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And by now the tour is so deep into rural Essex that GPS is an urban memory. Unfortunately, this gram-reduction programme meant most of the places on the signposts were untraceable. To save weight, I’d taken scissors to our Ordnance Survey map, and cut away all of Essex except the narrow strip showing stage three of the tour. But beyond a hamlet called Shellow Bowells, we get lost. Or maybe I’m not very good at reading maps. On July 7, when the tour blasts trough Rayne, Josh and his partner Grace will provide a marquee, an all-day music festival, street food and lashings of Coggeshall Gold. Rayne has no railway line these days, but the old track bed is now the Flitch Way and the station is a popular pit stop for cyclists and walkers.
Slice it stage 12 professional#
It turns out that one of the two proprietors, Josh Meehan, is a professional chef. In the quiet village of Rayne, we round a corner and find a disused railway station selling gourmet sandwiches, cakes and home-made scones the size of cottages.
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One of the reasons I love long day-rides in England is the frequency of delectable-looking pubs and tea rooms. The benevolent wind (I’d checked the forecast) pushes us along to the song of fretting skylarks. It’s a land of thatch and hedgerow, and it’s beautiful. In Essex, once they’ve crossed the Pant, they will be confronted by a fiendish maze of narrow, kinking, country back roads. Tour followers have grown up with helicopter tracking shots of breakaways on Alpine passes, heroic battles on the merciless Ventoux, and the peloton squirming through limestone gorges or fighting sidewinds on endless plains. Little of this will register on the peloton as it plummets down the hill towards the pond, because the cyclists will suddenly see a dinky little bridge shaped like a ski jump that is barely wide enough for one vehicle, let alone 200 hurtling riders.įinchingfield, "the most beautiful village in Essex" (Alamy)īack on the delightful B1053 we cycle southward to the aptly named valley of the Pant, where stage three suddenly becomes adventurous. Finchingfield even has its own, immaculate, white-painted post mill constructed over a century before the bicycle was invented.
Slice it stage 12 full#
Naturally, there’s an old inn and, next door, a tea room called Bosworths that serves full English breakfasts – and for slower cyclists, afternoon teas. Above the green is a church with a tower as solid as a Norman keep, built by Normans. Finchingfield has almost everything: a village green, a mirrored duck pond beside a humpback bridge, and cottages with pastel walls and crooked, red-tiled roofs. The road east from Walden is B-road bliss: a fast, swooping, swerving ribbon uncurling through billowing fields all the way to the most beautiful village in Essex. The two figures on the façade of the Sun Inn probably date back to the 17th century and show a local carter killing a giant with an axle in what appears to be one of the earliest records of road rage. Later, many of the houses in town were decorated with plastered patterns, or pargetting. The ruins of the Norman castle are at the top of Common Hill and the basic street layout around the upper part of town follows the outlines of the Norman defences. Long before the Tour de France was conceived, a more militaristic bunch of Gallic visitors was responsible for turning this small Saxon settlement into a fortified market town. It’s a pity for the riders that they won’t have time to pedal around town appreciating Saffron Walden’s 1,000 years of architecture. We talk about this over breakfast in a coffee shop.
Slice it stage 12 skin#
A momentary lapse of concentration here is likely to leave skin and Lycra smeared on the tarmac. Then there is a short climb past the 16th-century timbers of 1 Myddylton Place followed by a 90-degree turn into George Street.
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We pass the turn to Great Chesterford, where a walled town once stood beside the river and where a Roman mosaic was found buried, and cross the old Roman road into Essex.įor the peloton, the descent into Saffron Walden will be a breakneck swoop with eyes on the bend at the bottom. Flint arrowheads lie out there beneath the pale soil. Chalk country caught the eye of the first hunter-gatherers, stalking the grasslands for horned aurochs. Everything about this landscape is gentle and ancient. Sunrise on a Sunday floods the countryside with forgotten tranquillity. There is time on a bike to think about the poetry and incongruities of England’s signposts. The village takes its name from “ford at a shallow place”. We glide through Great Shelford, still sleeping. We’ve started early because there is nothing as intoxicating as the open road saturated with birdsong, breeze and cherry blossom.