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Avesbury.... home of the largest stone circle in Europe, I just saw parts of it passing through. A 4,000 year-old ring and ditch complex, hundreds of yards across complete with what was then a fifty ft deep ditch and avenues extending outwards a mile or more. Sixty miles inland I was still on chalk so the gleaming whiteness of the excavations when new must have been something to see...

Coming in from the east , a stone avenue....



Part of a main ring....







...and the encircling ditch. Sixty miles inland this was still over a chalk bedrock, originally more than fifty feet deep this ditch and bank system must have been gleaming white when new, all of this done by hand without iron tools.



England is very old, and also very crowded, especially the South. This was only about 100 miles west of the London Metropolitan Area and quite unlike when I was a kid, nowadays lots of people in the UK own cars.

The result is the highway infrastructure is way overcrowded, especially off of the Motorways (Interstates). What you have is a whole network of "A" and "B" roads, for the most part all just two lane, with absolutely no shoulder to speak of most places and with long stretches where hedgerows or stone walls extend up to or even overhang the asphalt.

As a result you end up riding the fog stripe with vehicles passing about two or three feet off your right handlebar, while lots of times brushing the hedgerows on your left side (they drive on the left in the UK and Ireland). Semi trucks and buses were the worst.

I had two wrecks in England, only ones of the whole trip, both of which actually dropped me out in the middle of the lane. One was early in the trip up in Northumbria where in heavy rain,not able to see the ground under deep puddles, I put a wheel of the edge of the asphalt. The other of which, north of Poole in the far South, was caused by my bags on the left side catching a dead tree branch laying under a hedgerow and pulling it under the bike. I just got lucky both times that there was no one passing right then.

Despite these riding conditions, road cycling at speed has become enormously popular in England (by "MAMILs"; middle-aged men in lycra ). Singles and packs of these guys are a familiar road hazard for Brit drivers, and your average driver or trucker over there is enormously patient by US standards when stacked up behind these guys on the usual heavily-traveled narrow roadways. Even so, when they do manage to pass they have to squeeze by just a couple of feet away.

In wanting to head north out of Avebury I was in a fix: The only road north was an especially crowded "A" road, heavy with truck traffic. I could have done it, but for the whole ten miles to the adjacent Swindon urban area I would have been tailed by my own convoy of backed-up traffic trying to pass.

I ended up on ten miles of dirt, much of which would have been tough even on an unloaded mountain bike, which stretches I had to get off and walk. This was one of the many public footpaths across rural land in England, this one called "The Ridgeway", which apparently extends some considerable distance.

Nice views of the Wessex Downs from up there though....