RSF - The Off Road Cycling Club

The Adventure Starts Here

1969

“Your bike is a discovery; your bike is freedom. It doesn’t matter where you are when you’re on the saddle, you’re taken away.” - Doug Donaldson, author of ‘Bicycling Magazine’s Guide To Bike Touring’

 

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In the halcyon days between the two world wars, many un fenced hill roads had gates, often placed at frequent intervals wherever a boundary wall crossed the road and sometimes on the blind side of a sharp bend. Many of them bore the legend “Shut this Gate and Use Cooper's Sheep Dip”. We used to think that the people who had to be told to shut the gate were not the sort who would use sheep dip!
From Abbeyfeal I went on to Listowel and Ballyyoundan, where I asked if I might camp at a farm site. Permission given, I was invited to partake of a ‘Dish o’ tay’ — with all the trimmings. Again, they would not take a penny, so after a session of chinwag, I went to bed. Popping my head out of the tent in the morning to see what the weather was like, I got a very wet nose for my trouble. It seemed that, as I was putting my face out, a young bull was putting his IN!
Well, we shoved and sweated over the pass on a clear, warm, delightful Sunday morning, with dear old Jim Hendry in the party. Down the rough descent to Blaen-y-cwm we stumbled with at least one of us dying for a drink and there, standing by the brook, with the bottles cooling in the water, stoodCapt. Ginjah — O.T. ’ot; jolly old pot; 95 in the shade, wot ! wot!
Not wanting to be involved in a “Hub versus Deralleur” debate. T would say I plonk for a Huret Allyet Gear with a multiple sprocket 14-16-18-22-28 giving gears of 74.2, 65, 57.8, 47.2, 37.1 with 26" wheels and 40-tooth chainwheel, the 65 gear being normal. A Huret gear is all metal with nicely tucked away innards ; if the bike falls over, the gear does not get damaged. This selection of gears gives a reasonable pedalling twiddle through any type of un dulating country
According to my cyclometer the distance between Glen Nevis Y.H. and Loch Ossian Y.H. is 20| miles ; only about 6 miles, however, were found to be rideable. This means that the distance to be walked is about the same as that on the Lairig an Laoigh and appreciably more than on, say, the Glen Tilt crossing ; accordingly I suggest that the Nevis-Ossian crossing is well worth doing, and certainly deserves to be better known.
High up at some 1800 feet in the great wilderness of Dartmoor there lies a saucer-like depression of oozing bog named on the map as Cranmere Pool. As its name implies this was once a large pool of water which has now dispersed through the numerous rills that have been cut around it and, lying as it does in remote isolation, it has nothing to offer but the sheer wildness of its location and its utter sense of loneliness.

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