Day 2 of our holiday, we'd taken the mountain bikes with us, as usual and were heading off to Grizedale Forest, one of my favourite places for mountain biking. The other good thing was we could go straight from the cottage and didn't need to drive anywhere.
The only thing about this was there are hills in the Lakes, everywhere you go ! It's easier walking sometimes... We cycled about 2kms from the cottage through Knipe Fold to High Cross at the far northern end of Grizedale. The really good thing about Grizedale is that there are several defined colour coded routes throughout the forest, some of which overlap and cross over so you can really make your own route from any combination of those already defined. Something else they've added, since we were last there is the North Face trail, which includes some sections of downhill single track... I thought some bikers were cycling down footpaths when I first saw them !
We started following the green route from High Cross heading south west through the forest on a lovely forest track. The weather was a bit overcast, but still pretty warm. It did drizzle a bit too, which wasn't great. We went up some hills, round an area called High Park and also found some really nice downhill parts : ) We had some nice views of Coniston (town and lake) as we were over on the western side of the forest. The green route went around the western side of Carron Crag and we stopped and had lunch somewhere at the top of the hill, nearby. Again, we had a lovely view looking north and some convenient tree stumps to sit on !
From Carron Crag, we followed the trail rouns to the south, and then turned back north towards the Visitor Centre. We had a really beautiful long downhill to the Visitor Centre, which has also changed a lot since we were last there. It's been extended, the cafe is much bigger and new as is the info place and shop and the car parking has moved. It's very nice and probably needed doing to cope with the number of visitors they get there, but has lost a bit of the charm the old cafe had. We had a cup of tea there sitting on the patio area outside. I couldn't help but check out the other mountain bikes ! Some of which looked very muddy, compared to ours...
We looked in the Visitor's Centre info place too, whilst there and picked up a new map of the forest with the cycle routes on, showing the North Face downhill sections too then back onto the bikes to get home. Unfortunately from the Visitor Centre to get back out into the forest, you have to go uphill... From there we followed the route round the eastern edge of the forest up to the Moor Top car park. It was a nice section, some up and some down hill, the last bit being uphill. From Moor Top we had a lovely 1 mile of downhill on a small lane to Hawkshead, then cycled through the village and back up to the cottage.
The GPS said 21.93kms today, which is far enough. The sun was still out so we sat outside the cottage to have a cup of tea, which was lovely. The gardens were nice at the cottage too, we were allowed to wander around it all. There were three seating areas and a wood with a tarn and ducks !
We walked to the pub that night in Outgate - the beer was good, the food was really good and it was only a 15 minute walk from the cottage. Walking back along the lane was interesting as we were almost run over by a tractor walking back !