Tell us about your weekend ride

Colour me interested.
Ernulf de Hesdin was a pal of Guillaume Bâtard. For aiding the invasion of Saxon England he was given a tract of land that included an oak forest and a verdant river valley where the river meadows were fertilised with the silt deposited by the flooding each Winter.
Fast forward not quite a thousand years and the woodland is still there!
Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve is the 2nd largest in London, (after Richmond Park), and the River Pinn has had houses built on (some) of its meadows.
No wonder they are at the risk of flooding!

Did visit Hesdin a long time ago, back when channel crossing trips were subject to a 50L limit on beer/lager. Would be good to cycle to/through it.

@hamrack knows the area as well.

@clubman.

Had a gander through this web site and the Pedal Club Golden Book.

The entry for Ian Steel had me laughing out loud, so much so, I was told to pipe down by SWMBO who was watching some durge on the idiot box.
My highlight in italics below.

After a two-day journey, the cyclists arrived in Warsaw, where they were greeted by Marshall Rokossovsky, the commander of the Soviet forces in Poland, who stood sternly behind his desk, knocking back glasses of vodka. Not knowing what they should say, one team member suggested they should simply say “bollocks”. “We said ‘bollocks’, with military precision to the most dangerous man in Poland,” Steel recalled.