Meet the Badasses of the World's Oldest Off-Road Cycling Club
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 Fellowship (RSF) was established when one man, a certain Bill Paul of Liverpool, put an advert in The Bicycle magazine: “I believe there is still a small select circle who love the rough and high ways amongst the mountains of Wales, the Lakes and Scotland,” he wrote, before asking any such people to join him in creating 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—usually unremarkable touring setups with Sturmey Archer internal hub gearing—where they weren’t designed to go: footpaths, bridleways, tracks, tight FF thickets, boulder fields, mountain streams, and deep snow, in the U.K. and beyond.
In their own headstrong (very British) way, their adventuring was rebellious in spirit, akin to their funky Californian countercultural counterparts who klunked together the first mountain bikes on Mount Tamalpais a decade or two later. In fact, these two movements dovetail: There has always been an international cohort to the RSF, and in the late 1970s and early ’80s, that included a couple of West Coast natives, Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher. Kelly even contributed to the bi-monthly RSF journal, noting, in a Colorado ride report in 1982, that, “In contrast to the European rough-stuff style, nearly all the riders here use the large 26 x 2.125 tires that have recently become popular in the United States.”
RSF members have always been ordinary people—bank clerks, factory workers, cabinetmakers, technicians—doing extraordinary things. Noteworthy feats include the first self-supported bicycle trip across Iceland’s mountainous desert interior in 1958; and in 1984, the first trip fully by bike to Everest South Base Camp. Everything has been scrupulously documented in Bill Paul’s scrapbook, in touring slide shows, in the RSF journal, and in the club’s annual photo contest. But club members’ photos remained unknown to the wider world until 2018, when the newly appointed archivist, Mark Hudson, began posting them on Instagram. They struck a chord with a new generation. Bikepacking or gravel or adventure biking, whatever you want to call it, has been tempting road riders to stray from the straight and narrow and try something a little dirty, and so the RSF’s penchant for taking the rough with the smooth has a resurgent appeal.
Perhaps we like their conviction that you can go anywhere and do anything on any bike. (“I never go for a walk without taking my bike,” said early member Bob Harrison, who took many of the photos in the archive.) Or perhaps we, too, now feel a certain weariness with being told what to do: Go this way, not that, wear this and not that, use this bike only for downhills and this bike for the ups.
And perhaps what we like most about the RSF archive photos is how democratic they are; that they show women and men riding their bikes simply because riding bikes is so damn fun. They are having the time of their lives. That’s something that our training goals and our pain faces and our cutting-edge tech sometimes make us forget. Join us: The club’s still open.
Max Leonard's The Rough Stuff Fellowship Archive Book is available here.
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