Intro
I'm currently living in the NW of England. After moving here in the autumn of 2018, I did what I always do: bought the local maps and started poking about on my bike to see what I could find.
There's a great expanse of high, open moorland lying north of Manchester's urban sprawl. It's part of the Pennine range of hills and uplands that stretches north from the English Midlands to the Scottish Borders. Like many areas of 'useless' land in the UK, it's become a site for windfarm development over the last two decades - and, as with many such developments, this has caused protest and public debate.
Cycling along below the turbines in February's freak heatwave, I started thinking about how we've come to fetishize 'The Countryside,' seeking to preserve it as (we imagine) it was at some point in the recent past (probably the 1950s, it usually is, although we're never entirely sure). I'm as guilty of this as anyone, and I don't think it's an entirely negative trait; one man's NIMBYist is another man's passionate advocate for a landscape they care deeply about, and want to preserve.
But such thinking ignores the often complex and contradictory history of the places we now pigeonhole as 'Countryside,' and we should perhaps make more effort to appreciate how this land was used in the past. It seemed to me there was a good ride here waiting to happen, linking up predominantly offroad cycling in a multi-day trip, helping me to understand how the UK's industrial history not only created the tracks I'd be riding along, but shaped the very landscape through which I'd be moving.
So, after a bit of planning and reading, that's what I did...
NOTE: this journal originally appeared on Crazyguyabike in 2019. I was happy enough with it that I decided it's worth reproducing here since deleting my CGOAB account (and the journals that went with it).
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