Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
A day of headwinds and three hours of rain. I should have expected that from the BBC weather forecast. Because that had told me it would be breezy and sunny with a brief shower. But I did the research I needed to, though the challenging weather did put me through my paces. Paces up Buttertubs,…
I’m very keen on wild swimming, so long as I don’t have to enter any water to do so. Anyway, that said, I’m doing a recce of my next route for a magazine article, on wild swims. The idea is to come up with a route that’s not only a very good ride of one…
Yorkshire’s most remote hamlet? Cockayne’s few houses, farms and church sit at the head of Bransdale, in the North York Moors. It’s at the end of two parallel narrow lanes up the valley, and not on the way to anywhere. The only road exit is back down the same valley. Cockayne’s nearest shop is ten…
Yorkshire schoolkids know their triangles. Equilateral; isosceles; scalene; rhubarb. This last, of course, being a three-sided geographical shape with Wakefield at an apex. It’s the world’s rhubarb-growing equivalent of Champagne, or Roquefort, or Newcastle. So forget Bermuda: this is the world’s most famous triangle. The Rhubarb Triangle. The exact corners can vary according to who…
It may be a whisky trail, but it wasn’t a day for shorts. In fact, it was nippy. Day 2 struck north from York a few miles to the village of Sutton-on-the-Forest – no, there isn’t a forest – which is the home of the very agreeable Cooper King Distillery. They started making whisky in…
Yorkshire is like a country in its own right. England’s Scotland. We even have roughly the same population. But, until recently, no whisky to speak of. Well, now we do. So let’s. The county’s first ‘national whisky’ came on stream in 2019 in Hunmanby, outside Bridlington: Spirit of Yorkshire’s Filey Bay. It’s soon to be…
I’ve a soft spot for royalty. It’s a bog in the North Yorkshire Moors… I may not be a fan of hereditary privilege, but I did enjoy cycling through Sandringham Estate today, and visiting an unusual disused royal station. I was in King’s Lynn for three nights, for reasons too complex to relate here. But…
‘England’s Dead Sea’ is in the fens just south of Peterborough. Granted, it’s not quite as low down – minus 2.75m, compared to minus 430m – but it’s the furthest-down dry land you can cycle on in the UK. It’s the country at its most negative, except perhaps for the comments below local newspaper Facebook…
Hard cheese, Stilton. First, it gets stranded on a cul-de-sac. Then, selling its own eponymous (soft, blue) cheese is made illegal. As I was passing nearby with my bike, and being familiar from my own career with tales of gradual decline, I couldn’t resist popping in to the Cambridgeshire village. I wanted to risk tasting…
Britain’s favourite 20th-century poet (whose centenary is in 2022) wasn’t initially impressed by Hull. Nice and flat for cycling, was Philip Larkin’s faint-praise damn. But he lived, worked and (early on, at least) rode his bike here for thirty years until his death in 1985. The city inspired his best work. And it’s work which…