Swithland Wood

Emailed.
It’s a start – let’s see where it leads to!

Emailed earlier this morning…

Have emailed

Oh, and Scandal42, you said you wanted to get involved in the quarries project. Mind if I contact you by email?

Sounds good to me i have just dropped you an email also.

I’ve not done any cheeky riding in either Bradgate or Swithland Woods, we always stick to where we are allowed, but would love to be able to ride legally off road in Bradgate. It’s always seemed a bit daft to me that we are allowed on the tarmac path, which is always really busy, but not allowed in the quieter parts. We went for a walk on a sunny Sunday afternoon two weeks ago in the park, but hardly saw anyone away from the tarmac.

Riding through Bradgate on the tarmac road as per the rules does seem to upset many of the folk waking along it, especially at busy times, a permissive track up and around the perimeter would keep us from upsetting folks. I almost never ride through there these days because of the risk of crashing into small children or dogs off the leash, it seems madness to me to mix cyclists with families out for a walk. Oh and as already stated, because i don’t ride in there the cafe doesn’t get any of my money & we always stop for coffee on rides. 😀

Many thanks to all those who have emailed me. I have been madly busy this week but will try to respond to you all next week.
Have a good weekend.

Fro45 feel free. I have always though Leicestershire. Much have some prime spots for a lee quarry type project.

Scandal.

I’m not so sure that our local disused quarries are comparable to Lee Quarry. The reason for this is that Lee Quarry is largely open cast and so can ‘leak’ water out of the open parts of the sides. There are obviously deeper holes there as well, which form steep sided lakes, but the overall quarry area, when viewed as a whole site is not simply a bloody deep hole in the ground.

Of our local quarries, only Bardon is the result of scraping away the side of a hill in open cast style. One of the major costs of the ‘bloody deep hole’ quarries is the constant pumping out of water that is required to stop them just filling up into very deep lakes. I doubt the quarrying firms will want to pick up the tab for that just to enable us to ride there.

On a wider note it seems that things are a-moving with regards to Braggie and exchange of ideas, I’m still ‘out’, but all the very best with it. I will perform some sort of symbolic hat eating if anything comes of it. The annoying thing about a lot of this is that I doubt the scallies who were taking a moto up to old john last summer would have been approached by the authorities even if they had been around at the time. I also doubt a couple of the more ‘likely’ looking lads on DH rigs I have seen will be spoken to either. Sometimes in life it seems that the more legitimate you try to be, the weaker you seem. Sometimes I wish I was just a thug, then in seems you can do what the hell you like and no one has the bottle to take you to task.

Good luck with the project, though. I guess life has had a jading effect on me(!)

I’ll join Danny in the eating of hat. I’ll even do it while mucking in with the digging / trail building. If I wasn’t such a coward I’d do some kind of forfeit, but no one wants to see me wielding a spade while wearing a dress

Oh, I don’t know 🙂

Anyone heard anything on this?

No response as yet to my email to Peter.

Response from Peter offering meeting, responded along with several others giving availability, seems to have gone quiet now…..

seems to have gone quiet now…..

If only.

If only.

Well, it sounds like there is no point in trying to keep this thread sotto voce any more. Firstly a disclaimer. I WAS NOWHERE NEAR THE INCIDENT AT THE TIME. We were out on a nice ride when we met some familiar faces who warned us that a certain path was being ‘staked out’. Oh yes, we are talking land rover parked halfway up a field where you wouldn’t see it and ranger loitering behind a hedge waiting to apprehend any wrongdoers, engaged in such heinous activities as riding a bike in the countryside. I am told the encounter was entirely friendly and professional, I hasten to add.

So, fro45, this is where greater visibility has got us. At least we all now know why things have gone quiet on the official front. We have been flushed out as a result of rattling the cage officially. I wouldn’t mind betting that some cross-reading of forum activity has informed this stake out. Either you have been incredibly naive (there were warnings) or this was a put-up job from the start. Either way, it doesn’t make any difference. The effect has now been seen. Well done (that is either sarcastic or grudgingly admiring depending on the original intent, by the way). The park authorities have played a good hand here, so again, well done you.

So here is (another) tuppence worth from me.

To the Bradgate Rangers.

I expect you to now stop and warn every single kid on a bike who strays even an inch off of the ‘main carriageway’. You have to have rules, and these rules must be applied absolutely evenly. If I see such behaviour, I expect to be able to report it to one of the rangers and have it acted on. If I see such behaviour whilst a ranger is present I will expect action to be taken.

I assume you are also going to at least warn everyone who lets their dog defecate in the park that they face prosecution if they don’t clean it up. I will be taking photographs of every pile of dog shit that I see and send them to Natural England. I dread to think what they would make of that.

Rules are rules after all.

Engagement is a waste of time. Narrow-mindedness wins. I’m going to employ some of my own and let’s see where that gets us.

Oh dear. Did that happen tonight?

Was it actually in the park boundaries or a certain track outside of the wall.

I wasn’t there, of course, but it was a path from a certain wood to the park boundary. I am told.

If it’s the track I’m thinking of, then surely it is not covered by the park byelaws.

If it’s the track I’m thinking of, then surely it is not covered by the park byelaws.

Yeah – I wonder if that point was made at the time?

That being said…you do realise that all the information needed for that “ambush” (not convinced that it was an ambush by the way) is freely available to anyone with an internet connection? If you know the area it doesn’t take a CIA investigation to put 2 and 2 together.

Nothing has been let out of the bag by any interaction anyone may have had with any representative Bradgate park so no one has been flushed out.
You were riding where you weren’t supposed to be, you got busted. Deal with it. You may not agree with the rules but thems the rules. Maybe they’ll change maybe they won’t.

Organising rides on cheeky trails on an open public forum is never going to end well. Even more so if you know a representative of the land your planning on riding on knows of the forum.

In fact I would be wary of organising any ride on an open forum for other reasons like car security, but thats another debate.

Point taken, but what do you think this stake out says about the intentions of the park authorities?

Do you really think that they’d bother with this if they were seriously considering granting access?

As you say, there will be no more organisation done on here. The thing is (was), that STW was a good place to pick up interest from people previously unknown. I would estimate over the last year that we have seen 20-25 different faces on our rides. Some have only been once, never to reappear. Some have been a handful of times. Others are regulars. So that’s 20-25 people getting out on their bikes, getting a bit of exercise and having a nice couple of hours in the company of like-minded folk.

No more, unfortunately.