There are road bikes and there are mountain bikes, and never the twain shall meet. A decade or so ago, that may as well have been the governing mantra for cycling in the UK. Sure, there were plenty of road riders with a mountain bike in the shed for winter cross training and mufti days, and even a sizeable body of mountain bikers who would shame-facedly admit, if pushed, to owning a road bike “just for commuting”. We were stolidly one or the other. But then gravel happened.
It came to the UK, like so many things, from across the pond [read our guide to the origins of gravel, here, with contributions from our US editor]. This fatter tyred road bike, which at first few could differentiate from a cyclocross machine, bemused many of us, at least to begin with. After all, the UK experience of off-road riding tended to be rather different to the images of long, straight, dusty doubletrack stretching towards big horizons filtering in from the States.
