Saturday was the SCCC Lyme Park 2015 ride. The weather forecast for the weekend was terrible – really strong winds an heavy rain! Andy and I were concious that next week is the Stockport 10 (a 10 mile hilly run) and due to me being ill we haven’t done much training for it. As the club ride started at Rose Hill Station (Marple), we decided to run the Marple Parkrun first.

As we arrived at Brabyns Park it was dry but rather chilly. However the grass was rather muddy as there had been a lot of rain recently.

    

There were places in the park that were a real quagmire. One section was so muddy that I thought I was going to loose my running shoe as it felt like it was getting stuck in the mud! A lot of coughing as I went and I mandage to complete the course (2 circuits of the park). We slid our way around in the mud. Our finish time was not good but we did finish and that was the main thing. Having completed the run, we got changed quickly in the car and drove over to Rose Hill Station to meet up with the cycling club.

We set off along the Middlewood Way.

We had not got too far when Nick had a flat back tyre, which we thought was a puncture. It turned out that the tyre itself was the problem and unfortunately he had to turn back.

We came off the Middlewood Way onto Springbank Lane. The way off was via some steps, so we hadto carry our bikes (or at least Andy carried mine for me!) up to the road.

We turned onto Shrigley Road, passing the Coffee Tavern, which is a favourite place for Andy and I.

As we got to Green Close Methodist Church, we turned off Shrigley Road and turned into a lane from which there is a gate into the back of Lyme Park.

Once in Lyme Park, there is a rough track up a steep hill into the top car park.

Once into the car park, it was then down hill to the Lyme Park cafe.

Whilst we we in the cafe, it started to get rather dark and windy and the the rain started!

From the cafe we headed down the main drive towards the main entrance and the turned off onto Red Lane.

We dropped down onto the A6 at Disley and then made our way onto the canal.

I have to say that the canal was very full – a lot fuller than I have ever seen it before! It seemed very close to spilling over the banks. By now it was raining – not as hard as they had forecast but enough to be glad that we had our waterproof gear on!

We pulled off the canal and onto Brickbridge Road

The route then took us the roads of Marple and back to the Middlewood Way

 

We follwed the section of the Middlewood Way back to Rosehill Station where we had started. As we got back to was just starting to rain harder and the wind was starting to get up. We had been very fortunate that the bad weather apeared to be starting much later than they had forcast.

You can see our route for the Lyme Park 2015 ride below:

 

[sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/gpx/LymePark_Nov15.gpx”]