Author: Rob Ainsley

Another day of endlessly beautiful lochside cycling in fine weather. Plus a deer, a seal, a canal, the smallest ‘bar’ in the world, and a bizarre place name. I started cycling up the Crinan Canal towpath to Crinan, where it opens into the sea (picture). It’s a playground for deer: I saw one on the…

Another gorgeous day of fine weather and stunning scenery. I was ignoring Sustrans Route 78 for most of it, but I inadvertently followed it out of Oban (picture): a 12-mile slog into a headwind over hilly pasture. Most of the day was a glorious lakeside circuit of Loch Awe (picture). The B840, running flat along…

A long day – almost 12 hours’ cycling – of endlessly beautiful loch views. I cycled north out of the sea-level campsite at Strontian at 6am and got up to 380m (picture) on just a banana and Twix. Sounds pretty efficient fuel consumption to me. A huge descent took me past Loch Doilet, which is…

My dorm-mate last night turned out to be from Hull, which seemed appropriate for this trip. I guessed he was from Hull before he even opened his mouth because he’d blagged two extra whiskies over the two-shot allowance in the tour of Tobermory Distillery. It rained hard till half ten, so I sat it out…

A fine day of Hebridean scenery and single-track roads, that took me up the west side of Mull destined for Balam – er, Tobermory. I kept running into minibus tour parties staring with binoculars at distant wildlife such as eagles, otters, and less elusive fauna such as Highland Cattle. Not far from the island of…

I’d rather have been on my bike, but… this was an enjoyable day on a succession of trains from home in York up to the Inner Hebrides. I’m doing Mull to Hull, which barely qualifies as a ‘rhyming coast to coast’ seeing as Mull is an island, not a locality. But it’s Scotland in May,…

Another glorious day of bluesky coastal cycling, a day of space and air and seasmells and freshness and fish and chips. And some lager drinking with Newcastle fans. From Ashington I headed east out to NCN1, which runs picturesquely up the coast. It was (mostly) fab, a series of backroads and not-too-muddy-tracks and paths that…

A delightful day of windless sunshine up the flattish north-east coast. After the headwinds and hills of the previous two days, my bike felt like an electric-assist model. I struck north from Durham this morning to Chester-le-Street, where I joined the Coast to Coast route east to Sunderland. On the rare bit of scenic path…

Lots of hills and headwinds today, but I didn’t swear once. That once was at about 4 o’clock. From the hostel it was all downhill into Whitby, some 100m away. Very steeply downhill, as you can see. The road, Donkey Track, is marked ‘Unsuitable for Motors’. Indeed. At the bottom, this photo suggests that the…

This is the latest Rhyming Coast to Coast: Flamborough to Bamburgh, F2B. Pedants among you will protest that it isn’t a proper Coast to Coast as it doesn’t cross the country, and merely follows a shoreline. But they rhyme and it looks fun, and I’d rather be happy than right any day. I’ll tell you…