Pedal to Sherwood Pines parkrun

It’s been a hot couple of weeks!

Two weeks ago I cycled a few miles each way to Rushcliffe Country Park to run Rushcliffe parkrun, where I was very happy that they had an ice cream van near the finish!

Last week I ran at my home course of Beeston and gave my new alphabeteer T-shirt its first outing.

Pedal to Sherwood Pines

I booked a half day of annual leave on Friday 29 July, so that I could cycle up to Sherwood Pines. My 14-year-old stepdaughter, Ellie, joined me as she’s on summer holidays now.

We set off a little later than planned as we’d not had time to finish our packing beforehand, and we were on the road for about 2.15pm.

Ellie had left one of her panniers at her mum’s house, so had to borrow one of Ian’s which meant she was a bit mis-matched at the back!

We cycled most of the way around the Nottingham ring road, before picking up the River Leen cycleway north towards Bulwell. Along the River Leen we saw three water rats! The first one ran right across the path just in front of us.

We managed to get slightly confused with the route once we popped out into Bulwell, and ended up taking a wrong turn into a Tesco petrol station at one point, whoops!

After negotiating the town we reached the edge of Bestwood Village and came off the road once again and onto the River Leen Valley NCN route.

The route took us through Mill Lakes where we stopped for a quick snack break and saw someone with about eight dogs! After leaving the park we were on a mixture of quiet roads and cycle lanes through Papplewick and Linby.

We stopped to have a look at the Linby winding wheel – so many villages around here are former pit villages and have these monuments. This one said that the pit had been operational from 1873 to 1988. In the early 1960s it was recognised as Britain’s “Champion pit” and was the most efficient coal mine in Europe. Peak output was achieved in 1963 when 1,113 men produced 1,325,675 tonnes of coal!

What followed was a lovely smooth gravel track surrounded by wildflowers. It smelled great!

Soon after leaving Linby, we turned right into the grounds of Newstead Abbey. We gently descended for about a mile and a half down nice smooth tarmac before arriving at the Abbey itself.

Newstead Abbey is a monastic abbey from the 12^th century and is famous for being the former home of romantic poet, Lord Byron. He lived there from 1808 to 1814.

I’ve never been inside, but I was there the previous month with my mum and my sister to see an outdoor theatre production of Pride and Prejudice – all very civilised indeed! It was 4.30pm when we arrived so we were just in time to get a drink and a snack from the café and use the toilets.

The ride back out of the grounds involved steep uphill!

We were on roads through the very nice village of Ravenshead, then we turned onto a very narrow and slightly overgrown part of the cycle route. We stopped near the beginning to let a lady with a very nervous Yorkshire terrier puppy pass, and she said “It gets worse every time you come down here”, which didn’t bode well!

It continued to be fairly overgrown and then it went quite steeply upwards on some loose stone and we ended up pushing for a bit.

After that we found some much nicer cycle trails and passed through a couple more former pit tip country parks before we finally made it to the edge of Sherwood Pines. I could tell Ellie was flagging a bit by this point, and I assured her it wasn’t much further.

The last part of the journey didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped. Initially it was OK, and we happily followed my Komoot map through the forest for a couple of miles, continuing along NCN 6.

However, suddenly the GPS route turned right, off route 6 and along a track with some very squishy wet sand which almost caused me to fall off. We followed it for over half a mile until it said to turn left. There was nowhere to go. It was just bushy undergrowth with no path. We pushed on a bit further because I could see another path on the GPS a bit further up. It turned out this was the forest’s red bike route – it was single-track and we’d have to go the wrong way. So we turned back along the horrible sandy path and re-joined route 6 again. A bit further along I had phone signal so checked Google Maps and could see that the campsite wasn’t too far away and that if we stayed on the track we were on we’d get there.

A mile or so later we were cycling along a big grassy bank and I could see caravan roofs and smell BBQ…but there didn’t seem to be a way in. We ended up cycling all the way up to the visitor centre and back down the main drive to find the campsite entrance.

By the time we arrived we’d done 28 miles rather than the 25 I’d said it would be – whoops!

We stayed at the relatively new Camping in the Forest campsite, which opened in May 2021. Upon arrival at reception we were told we’d get a partial refund as “backpackers”. Apparently there’s no way to specify this when booking, so you have to pay the full price, but they will apply the discount when you arrive. The woman we spoke to also said that even if the site is “full” if backpackers turn up on spec, they will find them somewhere to pitch, which I thought was really nice.

My parents live fairly nearby and my Dad had decided he’d come and camp with us – he was already there when we arrived. We pitched our little tent on the pitch next to his, had a quick shower, and jumped in his car to go for dinner at The Rose Cottage. We’d booked for 8pm (the earliest they could do) and the food didn’t arrive until about 9pm so we were absolutely starving. It was very tasty though.

We got back, had a cup of tea, and then crawled into our tents.

Sherwood Pines parkrun

It rained a bit in the night and was still raining when we got up, so we made some porridge and sat in the car to eat it.

We decided to have a bit of a warm-up and jog down to the start. Ellie wasn’t parkrunning but pootled down on her bike with us. We slightly over-estimated how far it would be and arrived at about 8.15am. My Dad has done this parkrun before, which was fortunate because people kept asking us where the start line was. We used the toilets and huddled under the overhanging roof of the visitor centre for a bit of shelter for a while.

After the obligatory tourist photos we shed our jackets and headed over for the briefing.

The course is really nice – one lap with a few undulations but no mega-hills on fairly smooth forest tracks. There were a few muddy patches here and there.

I finished 68^th out of 199 runners in a time of 26.42. Dad came in slightly ahead of me in 26.08. Somewhere along the way the drizzle stopped, which was nice.

If you drive you get a discount code for the parking, to bring it down to £2. I’d left my bike at the campsite, but as it’s a Forestry Commission cycle centre there’s ample bike parking around. There are loads of toilets and there’s a café on site too. If you wanted to make a day of it, Sherwood Pines has everything you’d expect from a Forestry Commission site – bike hire , cycling and walking trails, Go Ape, Gruffalo sculptures etc. etc. It’s just around the corner from Center Parcs so it’s the perfect place to parkrun if you’re having a break there.

Pedal / train ride home

We walked back to the campsite and packed away our soggy tents. We bid farewell to my Dad and we were on the road again.

The plan was to cycle to Shirebrook and get the train back to Nottingham. I was a bit concerned because there were train strikes today but the National Rail app didn’t show any signs that the Robin Hood Line would be affected, so we headed off and I crossed my fingers not quite knowing how Ellie would react if it turned out we had to cycle all the way home!

It was just under 8 miles to the station and the rain held off.

Thankfully when we arrived the screen was showing that everything was running as normal – phew! We made it with 40 minutes to spare until the next train at 12pm, so we bought our tickets from the machine and settled in for the wait. For such a small station, I was surprised that there were about 10 other people waiting for the train.

We went through how we were going to get on the train. We’d need to look out for the bike logo, make our way to the right doors, Ellie would to hop on, I’d unhook our panniers and pass the bikes to her, then grab the panniers and jump on with them. You can’t make bike reservations on East Midlands Trains and so it was a bit of a gamble whether there would be space for us.

Luck was on our side at this point. There was a man with his electric scooter sitting in the bike spaces but after we made a few remarks along the lines of “Oh no, what are we going to do”, and “We can’t put a bike there, it’s blocking the door”, he said he was getting off at the next station anyway and shuffled along towards the doors.

For the first 10 minutes or so of our journey we had the vestibule all to ourselves. However, our peace and comfort were short-lived.

As we passed through the next few stations more and more people started piling onto the two-carriage train. We soon twigged that it was Nottingham Pride, and loads of people were traveling into the city for that. In the end there were about 20 of us in the vestibule. We couldn’t see our bikes anymore and we had to stand up, squashed against the wall for about half an hour. It was very warm and I was acutely aware that I hadn’t showered since I’d run! Sorry everyone!

The train terminated in Nottingham, so we could let everyone else get off before we got our bikes and made our way off. I honestly don’t know what we’d have done if we wanted to get off before Nottingham – there was no way we could have got to our bikes and manoeuvred them and our bags through all those people!

Anyway, we hopped onto the canal in Nottingham and followed it all the way home – 4 miles back to Beeston.

Final thoughts

This was a lovely little micro adventure. Ellie and I cycled around 40 miles in total, we tried out a new campsite, and I got to parkrun with my Dad and tick off course number 37.

I love the idea of being able to travel around the UK by bike and train, but the reality isn’t quite as romantic as the notion. Bike provision on UK trains is pretty pants and there’s always a paranoia about what to do if there are already bikes on the train you want to board. This weekend it wasn’t just the lack of bike facilities that made things difficult, but a wider issue with capacity – surely if there’s a major event going on in the destination city, it wouldn’t be a crazy idea to put an extra carriage or two onto the service for the day?