RealClassic FRANK WESTWORTH
Great expectations? A wellknown novel or a dream of a motorcycle? Take your pick. We are – all of us – old enough to understand perfectly the weird combination of rose-tinted specs and unreasonable dreams. I’ve long-ago lost count of the number of allegedly brilliant bikes from my distant youth which have turned from silk purse to sow’s ear at the point of purchase. This is just the way things are, and to be quite honest with you, I had almost no expectations that the Royal Enfield Woodsman would prove to be as much fun as my memories from well over a decade ago suggest it should be. And of course there is only one way to find out.
Last time, I was riding home from its first MoT since 2014 and hoping that the bizarre fuelling glitch would just go away. I’d even sloshed an entire bottle of fuel injector cleaner into the tank and changed the spark plug. My engineering skills know no bounds, as you can see.
One of the many delights about knowing nothing of the history of a bike is that you know nothing about it. I remind myself of this. Just because a brand-new machine I rode in 2008 was amazing and loads of fun, and even fairly rapid, that is no guarantee that a well-worn 2010 example of the same model in 2023 is going to be as good. And the first ride of over ten miles
