Spin it whichever way you wish, but winter is categorically the worst season of the year for cyclists. However, the cold and wet months have led me to discover my new off-season obsession – tile hunting.
Also known as tile bagging, I became aware of its existence while scrolling through Strava and noticing how bizarre a few riders’ routes appeared.
Instead of a clearly defined loop or point-to-point, these were random, jagged squiggles, as if the riders were continually taking wrong turns.
After a bit of investigative work, I found out they were tile hunting on VeloViewer, the ride planning and analysis website.
I’d long been a VeloViewer user – its founder, Ben Lowe, is a good friend, and I even designed its logo. But I’d used it only to see my speeds, KOMs and distances – the tile-hunting sub-culture had passed me by.
Pedalling squares
To rewind a bit, what exactly is tile hunting? Imagine a grid of squares, each measuring one mile squared, covering the entire globe.
When you go for a ride, walk or any other human-powered activity, and pass through one of these squares, should you record your activity and upload it to Strava or VeloViewer, you ‘bag’ it. The tile turns red… and then the fun starts.
You then have two goals. One is to build a maximum cluster, which will stretch from your front door outwards and continue for as long as one tile joins another.
The other, which has kept me up through the early hours plotting my rides, is the maximum square, where the goal is to build as large a square as possible and fill in every single tile.
I could see its attraction, but it took a while for the penny to drop.
Ever since I bought my first race bike back in 1988, all I’ve ever wanted to do was ride as fast as I could. The pursuit of tile hunting didn’t fit into that agenda.
What would happen to my average speed if I was trying to colour in squares in hard-to-reach places?
However, I decided to give it a go. I’ve been riding bikes since I was a teen, and although I can’t ever see a time when I’d stop, there was something about this particular winter that wasn’t motivating me.
I needed to find a new reason to wrap up in multiple layers and head out of the door while saner people were tucked up at home.
So, I loaded up the VeloViewer homepage and switched to the Explorer Tiles page. Right away, it displayed what I’d already, unknowingly, achieved on previous rides.
I’ve lived in Sheffield since 2018 and had ridden here plenty – just never with the intention of riding every single road.
Every ride I do is duly recorded and logged on Strava, yet my maximum square of highlighted tiles was only 10x10. In the world of tile hunting, that’s measly.
This needed fixing. At first glance, there was some low-hanging fruit to reach. It’d only take me a couple of rides to drag my 10 up to 14 and perhaps I could reasonably target 25 by the time winter was done.
Setting that target was all I needed to get hooked, because now I was in competition with myself. For once, the goal didn’t involve speed, or the need to hurt – it just required perseverance, planning and execution.
Filling squares
Setting off on those early rides to fill in the gaps had me riding on all manner of surfaces.
Unsurprisingly, the places I hadn’t ridden were often areas without roads – there were tracks, if I was lucky, or open fields, and dead ends.
Suddenly, everything was rideable, no surface too rough in my pursuit of filled-in tiles. Not that this led to a change of bike.
All my winter riding is done on my trusty steed with 28mm tyres and mudguards – it’s not ideal, but not impossible either.
With this challenge, it didn’t matter how fast I was riding, or with how little dignity, as I pushed through a quagmire looking ungainly. If that square was coloured in, I was happy.
Not only will tile hunting burnish your route-plotting skills, but it’ll also help you learn to read a map. Often, you’ll be faced with the question: is this legal?
There’s a good reason why you won’t have ridden through some tiles – it’s because you’re not allowed to. What now?
Do you risk flying through that farmyard, or sneak under that gate while nobody is watching?
We’d certainly not advocate breaking the law, and it’s an absolute no-no to enter military land.
To this end, some tiles have been automatically filled in so you don’t have to cross a firing range or get mixed up with tank manoeuvres.
As I built my square, the tiles became further away and my rides got longer.
I was determined that I wasn’t going to start driving with the purpose of accumulating tiles, unless I was going there anyway. However, it was evident that each ride, as the square increased in size, was going to take more effort for smaller returns.
Yet, that brings us back to the idea of tile hunting as the ultimate winter pursuit – no matter the weather, every weekend has a purpose.
As long as you ride the correct route, you’ll come home a winner. Once you upload your ride, watching that maximum square increase in size is like standing in front of a slot machine as it pays out its jackpot. It’s a great feeling.
A night on the tiles
At the end of that first winter of tile hunting, I’d hit my target of 25x25 miles (625 tiles).
By the last count, I was at 40x40 miles (2,000 tiles), which would have me on the road for seven hours at a time to collect only a handful of tiles.
It was all worth it, though, when the square was complete – a thing of beauty. I love maps, always have done, and I can stare at my square for ages.
Each ride is an adventure, with a story to tell all of its own – of punctures deep in the woods, or of having to nip onto the A1 for a few miles because that was the only way to pocket the tile.
When you’re out there in the wilderness, you may occasionally find yourself in a place you don’t think you should be, despite having researched its legality. In your panic, you turn around and race back to the safety of the road.
This can lead to disaster, when you upload your ride to be greeted with the dreaded blank square, a singular white space right in the middle of the area you’ve just painstakingly navigated through.
The sinking feeling intensifies as you realise that, while in that far-flung field you reached by dragging your bike through mud, you stopped and turned just a handful of metres too soon and missed the tile.
This feeling is far worse than missing a Strava segment record, because you know it was your own stupid fault. The only course of action is to venture back into the sludge once more, not to mention undertaking the journey to get there.
This I’ve done, and I’m not proud to admit having driving back to a location, or, while passing, stopping and running with my GPS in hand to claim my missing tile.
Even though 90 per cent of my tiles are bagged by riding, some can only be reached on foot. This, of course, is just the excuse I need to drag the family out for some exercise.
“Where are we going, dad?”
“Why are we here, dad?”
“We’re going to tick off more tiles, aren’t we?”
They get to see new parts of the countryside and I get my reward – what’s not to like?
All sorts of things start to go through your mind while tile hunting. For example, on the cold, misty March morning when I found myself exploring the Humberhead Peatlands in North Lincolnshire, I realised I was isolated in a place of such desolation, it was as if I’d been dropped into the Dead Marshes, the reeking wetlands described by JRR Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings.
The peat-stained ground was black, as if burnt, the vegetation in its winter state, dead and decaying, and there wasn’t a single person to be seen, anywhere.
I spent close to two hours criss-crossing tracks in complete isolation, knowing that if any misfortune befell me, it could be days, or weeks, before I was found.
Half of me – the half that lets my imagination run wild – just wanted to get out of this place as soon as I could.
The other half was simply relishing the lack of other people, the deathly quiet and the gloom.
And this is the beauty of tile hunting – it takes you to places you never knew existed.
I’ve ridden through breakers’ yards surrounded by the carcasses of old trucks, alongside canals, through mud that came up to my wheel axles and, yes, on truck-laden dual-carriageways.
I’m blessed with my base in Sheffield because it’s right in the middle of the UK – I can go north, south, east or west without hitting water.
My next target is 50x50 miles and I’m itching to get started.
Tile hunting: how to get started
The current record for a max square belongs to ‘Dead Balladur’, who has a massive 158x158-mile square across northern France and Belgium.
In the UK, the biggest square is an impressive 102x102 miles, mostly bagged in a single year by Jonathan France.
The holder of the max cluster is Jürgen Knupe from Bavaria, who has managed to link an incredible 37,462 tiles (my max cluster is only 1,842, by comparison).
To get your campaign up and running, you’ll need a Strava Premium subscription so you can make use of the Route Builder function.
You can then access VeloViewer for free to look at your last 25 activities, but if you wish to view your entire history, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro version.
