The Wrecker Recce: Mendips, Ridgeway and the Long Run to London

The final sector of a UK gravel ultra from Land’s End to London

This is the third and final part of scouting The Wrecker, the last long sector before the route rolls back into London.

The character of the ride changes here.

Cornwall fights you constantly. Exmoor slows you down almost by force. But once you leave the coast behind and turn east from Weston-super-Mare, something shifts.

The route starts to move.

Not because it suddenly becomes easy. It doesn’t. There is still climbing, distance and more than enough rough ground to make poor decisions expensive. But the riding becomes faster, more open, less of a negotiation.

The final section doesn’t try to stop you.
It just waits for fatigue to do the job instead.

We started back in Weston-super-Mare, partly because it made sense, partly because riding the beach again felt like unfinished business. It was surprisingly pleasant. Firm sand, open views, and that slightly odd feeling of making decent progress on a surface that really shouldn’t be helping.

Then the route turned inland and hit the Mendips.

The Mendips still make you work.

After Cornwall, Exmoor and the Quantocks, I was expecting another kicking. It never really came. The Mendips climb, obviously. They are still hills. But they feel more benign. Less hostile. Less determined to make the bike feel like a bad idea.

The Mendips: Kinder, But Not Flat

The Mendips run east to west, south of Bristol and Bath, and they feel immediately more lived-in than Exmoor. More people. More paths. More signs that other humans have looked at the landscape and thought, yes, this might be useful.

The riding still has bite. There are open tops, limestone tracks, short ramps and enough climbing to keep you honest, but it is less of a wrestle. You can look up. That makes a difference.

Around Crook Peak, the landscape changes again. Open limestone, big views, no water, no softness, and signs warning about adders basking in the sun. Keep dogs under control, apparently. Also, probably, keep cyclists under control. Though that may be asking more than is reasonable.

There is wildlife everywhere. Birds, blossom, hedgerows, the kind of late-spring lane that looks almost staged. When I rode it, the hawthorn was out, the cow parsley was up, and the whole thing had gone very white and bridal.

The route picks up the occasional drover’s road, old lines across the land that still feel right on a bike. Not smooth exactly, but purposeful. The sort of tracks that remind you gravel bikes are not a new idea. We just added carbon forks and started arguing about tyre width.

Stoney Littleton and the Drop to Bath

Coming off the Mendips, the route gives you a short easier section. Around 40 kilometres of tarmac, lanes and old railway line as you work towards Bath.

It is worth making the small detour to Stoney Littleton Long Barrow. It is an early Neolithic chambered tomb, built around 3500 BC, and you can actually crawl inside it. Which is either moving, fascinating or a slightly unusual bivvy option, depending on how cooked you are.

I am not officially recommending sleeping in a 5,000-year-old tomb.

I am just saying the thought occurred.

A questionable bivvy option.

From there, the reward arrives properly when the route drops onto the Kennet and Avon Canal.

The Kennet and Avon: Flat, Fast and Slightly Absurd

After days of climbing, the canal feels almost suspiciously kind. Flat gravel towpath, easy progress and long stretches where you can finally sit still on the bike for more than a few minutes at a time.

The engineering is magnificent. The Dundas and Avoncliff aqueducts carry the canal across the River Avon with full Georgian confidence. Stone arches, narrowboats and water suspended improbably above the valley floor.

Then the canal settles into smaller details. Smoke from chimneys. Boats covered in flowers. Swans drifting past as if the previous days never happened.

The Kennet and Avon softening the mood.

It would be easy to mistake this section for recovery riding.

That would be a mistake.

Then Devizes appears, and the canal does something ridiculous.

Caen Hill Locks climb into town in a great flight of water, brick and effort. Twenty-nine locks in total, rising up the hillside like someone designed a staircase for boats and refused to apologise.

It is a brilliant place to finish a day.

I bivvied that night up on the Downs. Not glamorous. Not terrible. About right.

Avebury and the Ridgeway

The next morning started early and soon rolled through Avebury.

Early morning near Avebury.

Avebury is one of those places that makes Stonehenge feel a bit over-managed. Huge stones, open village, ancient stuff everywhere, and somehow you just ride through the middle of it. No turnstiles. No coach-party funnel. Just Neolithic Britain sitting there while you check your bottles and wonder whether you have enough food.

You probably don’t.

Because next comes the Ridgeway.

The Ridgeway is chalk downland, old track, ancient highway, archaeologist’s dream and cyclist’s resupply trap. It is fast, open and mostly excellent riding. The gravel is far better than I expected. There are a few rutted bits, but very little that properly interrupts the rhythm.

The hills are mostly green and orange on the Wahoo rather than red, which is a very important distinction at this stage of the ride. Though after several days on the bike, they develop a remarkable ability to feel red anyway.

You can cruise. You can build speed. You can finally feel like the bike is helping rather than negotiating terms.

But there is almost nothing up there. No cafés. No useful villages. Very little opportunity to fix poor decisions. There are a couple of water points, but food is the thing.

The South Downs Way is dotted with small cyclists’ cafés and easy escape points. The Ridgeway isn’t. Once you are up there, you are properly up there.

The danger of the Ridgeway is that it encourages confidence. The riding is so good, and the pace finally so steady, that it becomes easy to overextend yourself without noticing. You move faster than you should, skip a proper stop, empty a bottle too casually, and suddenly realise the next food is still a long way off.

Take food.
Take water.
Do not arrive there optimistic and empty.

The compensation is that the riding is superb. White Horse country, ancient sites, big skies, long views and that lovely chalky sense of being on a line that has been used for thousands of years. It is some of the best sustained gravel riding anywhere on a UK ultra-distance route.

Eventually the route drops towards Streatley and Goring, and with that, the whole mood changes.

Streatley and Goring: damage limitation.

The Thames and the Southeast

You hit the Thames and suddenly you know you are back in the Southeast.

The ride follows the Thames Path towards Reading, though it does not really go into Reading. It slips past on the river, which is the better way to meet it.

Something unpleasant in Berkshire.

Mapledurham appears on the way, all manor house, riverbank and Edwardian storybook energy. It is reportedly one of the inspirations for Toad Hall, and whether or not you choose to lean fully into that, it does feel like somewhere Mole and Ratty might approve of. Toad, obviously, would have ruined the gravel bike within minutes.

From Reading, the route works east on easy, flowing gravel and riverside tracks. After the Ridgeway, it feels almost indecently civilised.

Then comes the Jubilee River, a modern flood-relief channel built to take pressure off the Thames around Maidenhead, Windsor and Eton. For the rider, it means flat gravel, open space and a very efficient way of sneaking east.

Past Eton, towards Slough, and then the route starts to become stranger again.

Colnbrook and the Edge of London

Colnbrook is one of my favourite oddities on the edge of London.

It sits on the old London to Bath road, a coaching village now tucked awkwardly near Heathrow, as if history got parked at the end of the runway and no one came back for it.

The Ostrich Inn is the obvious star. One of the old coaching inns, with a history that gets darker the longer you look at it. The story goes that wealthy guests had a habit of meeting unfortunate ends there, robbed and murdered by the landlord and his wife. Possibly true, possibly embroidered, definitely not the sort of thing that improves your Booking.com score.

Either way, it is very Wrecker. Pretty, grim, forgotten, useful.

From there, London does not arrive all at once.

It creeps in.

The Grand Union and Home

The route follows the Grand Union Canal into west London, and for a while you do not quite realise the city has started. It is towpath, bridges, water, backs of buildings, small industrial scraps and the slow thickening of everything.

Brentford is where it starts to feel definite. The canal runs out, the roads return, and suddenly the ride is no longer crossing countryside. It is threading itself back into London.

Putney. Wandsworth. Clapham. Brixton. Herne Hill.

The strange thing is how quietly it happens.

After the remoteness of Exmoor and the openness of the Ridgeway, London feels compressed, overheated and oddly fast. But there is also relief in it. Familiar roads. Late-night buses. The sense that the line across the country is finally beginning to close.

Then Herne Hill Velodrome appears almost without ceremony.

Not a dramatic ending.
A proper one.

Final Thoughts

Fast gravel at last.

What surprised me most about The Wrecker is how much the route changes across the country.

Cornwall is tight, sharp and constantly awkward. Progress comes in short bursts before the landscape takes it back again.

Exmoor slows everything down. The riding becomes physical, technical and strangely remote, the sort of terrain that makes even experienced riders question how quickly they are actually moving.

Then the eastern half begins to release.

The Mendips still climb, but they flow more easily. The canal paths let you recover rhythm. The Ridgeway finally gives you speed. And the long run along the Thames and canals into London starts pulling you home almost before you realise it.

That shift matters.

Because by that point the challenge is no longer just terrain. It’s management. Fatigue, pacing, food, sleep, navigation, judgement. The route stops trying to physically block you and starts asking whether you can keep making sensible decisions several days into a ride.

That, really, is what The Wrecker became while scouting it.

The Wrecker is shaping into one of the more complete gravel ultras in the UK. Not because it’s the hardest everywhere, but because the terrain never stops changing.

A route you manage rather than follow.

For most riders, six days now feels like the honest target. The sharp end will inevitably try something ambitious, because they always do, but this is not a route that rewards optimism for very long.

The final section does not wreck you quickly.
It waits until you think you are nearly home.