Q is for Quarry#
Sat Mar 15 20:35:06 2025
Q is for Quarry. This was once a chalk pit, is now a grassy space behind a small housing development just north of Saffron Walden.
The trip there was supposed to be along "everyone's favourite route from London to Finchingfield", aka the A113/B184, but Kurviger really really doesn't want to route along it - I don't know why - so a couple of impromptu stops in the wrong Roding and again in Dunmow to curse it. Lots of very pretty villages with thatched houses that I really wasn't paying a lot of attention to. Next time I will know where I'm going. Maybe ...
I was running out of afternoon by the time I got there, so the journey back was "get petrol and then shortest path to the motorway". Which was a fair bit of riding onto the sun along minor roads, which was quite uncomfortable even with the drop-down visor in my helmet, then joining the M11 near Stansted - which I'm finding less scary than it once was but still no more interesting.
Speed limits on UK roads are weird. The default "national speed limit", outside of villages and town, is 60 mph on single-carriageway roads and 70 on dual-carriageway roads (those which have a physical divider between traffic in one direction and traffic in the other). Sometimes a 40 or a 50 limit is set where the road is considered not safe for 60, but it has to be important enough for someone to have considered it. So you find narrow gravelly NSL roads that one would have to be much braver than me to ride at anywhere near 60, and wide gentle well-maintained roads with good surface that are for some reason (no doubt a good reason, I am not disputing that the reason is valid) 40
I went back through my dashcam footage to find this shot with the half-timbered house on the corner that has each storey larger than the one it's above. Unfortunately although I have a timestamp I don't have any easy way of correlating it to where on earth I was at that time. Somewhere in a village in Essex.
(It's not that wavey-looking in real life, but my dashcam mount vibrates with the engine noise. I would move it somewhere else if I could only figure out where)
Aha, it was Thaxted Guildhall
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1112905