Crawley To Hastings (Mostly ) Off Road!

Runners Reunited!

Having read a lot of books recently about bike packing on an mtb I found myself scanning the maps to see if there was a long distance route home that we could do using mtbs rather than road bikes. In the south east there are three converted Sustrans rail tracks: The Worth Way, The Forest Way and the Cuckoo trail. The first two link together easily and the end of the forest way is only about eight miles from the start of the Cuckoo trail at Heathfield, plus some of those eight miles could be done on a few bits of bridle ways. The cuckoo trail would take us almost to Pevensey bay from where it would only be half a chain-gang on the road to get home, the ride was on!

Catching the train to Crawley (three bridges) was easy as we had the train almost entirely to ourselves and it was only a tenner each with only one change over at Redhill to our final destination.

Getting off the station we found the start of the route within a few minutes and could now relax and enjoy mile after mile of car free riding along the Forest way/Worth way. We knew that Sustrans had done a lot of improvement work on these routes and was expecting it to be tarmacked like the Cuckoo trail. This wasn’t the case but the closely packed cinder was in great condition and our pace wasn’t that far off a typical road pace despite the drag from our two inch knobblies.
Arriving at Eridge it was time to get on the road for Heathfield. This didn’t look far on the map but with quite tough undulating terrain , I found that the combination of heavy mtb, heavy riders and full knobblies made it pretty tough . There were no complaints about the roads

though which were so traffic free it almost felt like a continuation of the off road sections. The couple of off road bridleways were great and helped to avoid some of the less pleasant road areas.

By the time we got to Heathfield we were feeling peckish but no café could be found. We decided to press on to the ‘bikers’ café at Horam. At one point I got stuck at a road junction and lost sight of the others. I wasn’t concerned, ‘how can you get lost on the Cuckoo trail’?

This was The Correct 'Bikers' cafe!

Unfortunately I missed the turn off the trail at Horam and only realised my mistake when I saw a sign for Hailsham. Doubling back for Horam wasn’t too hard and after ringing Ivan to tell him where I was, I found myself alone at the lake side café. I had taken  this to mean the ‘biker’s café but another quick phone call made me aware that when they said ‘bikers’ café they meant the hairy Hells Angel type of biker not the skinny tyred lycra cladded variety.

By the time I got to the correct cafe, the others were all lounging around waiting for their orders so I had to join the rather long queue on my own. I felt a bit self-conscious standing in lycra shorts sandwiched between lots of large tough looking bikers in leathers  and denim, the place was packed.

Eventually our food had arrived and been eaten. It was now time to get back on the trail. From here it’s slightly all downhill to the ‘Sovereign harbour’ and we were there in no time.
Lady luck was smiling on us as we then enjoyed a strong head wind which pushed us all the way back to Hastings , maintaining a steady 20mph speed all the way back home. Our knobblies were really buzzing and Steve D commented that we sounded like a pack of bees.

We all agreed this was one of my better ideas and that it should become an annual event, hooray!

Steve C