South Bucks Midweek Cycling Newsletter - July 2025

While cycling past The Red Lion in Marsworth I noticed that it has scaffolding around it.  According to their website, it has "severe fire damage"!  The kitchen is closed; drinks may be available but I would check before visiting.

The better news is that there is a new cafe open at the main entrance to The Rossway Estate.  There is a new cabin-style building with a general store, cafe and toilets.  When five of us from Aylesbury visited there was a good selection of food and plenty of covered outdoor seating. There were not a lot of customers, but it was a Monday morning.  It does seem rather isolated for a village store and cafe, unless they have plans to make it more of a destination.

Willen Hospice have a sportive on Sunday 31st August with 100, 65 and 35 mile routes.  If you are interested, see the attached flyer.

I have been contacted by Sam Gregory who is working on creating a web platform to simplify organising group tours.  I had a chat with him, but I don't think I was his target audience as I enjoy tour planning myself and don't need a lot of help.  However, I realise that I am a nerd and that others may find a tour planning platform useful.  Sam would be grateful if anyone would complete this short online questionnaire.

If you want to buy South Bucks Midweek kit, contact David Ullathorne and when we meet the minimum five items requirement , we can place an order.

With two friends, I recently spent eleven days on a self-planned tour covering 452 miles from Saumur in the west to Chatillons-sur-Loire in the east, moving on each day, staying in a mixture of hotel, B&B and holiday appartments.  We left the van, that brought us via the Portsmouth to Caen ferry, in Saumur, and returned there for the homeward journey.

The Loire valley is a popular area for cycling holidays; lots of companies offer them.  It is easy to see why; it is flat, picturesque with numerous chateaux, has 900 km of signed cycle paths and famous wines.  Where there are wines, there are vineyards, often on a south facing slope, so there are optional climbs out of the river valley.

The Loire is a huge river, amazingly wide in places; we crossed a bridge of several hundred metres and then on crossing another, realised that the first was just to an island!  Traffic is concentrated in a few cities and alongside the river leading to bridges, so the minor roads are very quiet.

One forgets how rural and agricultural France is; we passed miles of fields of wheat, oats, barley, sunflowers and vineyards and saw a lot of the huge agricultural machines that make all the harvesting possible.  The villages are quiet and many have lost their small shops and cafes, though we still managed to find some lovely boulangeries and patisseries, and bars for a welcome cool Panache.

The planned route used a mixture of minor roads and cycle paths, which varied from wide smooth tarmac, to gravel paths, farm tracks through vineyards and across fields, forest roads and canal towpath.  It was all rideable on touring bikes with 28mm tyres, but some bits were more enjoyable than others.  I must admit that I prefer minor roads to white gravel which produced a lot of noise and a strong glare in the sun.

I plotted a draft route on Plotaroute.com to see how far we might go and then looked for accommodation on Booking.com.  Sometimes the accommodation, or lack of it, determined the route.  Another consideration is staying somewhere where an appealing evening meal will be available nearby.  We much preferred being able to stroll to a local restaurant than having to get back on the bikes, having showered and changed, to cycle to a nearby town, though we did have to do that a couple of times.

As a vegetarian, I have always found it difficult to get a good evening meal in France, but it is noticeably better now than a few years ago.  We had some good dinners and local wine.

We had picnic lunches of bread, cheese, salami, fruit and orange juice, bought before midday in local shops, which close, or often in edge-of-town supermarkets and eaten in a shady spot, ideally at a picnic table, but sometimes at the roadside were we hardly saw a car.

When staying in an apartment, no breakfast is available, but in a lovely house in Romorantin, we were able to order a breakfast of croissants, baguettes, butter, jam and juice to be delivered at 8.00 am and so it was.  Cafes in France don’t offer cakes and patisseries don’t offer coffee, but sometimes we were able to take our breakfast pastries to the café to have with our coffee.

We saw lots of other holiday makers riding along the Loire, including families with children using various buggies and trailer bikes, many of them camping.

The Loire appeared to be very low and in one place where a lock should have enabled access to the canal, the bottom lock gate opened onto a sandbank!

The Loire valley is a good place for an interesting but gentle cycle tour; you can see the route and some more pictures of our tour here.

Buckinghamshire Council has Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans for Aylesbury, High Wycombe and Buckingham.  They often have consultations on planned improvements where you give your views.  There is currently a consultation on Keep Hill Woods, High Wycombe.  You can see the plans here.