The chain-driven bicycle was patented
in 1873 and tarmac was not patented
until 1902, so let’s begin with the
obvious: People have been riding bikes
since before pavement existed. The
early Tours de France mainly ran on
gravel or dirt, and the roads to some
of the Giro’s and the Tour’s iconic
passes were not paved over until well
into the 1950s.
As time went on, the roads
improved, and bicycles became more
streamlined, thoroughbred. We roadies
(we’ll get to mountain biking) began
dreaming of blacktop zinging ever
smoother beneath our 22mm tires. But
over the years there have been resisters
to the charge of progress.
The U.K.’s Rough-Stuff Fellow-
ship (RSF) was established when
one man, a certain Bill Paul of Liver-
pool, put an advert in The Bicycle
magazine: “I believe there is still
a small select circle who love the
rough and high ways amongst themountains of Wales, the Lakes and
Scotland,” he wrote, before asking
any such people to join him in creat-
ing a fellowship. A few months later,
around 40 cyclists joined him at a
pub in Leominster, a small English
town near the Welsh border, for the
inaugural meeting.
That was 1955, which makes the
RSF the oldest off-road cycling club in
the world. (Though they also rode on
the pavement that connected rough-
stuff sections, they were essentially
mountain biking before mountain
bikes.) Membership quickly numbered
in the hundreds, and in its heyday in
the 1960s and ’70s, it grew to more
than a thousand. Members relished
the challenge of pedaling, pushing,
and shouldering their bikes—usu-
ally unremarkable touring setups,
often with Sturmey Archer internal
hub gearing—where they were not
designed to go: up footpaths, bridle-
ways and tracks, and through tight 64 BICYCLING.COM • ISSUE 5
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