The second City Divide

Still to this day The Second City Divide has got to one of my favourite bikepacking routes. Starting in Glasgow and finishing in Manchester, 360 miles of pure joy, well nearly, more like 300 miles of pure joy, then the not so fun Pennine bridle way to finish off. Now before you get on at me that Birmingham is the second city and not Manchester this isn’t a route I created, and I don’t know about that, but what I do know, this is a fantastic route to either add on to the badger divide, or just ride on its own. Especially if you own a gravel bike, the endless wide open gravel roads through the winding wind farms is a real treat. Especially if you get the weather.

Unlike a lot of routes in the UK this one isn’t afraid to just use the road sometimes which means you get to experience some incredible flowing roads with great views, and don’t worry because the road sections are not busy with traffic they are quite country lanes. It keeps the ride moving and feels like you are making good progress, meaning you can enjoy stopping of a jumping in the streams and rivers to cool off if you need to. (I did this was a scorching hot trip)

The only real downside for me on this adventure was the last 50 miles as you come onto the Pennine bridle way, which is a bit horrible to ride gravel bikes on (at least for me) and it’s very stop and start with all the gates. It did feel like it ruined the flow of the whole route at that point. But this is a route I do highly recommend doing.

As long as you have a good level of fitness and want to get out for 3–5 days then its a great route, the terrain is hilly but most of all the trails are ridable, there isn’t too much in the way of technical terrain, this route could be called the tour of the wind farms, there is that many. Its normally a long gravel climb followed by a long gravel decent.

You could ride a lot of this on pretty narrow gravel tyres 35mm would be alright, but you might struggle a bit as you get further into the route in places, 40-50mm fast rolling tyres will be your best bet, I think a MTB would be a little overkill for a route like this. This actually feels like an actual gravel bike route for actual gravel bikes. YAY