King Alfreds Way.

[Richard G]

Doing this over two days with a friend in just under a month. Any useful tips / things to watch out for?

Definitely a 29er route over a gravel bike.

Any particular reason?

[benp1]

The dog picked up a tick this morning so maybe watch out for those...

[HUX]

Some of the down hills are a bit rough and if its damp you may want the extra gription of an mtb tyre. It is doable on a gravel bike but I remember thinking 'I'm glad I'm not on the Camino'
Make sure you've got a bit of spare food and dont expect all the pubs on the map to be open or still be a pub and fill up your water at every opportunity.

[Richard G]

Cheers.

Water is my primary concern. I've set up the ride to have fill up stops in places at distances I wouldn't normally expect to be empty for. I'm not overly concerned about food as I'll be going at a fairly gentle pace (by my standards) anyway.

Everywhere I'm planning to stop has a cafe, shop and a pub (and this'll be a couple of weeks after they've been allowed to open), so one of them will have what I need.

[jameso]

Some of the down hills are a bit rough and if its damp you may want the extra gription of an mtb tyre. It is doable on a gravel bike but I remember thinking 'I'm glad I'm not on the Camino'
Make sure you've got a bit of spare food and dont expect all the pubs on the map to be open or still be a pub and fill up your water at every opportunity.

Thought the same - ok terrain for a gravel bike day ride, far happier on a rigid 29er loaded up for a longer ride. A few road miles in the SE corner of the route but more miles of old school xc.

Church yards, allotments, village halls and sport grounds always a good bet for water, found a few like that on the route.

[Richard G]

Prepping for my ride next week, and noticed that the biggest hill in the entire thing doesn't match any of the top five from this weekend's WRT. Silly Southerners with their flat hills.

(Yes, I'm fully aware I'm going to regret saying that)

[Asposium]

Did the KAW at Easter over two and a half days.
I wouldn’t want to have used the gravel bike, 29er hardtail.
There are a lot of tedious sections.
Some short sharp hills.
Water wasn’t too much of an issue. Don’t bother with a water filter.
I wild camped for the two nights, expect to be very stealthy.

[Richard G]

I'll have company, so the tedium shouldn't be too bad. I'll just have to put up with all his complaining about the hills instead!

[Asposium]

The only notable hill was that out from
QE park.
A couple of “long drags” up tracks onto a ridge

[shutuplegs]

Prepping for my ride next week, and noticed that the biggest hill in the entire thing doesn't match any of the top five from this weekend's WRT. Silly Southerners with their flat hills.

(Yes, I'm fully aware I'm going to regret saying that)

I’m local to Winchester, feel free to shout if you need anything.

[jameso]

Silly Southerners with their flat hills. :lol

Single-speed it then!

[rollindoughnut]

I used the Farnham to Reading section to link the NDW with the Kennet and Avon canal last week. Didn't enjoy the route much. It was really just a road ride with short sections of boggy off road to clag up the drivetrain and slow you to a crawl. Granted it was a horrendous wet weekend but the NDW was epic in the mud rather than frustrating.
Rode it in the dry on my return and didn't enjoy it even more. Had been in Wales by then though, so expectations had been recalibrated.

[trob6]

I used the Farnham to Reading section to link the NDW with the Kennet and Avon canal last week. Didn't enjoy the route much. It was really just a road ride with short sections of boggy off road to clag up the drivetrain and slow you to a crawl. Granted it was a horrendous wet weekend but the NDW was epic in the mud rather than frustrating.
Rode it in the dry on my return and didn't enjoy it even more. Had been in Wales by then though, so expectations had been recalibrated.

Did I meet you on the Saturday? There was 2 of us , we stopped and chatted and you wanted to know how far Reading was.
Tim.

[whitestone]

Just got home from doing this starting from Reading. Took three steady days - day one was enforced longer due to the pub taking nearly two hours to serve us! - 31hrs of riding. Started just gone midday Sunday, finished at midday today. If it hadn't been so hot I think two long days is entirely doable. By the time we got back to the car this lunchtime it was 28C!

Apart from some very short, as in ten metres, of deep mud sections that maybe amounted to 50 metres in total there was one "hill" I didn't climb which was on the section from Goring to Reading along by the river Thames - dropped into a dip and was then presented with 30% concrete covered in gravel That was maybe another 50 metres or so of walking. The climb up from the A3 (is that QE park?) was the toughest but that was mostly due to the heat. The only other one that was hard and nearly had me walking was the short climb up into Barberry Castle/Fort. There's a lot of long draggy climbs, those sort of 2-5% range jobbies that go on for two or three kilometres. I did get to the end thinking I could have done it on a singlespeed.

We were out for three nights, so May and June BAM done The guide talks about the Reading to Fliss section being hard to find locations to wild camp - I reckon there was a suitable bivy spot every kilometre or two! We camped (in a light grey tent) so needed a bit more cover but even then it wasn't that hard to find somewhere. I reckon I could have found somewhere to hammock camp each night, there really is a lot of cover. The one section that might be problematic would be the ranges on Salisbury Plain but even then it's only a couple of hours from one side to the other. There was very little humidity - I can't remember camping for three nights in the UK and ending up with a dry tent we could have just gone with sleeping bag and mat and cowboy camped.

I was concerned enough about water that I took a Camelbak with a 3L bladder and glad I did as much because of the heat. I probably went through one and a half fillings per day. Most of the streams/rivers are in low lying areas and not fast flowing, I wouldn't trust any of them without filtering. Because of Covid there were a few places on shorter hours - the shops in Avebury for example were shutting at 1600, we got there just in time.

We were both on rigid 29ers with big volume front tyres. Helps to have fast rolling tyres - my rear tyre is a nearly bald Bonty XR2 and that had enough grip. Quite a lot of folk doing it over the weekend, a lot on gravel bikes. We were doing tortoise and hare with one group of three lads - in Winchester they were at the statue when we were setting off towards Salisbury and commented that having big volume tyres would have made their ride much better. In the conditions we had we both felt that we could have done it on gravel bikes with say 650bx47c tyres, again, big volume.

The GPX is generally easy to follow - the times we went wrong were either when there was a subtle turn off on a fast descent or when there were two tracks heading in very similar directions and it wasn't obvious which one was right and you needed to go a hundred metres or so to confirm that you weren't on track. One thing about the GPX is that neither of our Garmin Oregons would load it. I had to manually strip out the waypoints, save the file then load it into bikehike and then export it from there before they'd show it. The file loaded fine onto my Edge 520 so don't know what was going on there. A couple of lads were having problems with using the file through Komoot, I think it had "helpfully" rerouted things to use the popular paths.

I'll do a trip report and shots in due course.

Oh, definitely do it clockwise!

[Richard G]

I’m local to Winchester, feel free to shout if you need anything.

Cheers. Hopefully no drama but I appreciate the offer. :)

We've got an Airbnb about 10 mins West of the main town.

Apart from some very short, as in ten metres, of deep mud sections that maybe amounted to 50 metres in total there was one "hill" I didn't climb which was on the section from Goring to Reading along by the river Thames - dropped into a dip and was then presented with 30% concrete covered in gravel That was maybe another 50 metres or so of walking.

Ha, that's where I'm starting (from the train station). My friend is going to sh*t himself!

[benp1]

The climb out of QECP from the A3 is butser hill. It's the highest point in the SDW. Plenty of folks walk it on unloaded bikes, my legs were burning riding up and I was doing it unloaded. If you've filled up at the tap at QECP and maybe for something to eat at the cafe then walking up it would definitely make sense to save your legs

[whitestone]

The climb out of QECP from the A3 is butser hill. It's the highest point in the SDW. Plenty of folks walk it on unloaded bikes, my legs were burning riding up and I was doing it unloaded. If you've filled up at the tap at QECP and maybe for something to eat at the cafe then walking up it would definitely make sense to save your legs

I'll be honest Ben, it wasn't *that* bad. There was maybe twenty metres a little below the midway gate where I'd just got enough traction and if it had been wet (or even damp) it might have been different. One of the three guys on gravel bikes managed it with a bit of zig-zagging.

One thing to note is that we had nothing other than the GPX so anything even slightly off-route was terra incognita if we couldn't see it. Lots of people at QECP but I didn't even notice a building as we went through the woods not the car park.

[Richard G]

Hmm... map is a good point. Does anyone know an alternative to http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ ?

It's been broken every time I've tried it and I don't have maps for that part of the UK.

[whitestone]

Hmm... map is a good point. Does anyone know an alternative to http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ ?

It's been broken every time I've tried it and I don't have maps for that part of the UK.

I use Openfietsmap - have the whole of the UK (and France and Finland and ... ) Same data source as the Garmin but not generated on the fly as Garmin do. I'm assuming your device can handle large file sizes.

[jameso]

I used the Farnham to Reading section to link the NDW with the Kennet and Avon canal last week. Didn't enjoy the route much

That's the only bit of the route I thought wasn't so great, there are some good sections among a lot of roads, short dirt sections and paths at the back of millionaire mansions. It wasn't bad riding at all to be clear/fair, just that the rest of the route was much more the type of riding I was hoping for.
I rode out to Goring from home so started there, it's a good place to start as it just gets better from Reading area as you go clockwise .

[Richard G]

I found this site just after posting: https://extract.bbbike.org/

Seems like it'll do the job. I've downloaded the main bit of the UK, not sure if they're routable though.

[rollindoughnut]

Trob6.
Sounds like you.
How long did it take to get to qecp?
I had a wild day getting from Reading to Marlborough then it improved from there. Wales as ever was sublime.

[Charliecres]

Food and water was a slight issue for us after Larkhill. We were banking on getting supplies in Avebury but everything useful was shut. There’s a water tap or two on the Ridgeway if you keep your eyes peeled but nothing else on route till you get to Goring.

I found the route through Reading frustrating, as it seemed to be designed to show off miles of waterways rather than get you out of the city with any urgency. You can’t get any speed up because you’re on paths shared with hordes of pedestrians. It would be fine if you have all the time in the world.

Similarly, south of Reading the route meanders on (not that exciting) back roads and a few paths. We straightened it out a bit and didn’t feel we’d missed much.

We started just south of Farnham, so this was the home stretch for us, which probably exacerbated the frustration.

[Boab]

Oh, definitely do it clockwise!

Why's that then? I'm looking to use it to link up The Ridgeway and The South Downs Way, so would be going anticlockwise.

[whitestone]

Oh, definitely do it clockwise!

Why's that then? I'm looking to use it to link up The Ridgeway and The South Downs Way, so would be going anticlockwise.

The climbs seem shorter and steeper with longer descents going that way. There's a few lanes and BWs that would just be a grind going anti-clockwise. We bivvied on Beacon Hill by Hindhead, there's maybe 8km of steady descent you can just coast along with a couple of short climbs. That would be a ball ache going the other way. Durford Wood just after Liss would be another.

I think the Reading to Farnham section is convoluted but it's trying to keep people off roads as much as possible whilst keeping things rideable. Not being local it's hard to say if anything could be better. I suppose when the route was being thought about and put together there was a list of locations that were worth visiting so it was a case of then trying to link up those in the best possible way.