In the company of wolves and kings: Suffolk’s new medieval cycle trail

25.03.2024 - 12:55 / theguardian.com

It was an inauspicious start. Having cycled no more than a few metres, from the steps of the Angel hotel into the grounds of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, I fell off my bike.

I blamed the wolf: in dismounting to take its photo, I had kicked my own pannier and sent myself sprawling. The good passersby of Bury St Edmunds came to my (embarrassed) aid. Saint Edmund himself, sculpted in bronze, standing beside the wolf statue, looked the other way.

I could hardly complain about grazed knees in such company. After refusing to renounce his Christianity to Viking raiders in AD869, Edmund – then king of East Anglia – was shot full of arrows and beheaded. According to legend, his head was later found being guarded by a wolf, and when reunited with his body, miraculously fused back on.

Thus the wolf is an important symbol in Suffolk, which is why a newly launched 400km (248 miles) cycling trail has been called the Wolf Way. Using bridleways, byways, gravel tracks, cycle paths and quiet backroads, the route weaves around the highlights and hidden corners of this largely flat but varied county. It was inspired by Norfolk’s Rebellion Way, opened in 2022. But while Rebellion was developed by Cycling UK with funding from the European Regional Development Fund Experience project, local couple Sharon Calton and Chris Bower put the Wolf together with nowt but their own legwork and enthusiasm.

“We came up with an outline of the route in an afternoon, and took a year to fine-tune it,” Sharon told me at their cottage just outside Bury. “We needed to test it, ride the roads, find the best options – recce-ing has been time-consuming but fun.”

Discover Suffolk has given advice, ensuring the Wolf Way sticks to permitted rights of way, but otherwise this project is the result of two cycle-passionate amateurs seeking only to encourage more people to explore this under-pedalled county.

The result is a satisfying loop, roughly a third off-road, that rides into the lesser-visited reaches of Dedham Vale, down the River Orwell, through the Suffolk & Essex Coast & Heaths national landscape (the designation that has replaced “area of outstanding natural beauty”) and into the wonderfully weird Brecks, taking in everything from neolithic settlements to lost seaside cities, medieval wool towns, UFO sites and the village of Hoxne (where Edmund allegedly lost his head). Chris has created an excellent digital StoryMap to accompany the route, which flags up places of interest along the way, with useful web links, while the Wolf Way Facebook group is a good place to pick up tips from other riders.

There are also variants, including a 100km (62-mile) Wolf Cub route, a Winter Wolf suggestion, which avoids the seasonal Bawdsey ferry, and a