The Easter Sunday ride; well it’s a bank holiday, it’s the UK, so of course it’s damp and cold, why would one expect otherwise? So it was that seven of us set off from Asda Hatfield for Church Farm in Ardley, which is a little hamlet well to the north. As it’s a reasonable distance we took a fairly direct route via Tewin, Aston, and Walkern getting to the farm at about eleven. Now this farm is a very trendy place with its organic credentials, same day retail food delivery service and of course an appropriately trendy café. Indeed the whole place has as its signage: “the agrarian revolution”, so there you are. Furthermore, when it opened a little while ago, I remember hearing part of a radio programme about it on BBC Radio 4 and what can be trendier than that? In fact its very prices also attest to its upmarket credentials.
So duly fortified, and less two of our party who had to head back, off we went to Allens Green. From Ardley this means heading southeast through a number of very pretty, quite remote hamlets, Wood End, Haultwick, before crossing the ford at Barwick. The countryside seemed particularly still and quiet, we decided the damp mist was actually muffling what little sound there was. From there it was through Hadham Cross and another ford and on via Green Tye to the ‘Queens Head’ at Allens Green for lunch.
How to get a bike stuck in a picket fence
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Bike extricated
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Jon and Judy, who (delayed by a puncture) had gone there via a stop to ‘research’ the Country Bumpkin café in Tewin, met us. There had been a beer festival at the pub and the remaining barrels were racked up so one could draw one’s own pint (after a few free tasters). Whilst we lunched in the newly opened glass-roofed extension, the damp weather gave way to proper rain, which was convenient, as by the time we left it had blown over.
Who's ready to go yet?
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Now we were heading to Hertford for tea, on the way passing though Perry Green, the village where the sculptor Henry Moore used to live and where the open-air museum/gallery of his pieces is sited. From there we went to Wareside and then by the back route of Babbs Green to Ware. On this route we passed a relatively newly planted vineyard, a harbinger of a warmer climate to come? From Ware it was along the canal side path and into Hertford. There into the inviting (cheap) Rose café for tea and cake.
Then there was just the trip back to the start for some of us. In all we did about 55 miles, and whilst damp and slightly drizzly we never got very wet and once or twice the sun shone through the clouds. So not a bad Easter Sunday after all.
peteR
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