Hitting Wye Valleys Trails
Tracking Down Unclassified Roads
Our usual watering hole for a weekend jaunt green laning usually takes us up on Salisbury Plains military ranges but running the same lanes over and over can get a little tedious. We had talked about the lane near Tintern Abbey a number of times and our pal Terry had done some research on UCR's in the area.
We met up at Chepstow for 9:30am and Terry lead us on some of the most challenging road the Wye Valley has to offer. If you are precious about your bodywork these lanes are not for you. Being mid summer with plenty of rain in previous weeks all the lanes were overgrown with foliage giving that spine tingling noise as it runs down the side of your bodywork.
All the lanes in the Valley are single track and just wide enough to take normal 4x4's. Height was an issue too with a number of fallen trees and large, low hanging branches. Darryl's Discovery 3 was the tallest truck and we had to guide it under trees on a number of occasions. Jason brought along his widebody 2.8TD Shogun from Gloucester, Terry in his Gen 3 Hilux Surf from Lydney and we brought along the trusty 95 Landcruiser.
The day was incident and breakdown free thankfully and we only met motor-cross bikes and ramblers on our journey , all of which were nice and friendly. The lanes are so tight in the area you would have to do some considerable reversing if you came across another group of 4x4's. In fact we would recommend no more than 4 vehicles on these lanes.
We left the Tintern steps lane until last, as the comments on trailwise suggest this isn't a lane you'd do in the wet with parts of the track 95% rocks it would certainly get slippy with a bit of rainfall. All trucks made it through without issue and the only damage was a wind deflector on the Discovery.
Fantastic to find some new roads to make use of and we are dreaming up a several days trip to take on Salisbury, Wye Valley and Mid Wales as we write this.
