Another cheap day out thanks to the £2 bus fare scheme, the X46 York–Hull service that takes bikes, and the rather good cycle gallery in Hull’s free Streetlife Museum. It’s a friendly, lively and engaging place well worth a visit. The only thing dry about the displays is the lack of moisture, which I was…
Author: Rob Ainsley
Slow Wharfedale: Timewarps with JBP
For my last main day of fieldwork updating the Slow Travel Guide to the Yorkshire Dales, I took advantage of the last day of the year of the Dales Buses. I took the 875 direct from York to the top of Wharfedale (a three-hour journey via Leeds, Ilkley, and then some spectacular scenery; it goes…
Slow Three Peaks: Cafe ups and downs
Another day of riding lovely scenery, updating the Slow Travel Guide to the Yorkshire Dales. Today I was checking out the villages of Three Peaks country: Ingleton, Clapham, Horton etc. The peaks themselves (Pen-y-ghent, 694m; Ingleborough, 723m; Whernside, 736m) are a popular walking challenge embraceable by even the most slightly adventurous. Which obviously rules me…
Markenfield Hall: Home sweet 14th-century home
It’s dubbed ‘the loveliest place you’ve never heard of’. Well, now I have. Markenfield Hall is a (mostly) 14th-century farmhouse just south of Ripon that’s one of the oldest buildings in Britain still inhabited as a family home. The utility room claims to be the country’s only one with both Norman-era double-vaulting and plumbing for…
Searching high and low: A vertical York end-to-end
Having just sold a couple of magazine articles on the theme of cycling from Britain’s highest pub to lowest pub, I’m keen to mine this seam of what are, effectively, vertical end-to-end trips. I’ll be doing Yorkshire’s Highest Cyclable Point to Lowest Cyclable Point later in the year, so as a kind of étude for…
Slow Masham: Otherness out of this world
More research for the Yorkshire Dales guidebook today, and several unexpected, quirky delights: an astronomical observatory with yet another solar system scale model; Yorkshire’s other most famous other brewery town; a bit of the Himalayas in the Dales; and another sculpture park with another miniature Stonehenge. After a very pleasant chat about bikes and touring…
Slow Nidderdale: Gorging on views (hedgehogs on bananas)
Today’s fieldwork for the Yorkshire Dales guidebook update involved the world’s oldest sweetshop, a remote cul-de-sac pub, a hidden gem of a gorge, plenty of lovely scenery, and a hedgehog abducted by aliens. I cycled up Nidderdale from Harrogate via Ripley, a pretty village I’ve blogged about before. I enjoyed a pork pie from the…
Slow Sedbergh: Chapter and verse on the book town
It may pose as Cumbria (or worse, now, ‘Westmorland and Furness’) but Sedbergh and environs was in Yorkshire up to 1974. So the 2016 extension of the Yorkshire Dales to include it was only righting a historical wrong. Anyway, I spent three days of fieldwork around Sedbergh for the Yorkshire Dales Slow Travel guidebook that…
Market Weighton: Grand col du Tour de Bretagne
Stage 3 of the Tour of Britain went through Market Weighton today – a £2 bus ride on the X46 from my house, with bikes welcome on board – so I went along to enjoy the roadside spectating festivities. Watching the race flash past is a bit like an eclipse. There’s an hour or two…
Slow Swaledale: Tales of trails, dales and ales
Swaledale is the most epic of the Yorkshire Dales. If Wensleydale is a Mozart concerto, and Wharfedale a Sibelius symphony, Swaledale is a Richard Strauss opera. An intense elemental-forces tale of love, conflict, separation, nine-child families and sheep. And cream teas with squirty cream. Our Yorkshire Farm, you could call it, or perhaps Unsere wunderschön…