Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
It’s all gloomy December days right now – grey, blustery, drizzly, cold – which is annoying, as it’s August. The forecast last week when I booked this cycle-camping trip (my first to this part of Wales) was pretty good, but once I’d paid for my train fares, it went as pear-shaped as a pear. A…
I’m in North Wales, doing Britain’s longest possible bike ride. Not distance, but word length: from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch to Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddollônpenrhynareurdraethceredigion near Barmouth, fifty-odd miles away. A day ride that genuinely breaks down barriers. Such as the margins on web pages. You won’t find either name on the OS Maps. The official version of the first (village)…
Drove roads – those ancient tracks once used to move livestock herds across the country to market – can make excellent mountain biking opportunities for people like me who don’t really like mountain biking. Mastiles Lane, running over the limestone hills of the Yorkshire Dales between Malham Tarn and Wharfedale, is a prime example. I…
In popular culture, ‘Yorkshire’ means ‘the West Riding’. If it’s a cliché, a trope or a standing joke, it’s probably going to be from the industrial west of the county: ee-bah-gum, trouble at t’mill, brass bands, see-all-hear-all-say-nowt, Geoff Boycott and Fred Trueman, Norah Batty’s stockings, Yorkshire Airlines, Four Yorkshiremen Talking… The itchy blanket of the…
I was itching to get riding. Literally. Leaving my lovely if lavishly midgy waterside wildcamp, I enjoyed the last couple of miles of smooth car-free tarmac alongside Katrine before rejoining the public road network at the ferry pier on its eastern end. Only four more lochs today to complete the dozen in this ‘Lakiest Ride…
What’s Britain’s lakiest day ride? A circuit that makes sense, on quiet roads with good scenery, which visits as many lakes as possible? A bike trip which, short of doing it with Laura Laker and a Los Angeles basketball team to a soundtrack by ELP’s bassist, couldn’t be any more lakey? I’m doing this for…
There’s no comparison between my ride from Dumfries to Glasgow, which I finished today on my comfy touring bike, and Kirkpatrick Macmillan’s on his velocipede in 1842. Mine was harder. Because I actually did it and he didn’t. He was hard at work in his smithy in Keir Mill, hammering away at glowing horseshoes on…
When non-bicycle inventor Kirkpatrick Macmillan didn’t ride from Dumfries to Glasgow in 1842, he would have not gone along the modern-day A76. Not a particularly enjoyable ride then, but even less nowadays. So, seeing as it’s all fantasy anyway, I ‘retraced his steps’ today a much more enjoyable way: via Wanlockhead, Scotland’s highest village and…
I’m riding a legendary route: Dumfries to Glasgow. It’s the one that Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan, ‘inventor of the bicycle’, never rode in 1842, on the nonexistent bike that he didn’t invent. Macmillan features in many a 20th-century history of cycling as a pedalling equivalent of phone trailblazer Alexander Graham Bell, or TV pioneer John…
The East Riding is Yorkshire’s overlooked third. Largely flat, gentle farmland, it’s a Schubert song alongside the Wagnerian grandeur of the North Riding; a trowel compared with the colossal factories and mills of the West Riding. But it’s where I come from and I love it, and the small-scale, intimate dry valleys of the Wolds…