The National Rally (Part 3)
7.
Sutterton, Arrival Time: 18.30; (Real) Miles: 23; Total Miles: 171
1st Break at Sutterton: Time of departure 19.40
8.
Grantham, Arrival Time: 20.06; Miles: 28; Total Miles: 199
9.
Lincoln, Arrival Time: 20.50; Miles: 28; Total Miles: 227
10.
Gainsborough, Arrival Time: 21.35; Miles: 29; Total Miles: 256
Soon after we left the Wisbech control we entered the town of Wisbech itself. This is a typical Fenland town with a river (The Nene) running up the middle of the High Street. It has real country character and always puts me in a good mood whenever I pass through it. Some places just do that.
A few miles before reaching the town we had crossed the county boundary and passed from Cambridgeshire into a corner of Norfolk. Soon we would be riding out into Lincolnshire and the wildness of the northern fens. It seems strange to me how such a flat and intensively farmed region can vary so much. But as you ride northwards, the landscape begins to take on a feral, almost savage, appearance. In stormy or turbulent weather it can be genuinely terrifying.
The Fenlands are only maintained at the expense of constant vigilance. Every day, the sluices all round the coast have to be raised and lowered with the tides to prevent the sea overwhelming the land. The ditches have to be maintained; the river levels monitored; water pumped and circulated. All Fenlanders pay a water tax to their local councils to secure their homes and livelihoods,.
The area’s one-million acres were artificially drained in the seventeenth century to bring the rich alluvial soils into cultivation. Ditches where cut and the meandering rivers straightened to increase their rate of flow. The plan worked but it had an ironic and unforeseen consequence. As expected, the soil dried out – and as it dried, it shrank. For the first time, the Fenland fields dropped below sea level and below the level of the rivers, too. Constant pump action now became necessary to keep them dry. Windmills appeared, and later electric stations. Today, water is constantly shifted round a huge network of channels, not just to drain the land but to irrigate it, too, and to keep the watercourses navigable. There are few places where you can get such a sense of the land being managed as you do here, or see a landscape which is at the same time an immense engineering project.
The next control was at Sutterton, a small village lying just south of Boston and about six miles from The Wash. The Wash is a huge rectangular estuary, surrounded by miles of mud flats. It receives all the waters of the Fenland rivers and is the focal point of this strange, independent world. The closer you get to The Wash, the marshier the land becomes and the fewer are the villages and towns. On this side, it has no real coastline, no place where the land ends and the sea begins: as you approach it, the ground gradually becomes muddier and wetter until eventually it is indistinguishable from the North Sea.
We turned off the A1101 and onto the A17 (The Washway Road), passing signs for villages with typically bizarre Fenland names like Gedney, Cackle Hill, Saracen’s Head and Whaplode. The ride up the A17 to Sutterton was easy, uneventful and atmospheric. It was of the kind that tunes your life to the engine’s growl and blows the world’s concerns out of your mind. Four bikes; four riders: we skimmed along over good tarmac, between hedgeless fields and under the steady heat of limitless skies. Around us, all of Fenland drifted by.
Eventually, at the Fosdyke bridge we slowed a little to watch the muddy waters of the river Welland flowing choppily down to the The Wash, and beyond that, to the equally muddy sea. The Welland: wide, windblown and careless, runs like all Fenland rivers, in a long, artificially straight line, lapping gently at its raised grassy banks. Downstream of the bridge, it supports a small marina which has the fresh, unhurried look of river communities everywhere.
As we headed on up the last couple of miles to Sutterton I scanned the skyline to the north-east, looking out for the Boston Stump, the tower of the church of St Botolph. Built more as a sea beacon than as an act of religious devotion, it claims to be the tallest tower belonging to a parish church in England and dominates the flat landscape for miles about. The town of Boston is today a sleepy backwater, happy to have lent its name to the somewhat larger and more significant settlement on the other side of the Atlantic. In most respects the two towns couldn’t be more different but Boston, Lincs does have a few things in common with its Massachusetts namesake: an association with the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ for one, and a historic gripe over taxation. With the sole exception of London, Boston was, throughout the early modern period, the most highly taxed town in England. Its solid and well-heeled inhabitants were none too happy about this, but I cannot find anywhere that they ever dressed up and dunked anything into the harbour in protest. They left that to their more excitable cousins overseas.
http://patchworkpixels.co.uk/photos/boston_stump.jpg
By the time we reached Sutterton it was half-past-six. The skies had mellowed and the day had taken on a warm and thoughtful air. About twenty bikes were parked next to the control booth, set up in the forecourt of Suzy’s café. This was to be our first scheduled food stop.
Finally! I was going to get something to eat - though not, as it turned out, without a struggle. Suzy was a friendly, obliging woman of middle age, but clearly not in the habit of catering to bikers with unusual dietary requirements. It took me nearly ten minutes of complex negotiation to explain what I wanted - a process which torqued up my analytical skills so much that I felt the threads beginning to tear. Unless you have to go through this performance every time you eat out, you won’t believe the potential for misunderstanding contained in the simple act of ordering a meal.
The control outside Suzy's cafe at Sutterton.
When the food came though, it was worth waiting for. Dave’s encyclopaedic knowledge of roadside café’s had not deserted him. We sat together at a window table chatting amongst ourselves and occasionally to another biker we had seen starting the rally at Stevenage. An odd episode followed when a rally rider entered the café with his girlfriend and caught our attention, not with a greeting, but with a peculiar, dramatic enactment on the subject (I think) of how hot it was and what a pain it is getting out of a set of sweaty leathers.
I needed to get some of the kinks out of my legs before we got back on the bikes, so I left the others after the meal and went for a brief exploration of the area. It was good just to walk and absorb the atmosphere of the place. Sometimes, the sheer sense of space here can make you feel giddy: often there doesn’t seem to be very much holding you down to the ground. It’s a remarkable landscape and over time I’ve grown to love it, but it has always been an object of fascination for me.
As a small child back in Hertfordshire I spent many happy days wading up and down the village drainage ditches in my wellies, damming their flows, creating fords across footpaths and diverting water into peoples’ gardens. These early (and illicit) engineering attempts were well planned and highly successful. I have always been proud of the fact that I was only ever caught in the act on three occasions. The first time this happened, I was marched into Home Farm and forced to apologise for turning Mr Prior’s chicken coop into a mini-flood plain; the second time I was soundly thrashed, since a lot of the diverted water had accumulated inside Billy Pugh’s sunken arbour – an effect which, at the time, I had regarded as something of a triumph.
But the thrashing failed to have the desired effect and I just became more careful how I carried out my projects. I did feel rather bad though when early one summer, dad fell down an experimental well I had been digging in our vegetable garden. Unknown to my parents, I had been working on this for several weeks behind the runner beans to see how much water it would accumulate from seepage.
Not wanting my well to be discovered, I’d covered it over with some old fibre board and then scattered earth on it. The board was probably rotten, but in any case it turned out not to be as sturdy as I’d imagined and one evening after dad had got home from work, mum saw him unaccountably disappearing down into the bowels of the earth. I seem to remember, he banged his shins rather badly on the edge of a spade as he fell. He also got rather wet. That was the third time I got caught. But on this occasion dad was too bruised and shaken up to do much more than glare at me for several weeks and stop my pocket money. (It was a damn good hole!)
Eventually, my poor, long-suffering father realised there wasn’t much he could do to cure me of this ‘obsession’ (as he saw it), so he tried to channel my interests into something more constructive (or at least, less harmful) by buying me a “hydraulic engineer’s set” for my eleventh birthday. I know he had to travel up to a specialist shop on the Tottenham Court Road (Central London) to get it and it made a fair hole in the family budget. It was a fabulous present, but it was no substitute for the real thing, and elaborate engineering works continued to appear all over the village and in the neighbouring fields for several years to come.
By my mid-teens I had discovered the work of Viktor Shauberger, the eccentric but brilliant builder of log flumes, and realised that there was more to this business of water management than met the eye. Influenced by his theories about liquid vortexes, I changed my school subjects to physics and maths. My career as a hydraulic engineer might well have taken off at that point, had I not, at the same time, been developing an interest in the even more fascinating (and intimately related) subjects of girls and motorbikes. Time spent in school labs was no substitute for evenings behind the hedge at the Red Lion pub or hanging out on the village green. There was no help for me after that: I became a lost teenage soul. All thoughts of a future career went out of my head and from then on, my obsessions began to take a more immediate and conventional turn.
In later years, motorcycles, which had overtaken my interest in watercourses became the means whereby I could visit the Fens and observe the pumps and sluices working at first hand. There is a kind of satisfying circularity in that, I’ve always thought.
I returned to the café to find the others finishing up their last cup of tea and getting ready to go. We thanked the amused and obliging Suzy and walked back to the bikes. There were now at least thirty of them parked up in the yard and yet more were arriving as we put on our gear. This was obviously a popular food stop for those in the know.
As we fired up the engines, I checked the time on the dash. It was twenty to eight.
The next leg of the rally was more-or-less a straight run due west along the A17 and the A52. We were (temporarily) abandoning the central fens and heading for Grantham. Grantham! - infamously the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher: grocer’s daughter; Tory prime minister; and owner of the most irritating and patronising voice known to man (and woman, too). I had forgotten this fact as we rode steadily westwards towards the town, and that is probably all to the good.
For most of the 28 miles between Sutterton (elevation 15 feet) and Grantham (elevation 200 feet) not a lot changes, really. Most of the area is still technically Fenland so it is only as we begin to approach our destination that the land starts to undulate slightly. Soon a few woods and spinnies appear scattered across the landscape and the road begins to develop a more familiar wiggle. Oh, and there is now a lot less water! With our bellies full and our spirits high, we put our heads down and pointed the bikes into the early evening sun.
The control, when we reached it, was popping. It was set up in the forecourt of 'Grantham Honda Motorcycles'. There were dozens of bikes parked up outside the showrooms, their riders milling about the site - a little less keen to press on, I thought, now that the still time of evening had arrived. The sharp, outgoing eagerness on people’s faces I'd noticed earlier was giving way to a more thoughtful look as they readied themselves for the long night ahead.
The dealers had clearly seen this as a marketing opportunity and the showrooms were still open. Staff wandered about among the riders, but had little to do. The company had laid on food and drink, and a rock band played energetically in the corner of the forecourt, the music thinning out and then blowing away on the evening breeze. But we didn’t linger. As soon as our cards were stamped and our attendance sheets signed, we set off.
We now had to retrace our route for ten miles before turning north on the A15 towards Lincoln. It was past eight o’clock and the evening skies were beginning to darken though the light would persist for a couple of hours yet. At a village crossroads, half a mile from the Grantham control, we passed a solo Royal Enfield rider wearing goggles and a long leather trenchcoat. He pointed up the hill towards the dealers and shot us a questioning look. We gave him the thumbs up. It was all smiles and waves and he was on his way.
On the A15 up to Lincoln we encountered several small groups of riders. They passed us, heads down, hands steady on their throttles, pacing out the miles to their next stop. Motorcyclists don't normally ride in groups at this time of evening, so there was little doubt about where they were going. A definite warmth appeared in our greetings now. Perhaps this was in recognition of our shared purpose, however tenuous and temporary. But perhaps too it was a more ancient impulse, common among travellers who find themselves far from home as evening falls. The A15 here, is a good road, easy-going but with enough twists and turns to keep a motorcylist focused – it's a good road to ride at evening time.
The miles rolled by comfortably and without incident. We were travelling now through a bleak and dusty landscape with few features of any interest. The air was cooling noticeably, but it was not yet cold. I'd settled down, letting my thoughts drift a little wherever they would. Up ahead, a roadside café appeared: one more unmemorable feature on an increasingly unmemorable road.
Suddenly, to my surprise, David indicated and swung off into the café entrance his bike tyres crunching over gravel. Dean followed. In my dreamy mood, I had been paying little attention to my surroundings or to the route plan on my tank bag. I braked hard and followed them in. Guy had dropped back and arrived some minutes later. We set the bikes down next to a caravan by the café entrance and looked around. We were the only riders there. Beyond the car park and isolated buildings, the dry and level fields swept far away into the distance.
A small collapsible table had been set up outside the caravan: this was the Lincoln control. A small boy stamped our cards under the watchful eye of his father who leaned casually against the metal walls, cup of tea in hand. We talked briefly before getting back onto the bikes. I zipped up the vents in my jacket and drank down a whole bottle of water, hoping that this would not have unfortunate consequences later on. It was ten to nine, and there were 227 miles on the clock.
We were some miles south of Lincoln itself, but would need to ride right through the city centre to pick up the road to Gainsborough on the far side. Under other circumstances, the prospect of riding through urban traffic would have made me groan. True, I was aching a lot less now but an extended period on the clutch, I knew, would quickly bring back the discomfort: the tension in my hands and wrists, the churning in my abdomen, the hot stabbing pains in my knees - it wasn't an attractive prospect.
‘Under other circumstances…’ I told myself. But this was Lincoln, a beautiful and enchanting city. And we would be riding right past the cathedral. Lincoln cathedral is just as moving as Ely but far grander and built with such a passion for life that it floods the senses of even a causal visitor. You can’t ignore it. It is one of the truly great buildings of Europe.
I looked up into the sky. Cloud cover was thin and the light was still reasonably good, so we would get to see it clearly at it as we passed by under its walls. We wouldn't be stopping, of course, but that didn't matter. Some things are just life enhancing in themselves. And what you cannot see, imagination and memory will supply.
The building stands upon a steep-sided hill that rushes suddenly upwards out of the plain. (The land south of Lincoln is the last northern outpost of the Fens.) The books say that it is built in the Decorated Gothic style, but that conveys little of its particular magnificence. Everywhere on this huge building, the stonework bursts into life, twisting and turning, writhing into leaf and flower patterns like vegetation in the spring. It’s as though the masons, its creators, were determined to express all their passion in a single building. All over the cathedral, flowing shapes sprout irrepressibly from the fixed forms of Gothic architecture, breaking the moulds of conformity.
Whenever I visit the cathedral, I think of the medieval craftsmen in their huts, working through the winter nights under their oil lamps creating these stupendous designs. I’m not really into art and architecture as such, and I’m certainly not into religion, but when I see something like this I can’t help but be impressed. Ordinary craftsmen made this, people who worked with their hands all their lives. And they made it this way because they had something to say about how they felt, and how they saw themsleves and their community. To me, the whole building is a wonderful act of self-expression in the midst of an authoritarian world.
My brief three minute glimpse of the building sitting atop of its dramatic hill was worth all the discomfort of city riding, though even that had been muted by the sense of anticipation it generated. It rose up above us. Then, in a moment, its soaring walls were left behind and my thoughts moved on instantly to to the road ahead and to Gainsborough, our next control stop. That was the nature of the event.
Beyond the city we continued north along the A15 for another nine miles. The A15 here follows the line of the Ermine Way, a major Roman Road connecting London with the North-East (passing, as it does so, very close to my home town of Hitchin). Construction began in AD 43, not long after the invasion and the road remained a major highway right up to recent times. This stretch of the A15 runs as straight as any Roman surveyor could wish for – or almost. At one point only, it deviates from the line of the original and takes a long, lazy sweep around Scampton Airfield. It’s a rural road, running along through large open fields, green with wheat or barley or yellow with rape. There are few settlements here, just scattered farmsteads with huge modern barns and industrial-looking outbuildings
East of Harpswell, we turned onto the A631 and headed for the village of Corringham, just this side of Gainsborough, where the next control was waiting for us in the forecourt of a large country inn. It was a short, quick run and it passed me by almost without my being aware of it. When we arrived at the inn I checked the miles: 256 so far. We were not yet half way and the night was beginning to fall.
It's a bit like describing a ZX10 as 'adequate'
