St Neots Cycle Track

Hi there did you know we once had a cycle racing track in St Neots have a look...

maps.nls.uk/view/101567696

unreal, i will go and see if anything remains of it when i am over.

PS i am also doing a search on all the old stone milestones on a stretch of the old A1 in Cambridgeshire.

please le tme know if you know of any

thanks

Geoff.

sorry here is the track.

G

Looking at Google Earth briefly looks like at least some of the shape of the track is still visible Geoff

Hi G thats amazing i will go down there and have a closer luck..i bet you can still see that top end, thanks G

That does look like you can still see a cycle track there, you probably know that what is now priory park was the private parkland surrounding priory hill house which you can see in the top corner om the old map. I think it was the well known St.Neots Rowley family who lived there and at that time the town didn't extend out that far so it was outside the town.

Would be interesting to know why they had a cycle track in the grounds,Geoff do you think it would have been a simple dirt track with banking at the ends? Perhaps the museum know something about it?

Hi Mark in the museum there are quite a number of ""racing cyclists " from around 1910.. they all show the riders are on track bikes. i just wonder if the Rowley family were into bikes it was a very upmarket sport and built or marked out a track,, my guess it was a grass track, flat all the way round for local riders to compete. It is well documented that St Neots CC is one of the oldest surviving cycling clubs in the country indeed the world.How great it would be if approaches were made to the owners of the land and with a few volunteers managed to cut the grass and mark it out,, when i get back the end of the month i will dig deeper and let you know,,, great stuff see ya soon G,,

Geoff, sadly I think most of it is now football pitches. My understanding is that it used to be a grass track

Hi R i have blown up to max via Google earth..you can definitely see the track, and both ends there is a definite trace of earthworks, i wonder if these were "banked " i have ridded banked gras tracks and i am sure they were from the shot,,yes i agree that it was grass, but there were a lot of shale tracks around the time, what a piece of history, i bet it is the oldest remaining visible track in the UK, i will keep digging about see ya G..

Hi on the OS map dated 1887 there is no track but on the 1900 OS it is clearly visible,, so it must have been built before 1900..G

Hi Geoff

This is very interesting, it would be great to find out more about the track.

One thing to bear in mind is that the images used on Google satellite view are often quite old - sometimes more than 10 years.
If you happen to have the Google Earth application installed you can see the exact date a given image was taken. Not that things will have changed much over the past few years...

Keep up the research!

Nic

FWIW, if you flick through the various maps here, maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/sidebyside.cfm#z...yers=6&right=BingHyb it doesn't seem to show up on any maps after the turn of the century. According to a book about St. Neots I have, Priory Park was land attached to Priory Hill house which was owned by the Rowleys (see pic). As the council bought the land from the family in the 60's (the house was where Woodlands now stands), I'd guess the Rowleys allowed the track to be built and used at their disgression. If you want to try grass track racing, I believe CCA has a track.

That's a valid point Nic, though also some of these things are easily visible from above but much more difficult to spot at ground level.

Geoff, do you have any friends with helicoptors you could hang out of to take a better look from above?