Trans-Pennine Trail

Rode the Makin ‘on-call’ route on Sunday for the first time in ages. this is the river run on the Trans-Pennine trail that starts for me at Sale water park and heads east towards Stockport and then on towards the Peaks. It looks like the council have been out and about building up the flood defences along the Mersey. Lots of the good bits have been lost and they’d even closed the steps by the school playing fields. Swines. Thing is it could have been like that for ages and I wouldn’t know as it’s been ages since I’ve done the local route.

The new bits found as shortcuts onto the old bits were a bit rubbish, but I did manage to link up the river run with the Fallowfield Loop Line route by heading up the hill from the Jodhpur Cafe and cutting through Reddish. It was an interesting change from riding up gert big hills, but the singlespeed managed to get just as muddy. Steve says it’s been like that for about three months now. The single track wooded section that used to be after the underpass and before the sports centre has been really badly destroyed and they’re built a wide cinder path. The singletrack is looking very neglected.

It’s not much but it’s offroad and at least it gets a bit hilly after Reddish Vale. As has been said there’s no cars – just dog shit and runners to dodge. Oh and herons to look at. There wasn’t much in the way of wildlife yesterday, but I did see:

As part of the work the council are doing here they’d built an earth bank on the path that was a fairly effective ramp. Just after riding it there was a little kid on a little quad bike, who rounded the corner saw it and said “whoa” rev’d the engine and took a big run up, at which point his mum, dad and sister come around the corner just in time to see him heading at speed towards the ramp and dad goes “oh no…” just as junior hits the ramp and gets all of about 3″ of air 🙂

Then just about here I could hear the sound of an engine as I rode along the river and a few seconds later a couple in their 40s on one of those really little motorbikes came around the bend.

See it’s not all just dodging turds.