The stone circles of Avebury are bathed in golden light early on a crisp autumn morning. The Neolithic monuments, which are rooted in and around a sleepy Wiltshire village, 17 miles north of Stonehenge, were once a major stop on a now largely lost network of roads established by drovers and traders.
Several thousand years later, a small band of travellers with rather different intentions are gathered beside the stones. We wear tastefully muted shades of Lycra and merino wool as we make the final checks on our bikes before a modern adventure with historic foundations.
I’m here to ride a wave that’s swept the cycling industry in the past few years. It’s called ‘gravel cycling’. And, like cargo trousers and bucket hats, it has the strange quality of being both a hot trend and a total throwback.
In the age before asphalt, everything was ‘gravel’, a word now used to describe pretty much any unpaved surface. But with the invention of Tarmac, leisure cycling eventually split into three tribes: road cyclists, mountain bikers and cycle tourers with their panniers and Thermos flasks.
Now cyclists of all stripes are reuniting, on tracks, bridleways and forestry roads — anything that offers a
