Sustrans 11 Cambridge to Bishops Stortford and Back (with a bit of Sustrans 16)

I had to work over the weekend so decided to plan a slightly longer mid-week ride, a pity the weather is not so nice. Here you can see rain in the distance. The weather is not too cold though so I have generally been wearing shorts, sandals, t-shirt and a rainproof cycling jacket. It works well when the rain is heavy, but I do tend to get a bit too hot when there is no rain. Here you can see the rain clouds with rain in the distance - I got soaked several times on this journey.

One of the great things about using the Garmin GPS is that it allows me to explore areas that I do not know, without the hassle of carrying maps. Normally I would plan a route without too many turns and yet would still end up frequently checking on the way with the map in my pocket. I have managed to lose my way quite a few times because stopping to check is a nuisance and the roads do not always look like they do on Google Maps!. The GPS allows me to quickly string a route together and even if I stray en-route from the plan it is quite easy to find my way back again it definitely makes longer exploratory cycle rides more pleasant.

The route I chose was to take Sustrans 11 down to Bishops Stortford and then take in interesting route I saw on the Sustrans map - Sustrans 16 to Braintree and then back to Cambridge using the smaller roads.

I used BikeHike to plan the route as it has an OS map window alongside the Google or OSM map window. Sustrans Route 11 is not as complete as some other routes and stops short of Bishops Stortford. I quickly strung the route together, for off-road sections you can map the route on the OS window otherwise the auto-route software would select roads. One challenge when mapping a route that follows the path of a road, but is not on the road is that the routing software will "assume" the route is following the road. The BikeHike website allows you to create either a Course or Track and in the end I created three different formats as I could not quite remember what I had used for the Hull to Cambridge ride.

Almost from the start I found that my GPS route had deviated by a few tens of metres from the actual cycle path alongside the route. I also had inadvertently selected the navigation features of the GPS unit, where it would bleep and show close-ups of the junctions. Whilst it is something that I find useful in the car I think that it is over the top for a bike ride. The other nuisance was that after showing a close-up it reverted to a "random" scale map depending I presume upon the twists and turns of the immediate route. I find this a little confusing until I realised that I had to check the scale each time. At this stage I was not sure whether the differences were due to the type of file I had created, or the Website I had used to create the route with.

After a while I also realised that the GPS unit was re-routing me whenever I drifted off - so I stopped and selected another the the file formats, which then crashed the GPS, so I went back to the first file and found that it had also kept the log up to that point and turned off auto-routing and prompting.

Here is Sustrans 11 - billed as an off-road path - alongside the A1301. Although it looks a bit like a bike road it is a shared path, one side for cyclists the other for pedestrians. Be careful if you go by on a penny-farthing.

The route quickly moved away from the main roads to follow some lovely country lanes as it passed through villages such as Ikcleton. As I cycled along I also wondered why the GPS was showing a detour, in the interests of science (actually I had not cycled up those roads before) I followed the detour up 30m in height , down 60m and then back up 60m through a village called Littlebury when I was re-united with the Sustrans route (and markers). Checking later on the route when I got home I noticed that on the Google map used by BikeHike the Sustrans route followed a road (shown as yellow with dotted lines either side) of less than 4m in width and the BikeHike routing software had neatly avoided it. In my haste to plot the route I had not noticed, not a problem in this case but something to watch out for and check on the BikeHike settings.

The detour took me over the M11 and back again along quite a small lane, here is one of the bridges.

Alongside the bridge three Base-stations. There are several reasons why they are here. This was a high piece of ground at 110m, but the more obvious reason is that it is close to the M11 and the Cambridge to London railway line. I had not realised before but I think that quite a few Base-stations are sited near main roads, because that is where many phone calls were made from. I guess they still are - lets hope they are to/from the passengers in those cars.

Normally I am quite slowsie when cycling up hills.

I am not sure whether it was a name for the village of named after one of the nearby hills - such as this one (a later check on the OS map and I am still not sure). Although the sky had been pretty cloudy I had only felt a few spots of rain so far.

Brooding skies - no rain!

Before reaching the town of Stansted Mountfitchet I passed through a small village called Rickling - here is All Saints Church, Rickling.

The Sustrans route ended in Stansted Mountfitchet and I had plotted a route, not very carefully over the M11 to the Sustrans 16 route which followed a disused railway line. I had not realised quite how large the junction over the M11 was. It is this junction where you turn off for Stansted airport on one side and Motorway Services on the other. Most of it was controlled by traffic lights and I used the footpaths around it though.

Once on the other side I set off expecting to see some Sustrans signs, but after cycling 500m up the road could see that I was still not that close to the route plotted on the GPS so I backtracked to a smaller B-road. Still no signs but I passed under a railway bridge and realised that this must be where the cycle path was. It was a bit of a scramble up to the path and I found myself on Sustrans 16 to Braintree. I did not see any blue Sustrans signs at all, but Essex County council had signs showing that cyclists were welcome in these parts.

When I checked later on the Sustrans website I saw that I could have saved myself some problems as their map showed an easier way to cross the motorway. Still in the spirit of adventure I should not really complain that the OS, Google, Sustrans and OSM maps are all different!

The bike had a brief stop at Takely Station and I had some jelly babies, lemon juice and a rest.

The path was pretty good for cycling, although in places I got stung as the stinging nettles encroached. fortunately I do not get much of a reaction and I had passed the nettles before I realised that I had been stung. If you look closely you can also see that obstacles had been set up for the adventurous mountain biker - not an easy path to cycle along at night I would have thought.

Whilst cycling along the path I noticed that the GPS trace showing on the Garmin Edge had deviated away. When I checked it on Google Earth that evening this is what I saw. You can see that the trace the GPS unit recorded seems to deviate off the Cycle path onto the nearby road and back. Now I know that I did not do that, I wonder if there was some form of interference from the nearby airport which you can see at the top of the picture. The GPS signals are pretty weak and I wonder if they got swamped by the airport radar or communication transmitters.

As I came to the end of the Flitch Cycle Way I pulled off before getting to Braintree as I had picked a route to return to Cambridge through some small roads. However again on Google Earth I noticed that the recorded trace seems to have picked the road as my route and then bounced back. I must check to see whether the GPS was in a road-following mode. I have not see this before and assume that it had been re-set to track to the nearest road (or footpath) when I uploaded the later version of the GPS OS (2.8) a couple of weeks ago.

I had picked the route using Google maps and had inadvertently chosen a "footpath" but one with a gravel road and pretty large bridge over the A120. Actually it was only on checking my route later that I realised that I had not actually reached Braintree but had left the route earlier close to Great Dunmow. That's what happens when you plan a route too quickly trying to compare several sources of data. I was a bit wary of cycling along a footpath but carried on and past this house which had been boarded up. So hopefully I was not going to encroach on anyones garden, I could always start walking my bike in any case.

The route carried on to some very flat farm lands with roads going nowhere through them. I guessed it must have been an old airfield - later "research" showed that it was RAF Great Dunmow. After it was abandoned the concrete runways were used for aggregate for the A12 a major nearby road. The picture below is a composite of five pictures, it seems that there are quite a few of the airfield's periphery roads still around. Although unintentional it was a great place to cycle away from civilisation (apart from the airport and nearby towns!).

Not all the track was quite as good as this, but some of it was signed as a Bridleway so I did not feel so bad about cycling along it.

On the other side of the old airfield was Easton Lodge , there was a sign indicating that the Gardens were no longer open due to funding constraints and the path showing on the GPS screen was along a road with a "Strictly Private" sign. It turns out that there was a footpath that I could have walked along - but checking out the area I could see a road that linked up on the other side of Easton Lodge with my planned route so I took that instead. On the other side where I would have emerged I could see that the path would have been quite challenging to cycle along so not a bad detour. I must check my routes a bit more carefully before setting off. I guess that Google maps omit "right of way" information because it minimises a legal issues - it makes their maps slightly less useful though. I rather liked this picture of a church alongside a windmill on the horizon, but I am not sure where it was.

The rest of the route back was uneventful, however I did find that when comparing the GPS recorded route with Google earth there were quite a few places where the trace had "gaps". In this picture you expect to see the white rectangles at regular intervals. The GPS records at second intervals. However in quite a few places there was this effect with a larger gap and no this was not caused by me speeding up suddenly. My guess is that the additional computational load on the GPS as it tracks and compares the planned and actual routes causes it to briefly stop recording leaving a gap.

So next time I must remember not to use the GPS to navigate for me and I must go back and try out the cycle path from Great Dunmow to Braintree. I am also amazed at just how many disused railway lines there are still around.