The first Friday of the month is traditionally the BBUG social. Normally we meet up in the evening and have a drink at a pub within Bicester, but this month we tried something a bit different, which linked with our ongoing project to link up Bicester town with the neighbouring villages via safe, off-road, cycling routes.

One of the big challenges for cyclists who want to connect with the surrounding villages is that many of the roads are fast and busy, which can be off-putting for many. This is a real shame, as there are numerous pretty, interesting villages very close to Bicester, many with friendly and hospitable pubs. Hence our recent project to identify quiet and off-road connecting cycle paths.

By law it is lawful to cycle on a bridleway, but not on a footpath. However, there is no legal obligation on the highway authority (here, Oxfordshire County Council) to actually make the paths fit for cycling. This means that some of the bridleways may be little more than routes through long grass. Agricultural vehicles may also leave deep ruts in the ground. You can find bridleways online from the Oxfordshire Highways map here: PRoW Map, and more detail of the quality of the paths is available on CycleOSM. BBUG have a project to map accessible cycle routes both within Bicester and into the countryside. The route we followed last month is BLR05, available (with other routes) here. While the town routes are obviously suitable for any sort of bike, on a bridleway wider tyres are generally advisable.

So the Friday before last, a group of us set off in the evening to follow BLR05. We met at The Lion in Wendlebury (itself now a 20mph zone), then headed south via a bridleway towards the Nut Tree Inn in Murcott. The Nut Tree is a fine dining establishment, but also has a great pub and if you ask the chef very nicely, he may see if there is any left-over ice-cream (we were lucky...). Next we headed around another bridleway on the edge of Otmoor towards The Crown at Charlton. This is another really welcoming pub in a beautiful, quiet, village with a great pint from up the road in Brill.

Dusk fell as we left the Crown, and here we ran into the most eventful stretch of the route. This is again another bridleway via a bridge over the railway. Last time we checked the route out the grass was long, but perfectly cyclable. This time, some well-intentioned soul had cut the grass, but the results were fairly catastrophic. It seems that long, cut, grass has an almost magnetic attraction to derailleurs. Before long, half of us had grass tangled around our gears which took some work by torchlight to extract. This delayed our progress somewhat, but we were still able to make it back to the Lion for last orders. Overall, it was a thoroughly entertaining evening.