Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
Another sunny, easy, lovely day, trundling the quiet lanes and bike paths of southern Wallonia, and ending up at a place called Soup. It was straight-up freezing cold when I left my room in Beauraing at half seven this morning. I always wondered what chilblains were when my grandparents talked about them sixty years ago….
A short day, dictated by the availability of affordable accomm… but some of the loveliest cycling so far, following the river. Eek! It’s the Meuse! I’d had a sleepless night in a noisy dorm. If only science could invent some device that enabled people to listen to music or films on their phone without disturbing…
When I did my Belgium Side to Side in 2022 I passed through the country’s central point. Now I’m doing it Top to Bottom, I just had to go through the same point. This made my two routes cross in the most appropriate way, forming a wobbly chromosome-like ‘X’ shape. Well, cycle routes are clearly…
A short, bright, breezy day of headwinds and towpaths. Not the narrow, lumpy, muddy tracks typically accompanying a British canal, though: here, a ‘towpath’ is a jaagpad, a wide, smooth, tarmac service road on which motor vehicles are as common as Belgian downhill skiers. With plenty of time in hand, I could dawdle round Antwerp…
Two years ago I did Belgium End to End by doing it Side to Side. I love cycling the place because of its excellent cycle paths and its highbrow cultural experiences such as beer, chips, chocolate and comics. So now I’m doing it Top to Bottom. This will take me from Essen – not the…
The poetically named Gypsey Race is East Yorkshire’s most enigmatic watercourse. One that only works part-time, like me, and keeps disappearing unpredictably, also like me. It’s a winterbourne; it’s a chalk stream; and it’s a predictor of disaster. It’s part of the mystery behind the Wold Newton Triangle, Yorkshire’s equivalent of the one in Bermuda….
The Great War of 1914–18 resulted in the loss of almost 900,000 of Britain’s men. Every city, town and village suffered casualties. Well, not quite every village. Historians reckon 53 settlements in England (none in Scotland or Ireland, as it happens) saw all their men return. Of these ‘thankful villages’, as they’ve been dubbed, five…
A quick visit today to the village I grew up in, North Ferriby just outside Hull, to see what has put it on the map: the Ferriby Boats. We have a few claims to fame for a place of under 4,000 folk: Mariinsky dancer Xander Parish, weather presenter Alex Deakin, and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce….
Julian’s Bower, at Alkborough in far-north-west Lincolnshire, is the only Julian’s Bower in England still called a Julian’s Bower. I cycled it today. A JB is a maze; technically, a labyrinth – a one-route turf path that winds its convoluted way within a circle to the centre. The concept wasn’t invented by the York one-way…
Fans of Ordnance Survey maps – particularly the 204 of the classic Landranger series that cover Britain – spend hours looking for oddities. Two neighbouring, separate villages, both called ‘Great Totham’ in Essex, for instance (map 178). Or a strange dry ‘aerial river’ snaking from Littleport to Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire (map 143). Or the…