Edinburgh Trial cancelled

On no! The forthcoming Edinburgh Trial has been canceled. The foot & mouth disease is still not well controlled in the South East of the country and the MCC's executive have decided that the club must be as responsible as possible and not risk spreading FMD around Derbyshire. The day that the decision was released there was a suspected outbreak in Solihull, which isn't a million miles from the start of the event in Tamworth. Later DEFRA stated that the tests for the virus were negative but it shows how touchy the farming community is at present.

I was in Derbyshire last week nice and early and found it as beautiful as ever.

I took in a few lanes that I'd neglected for a while, partly due to post-NERC uncertainty and found them dry. This one is so obviously an old road, perhaps one from the Inclosure Acts of the first half of the 19th century, where roads were specified to be either 40 or 60 feet wide?

If all that is a little too peaceful for you, how about some noisy cars from the 2006 trial getting stuck on Litton Slack?

Leicestershire lanes

Last night I worked my way through a lot of sections of online OS maps and found a dozen byways and ORPAs within Leicestershire. These made up a convenient loop just to the west of North Leicester Motorcycles, the Moto Morini dealership.

The weather has been dry recently and so the tracks were easy. Some heavily rutted, but firm at least. Leicestershire appears to have started a programme of placing accurate signage (despite the careless spelling), even to showing where a BOAT stops. The byway element was lovely to ride.

Some tracks are county roads and therefore not signed; this bridge shows that they may be quite old carriage routes:

The ford looked deep so being a coward, and liking dry feet, I took the little bridge.

I now need to contact the council to check the status of some routes I passed, but didn't take, as I wasn't confident from the signs that vehicular use was permitted.

The area is an hour down the motorway from home, but at least that's easy going on the Alp.