ONE motive for moving from East Oxford to Charlbury was for the cycling.

This remained pretty much a theoretical benefit, unrealised until the warm weather started six weeks ago.

Until then, the only tangible benefits were the view of fields instead of grotty student houses and not living on what felt like a urban drag-race track in Southfield Road.

Now the weather has turned, the dog and I find it impossible to watch the sunshine playing though the office windows.

Most lunchtimes, we explore the phenomenal range of off-road routes around Charlbury. There are easy climbs along wide, rutted farm tracks and parts of the Salt Way, once a straight-line Roman road used for transporting salt from Cheshire to London.

These uphill tracks are fast-going and safe, miles better having horse trailers hammering past you – perfectly legally – at 60mph as you plod up a steep B-road on a mountain bike.

The maps on Strava.com are great for scoping out what downhill tracks other mountain bikers have found.

There are big holes on Strava where riders have to avoid the country estates out my way – Cornbury, Ditchley and Blenheim.

Or maybe they don’t avoid them, maybe they just turn off their Strava while they ride what look like fun forest loops in the estates.

But these holes in the maps are more than made up for by the brilliant wooded valleys and bumpy single-track descents that riders have shared on Strava.

Back in town, the riding is as easy as ever, though cycling provision per se is almost non-existent.

Charlbury-based friends were already counting the days till I started to get “a bit political” about local cycling. Have I started? Perhaps I have.

Within a fortnight I was known to my local town councillor, demanding cycle parking outside the town’s main supermarket and by the doctor’s surgery. Hailing from East Oxford, provision for cyclists in the sticks is measly.

In Oxford, it would be unthinkable for a supermarket and a medical centre to have no bike parking.

In my sunny retirement from Cyclox, will I now be sucked into the campaigning vortices of the Oxfordshire Cycling Network (OCN)?

They are busy collating information on the "missing links" in Oxfordshire’s cycling network. These are short pieces of route where there is a problem for cyclists that could cheaply be resolved – the "quick wins".

OCN is feeding these in to the county council as part of their inputs on cycling strategy. Add your suggestions to their web form at tinyurl.com/ohzxym4.

Separately, OCN is looking at the county’s overall route network. I for one will be suggesting a much-needed foot and cycle link over the Thames at Bablockhythe.

It won’t make any difference to me up in Charlbury, but for city-based cyclists, there is a great swathe of West Oxfordshire that is inaccessible due to the Thames and busy A-roads.

A crossing at Bablock Hythe would join Cumnor with Standlake and Stanton Harcourt, making it a popular commuter crossing as well as a much-needed leisure route.

Then, perhaps, we can look at safe routes from Charlbury to the Bladon roundabout, as from there the A44 has good adjacent cycle tracks all the way into Oxford.

Again, it’s an estate – Blenheim – that one would ideally wish to traverse.