Promises mean little when you see only inaction, as Laura finds in the Lake District
OPINION: THE GOLDEN AGE OF CYCLING?
Transport journalist
When a road is blocked by a landslide, you can bet the powers that be would move heaven and literal earth to get it reopened. When that road’s only real value is in the cycle route it carries, it seems, the reality is very different: the earth stays put.
One weekend in November 2021, storm Arwen battered the Lake District with high winds and heavy snowfall. Trees, rocks and earth fell on a tiny road beside Thirlmere reservoir, just north of Windermere, and there the debris stayed. It’s a spot I coincidentally visited in the hot summer of 2022, nine months into its closure. It’s a stunningly beautiful, narrow strip of tarmac, bordered by stone walls, and skirting the vast shore of Thirlmere Reservoir. Across the water, the gargantuan Helvellyn mountain rises through the trees, a great wall of earth, rock and grass. Like a lot of the Lakes, it’s genuinely breathtaking. It also happens to form a key part of the National Cycle Network, one of the few safe, practical routes for cycling, walking and horse riding in the area. This quiet, wooded lane diverts cyclists from one of the Lake District’s busiest and most terrifying roads for cycling, the A591 – a monster of heavy traffic that only the iron-clad or desperate would dare to cycle. In fact, it’s one of only two north-south cycle routes west of the M6 – and both routes are so patchy, abandoning riders suddenly and repeatedly to busy roads, that they would challenge a rusty colander for holes.
By autumn 2022, Thirlmere’s west road had already been closed for a year without any visible action on the ground, but there was reason to be hopeful. Sustrans – the NCN’s caretaker – said Cumberland Council had reached an agreement with the landowner (the UK’s largest water company, United Utilities) to explore not only reopening it to cycle traffic, but to filter it so motor traffic could no longer cut through. This would make a safe, traffic-free route that was both beautiful and practical that would make cycling journeys possible along one of the Lakes’ busiest travel corridors – and a fairly flat one, to boot.
However, as another autumn rolled around, instead of applying for
