UK alternative gravel rides — Sand, rock, slate and urban riding

If you expect gravel riding in the UK to be anything like the United States, where the boom really took off, you might be disappointed. Although there are some areas of the UK that have fantastic stretches of gravel roads from the South Downs Way to the forest roads of the Scottish Borders, we simply don’t have the extensive network of rural, wide and mostly traffic-free gravel roads, or ‘groads’, like North America boasts.

What we do have, however, is arguably more exciting. A patchwork of landscapes knitted together by slivers of singletrack, by rocky doubletrack trails, by undulating bridleways and moorland tracks. Not only do we have gravel like you could buy at a garden store, but we also have slate, sand, rock and mud. In essence, in the UK, we are blessed with a multitude of different surfaces for off-road cycling, all of which can make riding drop-bar gravel bikes a bit more spicy!

Here I’ve brought together some of my favourite non-gravel ‘gravel’ Tours from all over England and Wales that’ll really test your bike handling skills. Of course, most of these could easily be ridden on a mountain bike too, and you can always get off and hike any parts that you feel uncomfortable with.

Not for the faint-hearted, these often more technical routes will take you off the beaten track to new areas of the UK that are frequently overlooked. Forget the Ridgeway, the gravel trails of the Peak, the forestry roads of Scotland or the gravel roads of the Cambrian Mountains; these Tours are for gravel riders seeking something a little different.

As a lot of these Tours feature more tricky riding, I’d recommend a gravel bike with tyres no narrower than 40mm, with decent tread and reasonably high pressures to avoid any pinch-flats on rockier sections.