Cycling adventures across Britain and beyond
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…
The North Riding of Yorkshire is why it’s dubbed God’s Own Country, much to the irritation of God, I expect. (During the pandemic’s restrictions it was joked that He must be in Yorkshire, because He’d be working from home.) It’s the third of the county with all the dramatic, TV-friendly scenery: the Dales and the…
Thanks to all that vertical work yesterday, we had the agreeable situation today of downhill all the way. Downhill from Susch to the border; downhill from the border to our accommodation target in Landeck, Austria. Along with thrilling scenery, sunny weather, light winds and a return to Austrian prices, it made for a very enjoyable…
Over the Albula Pass today, after which it was all downhill to Susch. Our hotel breakfast included prosecco, which I couldn’t resist but had only a few sips of. Otherwise the day would have gone downhill immediately. We started by retracing our steps last night a few miles back to Bonarduz, in light rain. There…