Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
I’m here in Northern Spain’s Basque Country for a few days’ winter break, bar-hopping on my folding bike. After a few days in Bilbao doing little but riding around slowly and eating pintxos – this region’s equivalent of tapas – I’m now in Donostia / San Sebastián also riding around slowly and eating pintxos. Yes,…
I rode both of Britain’s so-called ‘Dutch Roundabouts’ last week: the one in Sheffield that opened in Dec 2024, and the one in Cambridge that opened in summer 2020. Many cycle-infra buffs reckon Britain’s ‘Dutch’ roundabouts are about as Dutch as a ski resort, and don’t closely resemble the various layouts that bike-friendly gyratories have…
Milton Keynes, with its grid streets, shopping malls, shiny steel’n’glass newbuild, and sprawling scale, is like America without the guns. Or Trump. But with good bike paths, Greggs and Wetherspoons. So I like Milton Keynes. It was built from scratch starting in the 1970s as a new town halfway between Birmingham and London. Now a…
I’m doing Queen’s (College, Oxford) to Queens’ (College, Cambridge): an academic journey between the two eminent university cities that, over the course of a hundred miles, only moves an apostrophe one letter to the right. Today I did Oxford to the slightly more recent city of Milton Keynes, via a village that isn’t a village,…
After riding through Sykehouse, England’s longest village, I headed to England’s largest village: Cottingham. Well, so it claims. With a population of 18,000 it’s certainly bigger than many towns (such as Middleham on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, home to under 500 people but also a lot of horses). It’s even bigger than Ripon…
Q: What links – River Severn; Elizabeth II; M6; Sykehouse? A: England’s longest – river; reign; motorway; village. Yes, Sykehouse, excitingly positioned between Doncaster and Goole in south Yorkshire, is the longest village in the country. And to prove it I rode through the place on this, the shortest day of the year. There are…
The source of York’s other river, the Foss, is a hillside hole in a wood about fifteen miles north. A few years ago (as part of my Yorkshire River rides) I cycled to the High-Dales source of the Ouse, the Foss’s much bigger counterpart which swallows it up in the city centre. But today I…
The annual figures for passenger use of Britain’s 2,597 railway stations have just been announced. It seems a media-story thing now, in the same way that the arrival of Beaujolais Nouveau isn’t. Anyway, I couldn’t resist riding from Yorkshire’s least-used station (Rawcliffe, 498, 25th least-used nationally) to its most-used, thirty-odd miles away (Leeds, 24.9m, 16th…
At last, I got to The Point. Which is where my odyssey down the Yorkshire coast finished today, at the end of Spurn Head: the four-mile-long sandy spit, at times no wider than a tennis court, which wanders recklessly out into the North Sea from the bottom right-hand corner of East Yorkshire. See map of route…
The crumbling coast between Bridlington and Kilnsea is the fastest-disappearing in Europe. Riding it is a sobering experience. Roads and lanes end abruptly on a literal cliff-edge, blocked off by concrete slabs that get moved regularly, wearily, back with every new collapse. Caravan pitches, farmland and houses tumble into the sea after every storm. It’s…