Feral Sheep Toughing it out with the Hard Men on the Hardknott Pass

[Andre Jute]

My "overkill" setup did, however, enable me to cycle up Hardknott pass in the English Lake District, the steepest bit on that hill is supposed to be about 30%.

Alas! We were all younger and fitter c1977. Congratulations.

I've been over the Hardknott Pass on foot (conclusion: machismo is stupid) and twice in Range Rovers I was testing for various magazines thirty years apart. I much preferred the Range Rover Way...just saying.

Anyone tempted to emulate Martin's Epic Transit of the Hardknott should note that it may be hours, perhaps even days, before a car comes along, so make sure your bike is in good order and you have enough spares with you.

And mind the feral sheep. There was this ram, who apparently thought we coveted its females, who head-butted the door of the Range Rover, through which I'd just escaped its enraged attentions, so hard that it got stuck by its horns sticking through the aluminium doorskin. I climbed over the centre console and my companion, and gave the jack another couple of strokes so that the ram's front feet we're off the muddy road and it hung from its horns at an angle where it couldn't release its horns by scrabbling in the slippery mud with its hind feet. Then I packed the flat wheel away neatly, checked the wheel nuts, and stood for a couple of minutes fixing angles and distances in my mind while the bloody ram stared at me with bloodshot eyes, probably trying to convey, 'Are you dissing me by working right here in my personal space?' I said to my companion through the sunroof, 'Wind down the rear passenger window on my side.' Then I grabbed the ram by the lowest joints on its rear legs and lifted its back end so it could free its horns from the door. It twisted around with unbelievable speed, presumably hyper-motivated by my impertinence in coming so near its only reason for existence, but I was already twirling like a Scottish rugby forward tossing the caber at the village sports day, and when the animal was high enough and I was moving fast enough, let it go to fly over the roof of the car to land about fifty feet on the downside of the mountain to give me time to salvage the jack, which I thought, correctly, we would need again, throw it through the back window, get into the car and get it moving. That ram was incredibly fast because in the less than the ten seconds it took me to let down the car and throw the jack into the car and me through the driver's door, it reached us and, as the car passed it, used its horns to score the rear quarter of the car.

I've been convinced ever since that you can't hate sheep enough.

[martinf]

I don't think I'd try and cycle up something that long and steep nowadays. I did go back to the Lakes in 2001 with my wife and one daughter during the foot and mouth epidemic (not so many people about), and went up Hardknott in a hired left-hand drive Citroën ZX with a fairly big diesel engine.

As I had already been living in France for several years and there were no other vehicles on the road at the time I drove the car up the pass the French way, relatively fast, with gear changes before and after the bends to keep the revs up, and was surprised to see walkers near the road clapping, maybe in irony.

[Andre Jute]

I loved Citroen cars, starting with the Deeeeee-Esssssse, of which I had several timeless DS starting with one I scored from the budget of a film I produced when I was still a student, and when I had the money for it, several SM, which I still consider the most pleasing grand tourer ever made, but it was so unreliable, you needed three to have one to drive while the other two were in the garage, and they each cost more than a Rolls (who licensed their self-leveling rear suspension). All the same, when it ran, the SM was such a cosseting, effortlessly capable car, I several times set ton-up averages overnight from London to Nardo in the boot of Italy without the passengers ever noticing something extraordinary was happening. When we returned from Australia, my wife was pregnant, and the Volvo I'd ordered to keep her and the child safe took months to be delivered, during which time I drove a GS that was on the lot of the used car dealer nearest the station at Cambridge, and I was sorry to give it back to the dealer when the wretchedly crude Volvo was delivered. Not that a Citroen couldn't also be crude: the DS, to the end, ran on an embarrassing tractor engine with pre-war roots, the Maserati engine in the SM was crudely cut down to a V6 from the known-reliable V8 (I had V8 Maserati too, in all three the then-current sizes, all bought secondhand, and you just couldn't kill them), a botch that ruined the car's reputation, and Citroen didn't have the money to develop the rotary GS, of which the one I drove via a day's detour to its final rest in a museum, a thrashed prototype with half a million kilometers on it, was what enthusiasts always expected a small English sports car to be--and were always disappointed, while at Citroen the French got it right more often than not. The whole of any Citroen, starting with the humble 2CV, was always at least twice the compass of its component parts, and oftentimes more, which was just as well because their ever-parlous finances dictated that models had to be kept in production for a very long time.

Can you picture the bicycle Citroen would have designed in the full flower of its technical imagination, running for the four decades from the Traction Avant in 1934 through the  2CV, DS and SM to the CX in 1974?

[Danneaux]

Can you picture the bicycle Citroen would have designed in the full flower of its technical imagination, running for the four decades from the Traction Avant in 1934 through the  2CV, DS and SM to the CX in 1974?

Actually, I can, Andre...an Art-Deco cross between a full-sus Moulton AM-7 separable spaceframe and a Dursley-Pedersen.

Is that about right?

Best, Dan.