1st Battlefields Ride

Last year’s Grim Riders MCC challenge was to visit as many of the 15 UK National Parks as possible within the year which is something we managed to do with Bob and Bonzo even visiting a few of them more than once.

This years Grim Riders MCC challenge was called the Battlefields Ride and involves visiting as many of the 15 (plus 1 optional battlefield in Ireland) UK battlefields that are listed, I’ve created a little Google Map where you can see the location of the Battlefields including the ones we have visited and the ones we are yet to visit.

Today marked to start of this years challenge rides for us even though technically the challenge started on the 1st of January, we had decided to attempt to visit 3 battlefield sites in one day starting at Bosworth in Leicestershire then heading north to Winceby in Lincolnshire before finally heading back south to Naseby in Northamptonshire.

As with all our bike rides the most important detail is where were we going to have breakfast? We were very fortunate that Bosworth Battlefield has a great cafe and serve a fantastic breakfast so after getting our challenge photos at the sign for Bosworth we headed inside cafe for our breakfast.

Bosworth Battlefield

After breakfast our next Battlefield was Winceby so we headed north east along the fantastic A6006 through Melton Mowbray and onto the B676/A151 to Bourne where we then took the A15 past Sleaford and then the A513 to Horncastle where it was just a 5 mile jump to the site of the Battle of Winceby

Winceby Battlefield

Unfortunately there’s no cafe to welcome you here just an information sign the battle in a lay-by so we got our photos taken in the freezing cold and quickly jumped back onto our bikes and headed south.

Due to the weather getting much colder we decided that we would rather use the main roads to get to Naseby so with Sat Nav’s reset we blitzed down the A16 past Boston, Spalding and Stamford and then picked the A43 around Corby and Kettering until we eventually found the correct site of the Battle of Naseby. Unfortunately the monument is situated at the top of a field so we had to make do with photos of our bikes from the road with the monument in the distance.

Naseby Battlefield

By now it was VERY cold so we jumped onto the A14 and M6 and headed home as fast as we could. It was a great day out, we covered over 250 miles but it was blooming cold.