Cadwell Park Track Map Poster

Next time someone tells you Lincolnshire is flat, show them Cadwell Park. Its 3.502 km (2.18 miles) and eighteen turns run clockwise through a steep-sided valley of the Lincolnshire Wolds, across old parkland and woodland, and at the Mountain the motorcycles can take off: the grandstand sits level with the summit, so fans watch the riders leave the ground.

The land was once the park of Cadwell Hall, a manor house long since demolished. A farmer bought it in the 1920s for shooting, but his son wanted to race motorcycles, and in 1934 the first race ran on chalk tracks around the park, with just one stretch that had anything like a paved surface: the old entrance road to the hall, now the Hall Bends. By 1938 sections had been laid in concrete, and in the 1960s and 70s tens of thousands came to watch the bikes.

It grew longer over the years, but never wider, and it remains a circuit made for motorcycles. Charlies climbs toward a horizon of treetops like a rush toward a precipice, the Gooseneck drops out of sight down a steep hill, and the Mountain can throw riders into the air lap after lap. Its own nickname says the rest: the mini-Nürburgring. In the early years, solo motorcycles even raced counterclockwise while sidecars ran the other way.

The poster numbers all eighteen turns and letters in Coppice, Charlies, the Gooseneck, the Mountain, the Hall Bends, the Hairpin and Barn, among others, with the Club circuit’s shortcut in a muted line. Heritage, the vintage clubhouse edition, suits a circuit born in the park of a vanished manor house. Lincolnshire may look flat on most maps. On this one, the names alone, from the Mountain to the Gooseneck, say otherwise.