up and down again

When I was small this path was bare earth, repeatedly renewed by the constant passage of the wheels of bicycles of children tearing round and round and round and Up and Down the various little ramps and dips and holes and jumps of Woodhall Spa's prémièr bicycle-mounted fun-location long before mountain bicycles were fashionable and when BMX bicycles still had bright yellow padded lagging around the crossbar. Only posh kids had those and the rest of us had to manage on normal bicycles with neither axle-pegs nor drop-bars; a snotty child with a racer once attempted to mock me, my sister and our neighbours and associates by referring to our conveyances as "rubbishy push-bikes" without realising that he was too thick to realise that a push-bike was any bicycle not powered by motors. Compared to the likes of Glentress it was obviously a fairly limited location but provided hours of amusement and lots of punctures and scrapes and scratchings of legs with thorns. I once jumped into a large central depression only to find that Bigger Boys had stuck a massive log in my path and flew face-first into a nearby tree, getting a small scar on my upper lip which is probably invisible today. I recall that my initial reaction was to complain that I'd dropped the ice pole (one of those frozen things in a long thin polythene sac which could either be sucked or ground, melted and drunk) I was eating until someone pointed out that my face was leaking though I luckily had all the teeth I'd started the manoeuvre with (though it is the risk of teeth-loss which is the most powerful deterrent to modern mountain-biking). Various other forms of amusement included watching people come off their bikes without the aid of sabotage and fall into thick patches of nettles, briars and mud, people chickening out at an unsuitable moment and catching a crossbar in the bollocks and kids shuffling slowly home with bicycles that could no longer be easily rolled beside them following some form of mis-hap to parents who would probably have something to say about the state of the bicycle. Luckily our nowt-fancy bikes were at least easily-twisted back into their original shapes after even a fairly hard landing and wheels were made of sterner stuff back then and failed to bend in the distressingly easy way they do nowadays when confronted with potholes and wheel-twister bicycle parking facilities.

It doesn't look like it gets used much these days.