Wednesday: Bath to Stonehenge.

July 16, 2014

I wasn't in any hurry leaving, as although I could make it to a cross channel port in a day, it would be more a two day ride in touring mode. Spending an hour after breakfast writing up a page for this journal, then see check-out time in the White Hart Inn is ten o'clock, and it is now a few minutes after ten. Time to get a move on.

I scramble all my stuff up, pack the panniers and log them out the door and downstairs. There is only the chef and a cook chopping vegetables in the kitchen visible through an open door behind the bar. "Kelly (the woman in charge) will be along shortly" says the chef. All that rush for nothing.

Still in no hurry I ride up through the walking streets, then remember that its frowned upon in England to ride on the pavement, and a beat policeman will perhaps soon step out and stop me, so get off and walk the rest of the way to the coffee shop.

I take a paper cup of coffee to one of the few remaining available benches and take a seat. Being July and good weather, the street is crowded with holidaymakers. Also other cycle-tourers. One wearing a big sunhat turns off the walking street and disappears round the corner along a narrow street laid-out with a cycle-lane, headed east, the way I'll be going. But first I linger over my coffee.

The blue NCN cycle sign leads out along a canal tow-path towards Bradford Upon Avon. My front mudguard is rubbing, something I can't get to the bottom of. I broke it last year when the wheel picked up a branch while riding into a forest. I taped it up and the repair has lasted, but lately it has decided to touch the tire. No matter how I adjust the stays, I still end up with that bur whine, or playing card flap sound. They are a godsend on a wet day, but the rest of the time they're just something getting in the way.

I reach a lough with a turn off to Radstock, which I decide on taking, it being more in my direction. It leads out on the busy A36 where I lose it, so ride on the inside white line with the constant steady flow of traffic passing until I get off on a B road into Norton Philip, a village with a sign on the way in commemorating a battle fought nearby in sixteen something. Here I stock up for lunch in the village shop, but wait to lunch until reaching the town of Frome, where I sit in a car park area with a street market. The traders are packing up their stalls for the day. A van with all doors open, stereo oozing out mid-sixties hits and the stallholder hums along as he packs shirts into the back.

From Frome I pick up the NCN path again through country lanes. Then through the extensive grounds of a mansion used as a wildlife park as a build up of cloud threatens rain, soon clearing as afternoon changes to evening. I return to the busy main road, passing through Warminster, and shortly after I turn onto a B road going east across what would be bleak windswept landscape, though in evening sunshine, is wonderfully golden rolling fields of wheat and barley. The Salisbury Plain, supposedly once all rough sheep pasture, but since the nineteen-fifties, the post war push to food self-sufficiency, has been ploughed up and cropped.

Not far to today's destination. It had gone eight o'clock when I arrived and the visitor centre and thereby site was closed for the evening.

A barley field with a drop into a hollow and a steep slope up the other side, representative of the rolling nature of the Salisbury Plain.

The Plain is also used as military training range.

view from my campsite on a vacant plot near Stonehenge.

Today's ride: 71 km (44 miles)
Total: 1,465 km (910 miles)

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