Stately homes get involved in lots of exciting escapades. Pinging motorcycles up the length of their driveways is one guaranteed to provoke the interest of CBG readers, reckons Steven Myatt.

Theoretically you could ride this to an event.

In the year 1562 Thomas Hoghton started work on a very grand new house. It was to be a mock castle with two faces: from the outside it was grim and forbidding but, once you went through the main arch and into the courtyard, the house itself was light and elegant. Like Hardwick Hall, its walls were more glass than stone.
It was a strange time for Thomas to be putting his head over the parapet, both literally and metaphorically. He was a devout Catholic, and the equally devout Catholic Mary I had died four years earlier and her half-sister, Elizabeth, had ascended to the throne. She was a Protestant, of course, and, while she didn’t actively pursue Catholics, it wasn’t a good idea to draw attention to oneself. Thomas realised this a bit late, and he went into self-imposed exile in France, where he died.
The house he created, Hoghton Tower, has survived largely unchanged since then. It fell into disuse in the 18th and 19th centuries, but was very sympathetically restored at the end of the 19th. Since it was built it has been handed down, uninterrupted, through the male side of the de Hoghton family and is still owned by that family today (who have owned the land since the early 1200s).

What is of particular interest to us, though, is the approach to the house, which could hardly be more dramatic. The drive runs dead straight from the gates but then, without veering to left or right, rises steeply to that symmetrical external façade. The house was never really built for defence, but it must have been in the back of every visitor’s mind – as they craned their neck looking up to it – that it would be a very difficult place to take by force.
Nowadays, though, there are invading forces cannoning up the drive but they come in peace – and turn off just before they reach the house itself. Every spring there’s a motorcycle hill climb here, and it’s an ideal location, just a couple of miles north of the M65 Preston-to-Burnley motorway.
The drive is fairly narrow but, helpfully, the steep and grassy banks mean that spectators are up out of harm’s way. There’s plenty of room for pits at the top of the hill, and the only real problem is that bikes have to come down the hill from the pits and turn round in a fairly small space, before racing up again. They do this in batches of a dozen or so, and it takes some patient organisation. Seems to work, though.
There are up to 10 hill-climbing events nationally every year, and you’ll see all sorts of machinery racing. There’ll be ultra-modern Japanese rockets, sprint bikes, racing combos, standard classic bikes, specials and even Super Moto machines. I went to the April meeting, and the classic bikes just about outnumbered the modern machines, I’d guess.

The event had a typical club feel to it: everyone is racing to win, but the atmosphere is friendly and racers are obviously more than happy to help out other competitors. It wasn’t in any sense commercial; more a case of folk getting out on a Sunday and simply doing what they really enjoy.
The 2005 meeting was the 26th annual event at Hoghton. It’s organised by Marshals North West and the ACU’s North West Centre, in conjunction with a number of local bike clubs.
Marshals North West act as marshals at bike meetings across the country but in the main at Aintree, Three Sisters, Oulton Park – and once a year at Hoghton Tower. Some of the members also marshal kart meetings at Three Sisters and various other car events across the country. It’s a club for bike enthusiasts and no one is paid to be there, but there was nothing amateurish about the way they ran the event – the marshalling was very slick and secure.
So, what we are talking about is basically sprinting, but up a hill. Sounds easy enough but that extra element makes it a whole lot trickier. Riders make a lot more mistakes than when they’re running on the straight and level. If sprinting is won or lost on the line, then hill climbing is won or lost on the line to the power of 10.

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