Pigdon / Mitford Bank
- Wheelygood Rating: Easy
- Length: 0.22 miles
- Avg. gradient: 7%
- Strava Segment: https://www.strava.com/segments/1233148
- Parking: Nothing official, but Mitford is pretty quiet and there will likely be somewhere to park on the road in the village.
‘Oh, God, are we going up there today?’
This would be a typical refrain from a Club Run when they discovered it would be heading up Pigdon Bank. Somehow its minute of pain gets amplified into something much larger, perhaps because the natural tendency is to gun it from the bottom which, almost invariably, means that you’ll blow about 3/4 of the way to the top and spend the last few yards grovelling and wondering where you went wrong in life.
You can help yourself by coming at it from the Morpeth direction – that way you’ll get a good run up and can carry that onto the bottom section. If you come from Mitford itself you almost have to double back on yourself at the bottom which takes away pretty much all your speed and, essentially, means you have to be in a low gear before you reach the junction.
Once you do actually make it onto the climb itself, it doesn’t mess about, bumping up, as it does, to over 10% pretty much immediately. Be aware that the road allows for two way traffic despite not being all that wide, so please try to keep to the left hand side of the road. Vehicles coming down often seem blissfully unaware of the possibility of anything else coming up to meet them and, as such, tend not to be hanging around. This is interesting to watch when it’s two vans meeting, but when one of the parties is a cyclist there can only ever be one loser in that competition. Keep out of their way!
The way I found to tackle this which minimised the wheezing and swearing at the top was to go for a threshold type effort up the first straight section and around the right hand kink. Once past this, you can see the top and, if you want to unload a Wattage Bazooka, feel free, but, otherwise, just hold on to what you’ve got and you’ll quickly make it to the summit.
Slightly annoyingly, I’d recommend not stopping at the top if you can help it. It’s for much the same reason as keeping to the correct side of the road lower down: cars coming up won’t be expecting you to be there and it could end up being a bit … tricky. Be somewhere else – ideally a couple of hundred metres further down the road where you can chuck up over the hedge if you really have to!
Once you’re done with all that, sit back, relax, congratulate yourself and then start plotting how you can improve your time…
If there are any other road climbs you’d like me to take on, the more ridiculous the better, then please send me a message on my FaceBook page https://www.facebook.com/wheelygoodcycling/ or email me on wheelygoodmail@gmail.com and let me know…
