Then round Tandle Hill country park:
TTM: 17:56 ODO 184.1 DST 2.85 TM 0:20:11 AVG 8.4 MAX 24.1
The weather has turned since the heat of the last couple of weeks. Nevertheless, Richard and I had planned to go out on our bikes... so we decided to defy the heavy rains and head out anyway. Donning up in waterproofs and shorts we headed out to Hollingworth Lake, a lake up near Rochdale that was originally built to feed water into the newly built Rochdale canal.
As you'll see from the route, we parked at the visitors' centre, then cycled the 2m round the lake itself; from there we went down a hill into Littleborough, where we joined the towpath of the Rochdale canal. You've probably worked out by now that I like towpaths as they're fairly flat - with the odd burst of energy required at locks. The towpath was sometimes more puddle than path, but it was quite a good ride - we followed the canal up its flight of locks here to Summit and turned round at Longlees lock. Interestingly, the West Summit lock, at the top of the Littleborough flight, is the highest wide lock in England. Only the Huddersfield narrow canal is higher than that stretch, too, as charted here.
We turned round at Longlees lock and pootled back the way we'd come, which was good - because we were going down again it was a bit faster! Obviously because of the wet and narrow towpath we didn't exactly bomb it down but it was still good going a bit faster down there. The only slight problem was that to get back to the lake from Littleborough was a long, slow hill; I'm really pleased that I made it to the top, although it was a bit of a slog.
It was actually really good fun - the showers were heavy and frequent, and after a while I gave up trying to avoid the puddles and turned it more into a damage-limitation exercise than one where I tried to stay clean! I think Richard enjoyed it, too, and it gave his new bike a bit of a workout. 'Only' nine and a half miles but it was considerably more work than doing it all on the roads! I really surprised myself as to how much I enjoyed it; I thought it might be a bit of a washout but I think we just both went into it with the 'Brits on holiday' attitude of enjoying it no matter what, even when we rounded the corner on the towpath at Summit and the wind slowed us up quite considerably!
When we got back we went out for a short ride near Richard's house, round Tandle Hill Country Park - a couple of miles up and down in a forest; very pleasant. All in all, a good day.