Ridgeway One-Way Tour

The Ridgeway has been walked, driven and ridden for around 5,000 years — a high, dry route along the chalk that avoided the wooded, wet clay below. Drovers took cattle along it to market, soldiers used it, and the Victorians romanticised it. Riding it one-way, with the wind mostly behind you and no need to turn round, is the way it was always used.

The Uffington White Horse has been kept clean by human hands for something like three thousand years. Until the eighteenth century, the "scouring of the horse" was a village festival with cheese-rolling down the hill and a fair in the old hillfort above — the event Thomas Hughes wrote a whole book about in 1859. Grass would have buried the figure long ago without it.

Our minibus waits at Overton Hill, so the ride is genuinely one direction: thirty-odd miles of open downland, three extraordinary monuments and a lift home with the bikes at the end of it.