You’ve just described the Fens perfectly, apart from no mention of the obligatory headwind that will feature strongly on any East Angular cycle ride; normally on one of the dead straight roads that run along the edge of a featureless dyke.
Is Mawdesley twinned with The Fens?
I didn’t think the fens were that bad! No seriously Mawdesley is the absolute pits for mountain biking (absolute pits in every other way too).
I guess in the fens you’ve got, well, the fens. In Mawdesley there aren’t even any streams, rivers, lakes. Apart from when it floods, like it did at Christmas and all the stinking cabbage fields were beneath 2 foot of filthy water and this non-place was even more cut-off from humanity than it normally is.
Mawdesley must be one of the most featureless and boring areas in the UK. To make matters worse it’s a snobby commuter area so the narrow potholed backroads are full of speeding luxury 4×4’s (Mawdesley Tractors as I call them) – so it’s not safe.
Outside of Mawdesley there are some tiny hills on the way to such delightful post-industrial dystopia’s like Skelmersdale, Wigan and Chorley. You know the sort of places, the recruiting ground for the Jeremy Kyle show. There are some busy pot-holed roads up these hills but that’s about as good as it gets.
The “real” hills are the West pennines, however from Mawdesley you have to navigate a nightmare of a route, through the surrounding desolate, inbred, “Wicker man-esque”, banjo-playing dunagree wearing bumpkin-land, then a series of post-apocalyptic urban areas until you reach the hills. Most of time it’s not worth the bother.
Would be nice to be able to cycle out from my front door and actually enjoy it, but that’s not possible. It’s better to drive up the M6 for an hour to find somewhere out of this god-foresaken hole.
