About

The Goring Gap Cycling website has its roots in a retirement project by Steve Rock. A life-long cyclist, Steve’s Cycle rides around Goring first saw the light of day in the Sport section of the June 2001 edition of the Goring Gap News, with hand-drawn maps and destinations including the King Charles Head in Goring Heath (August 2001).

Time moves on, and the King Charles Head is one of the many pubs that has closed, as is the White Lion at Crays Pond. The advent of smart phones and digital mapping opened a new way to share favourite rides and help people find suitably safe and quiet lanes to enjoy the local countryside. Steve’s daughter Dino asked him if he could develop a website for her to blog about her Canadian cycling trip, riding coast-to-coast across the land of her birth. Getting to grips with this technology made Steve realise this would be the ideal way to store and share local cycling routes as well. goringgapcycling.co.uk first saw the light of day in May 2013.

Since then, the website has continued to evolved. After he retired, Steve came across a group of local people who went cycling together, one or two of whom he already knew slightly. This group had its origins as local members of the Reading Outdoor Group who liked to meet up for a cycle ride together. The group acquired the name Gromils thanks to Dino’s idea of a joke. Over the years the group has grown and outgrown its original name, as nowadays not all the members are retired or male. One or more members of the group have recorded the weekly rides on their smartphone or GPS device and many of the routes are now the backbone of the Route Library.