Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
Scotland’s highest cyclable tarmac road is, delightfully, closed to motor traffic. It’s the access to a NATS air-traffic control radar station and suite of comms towers up the top of Lowther Hill. They’re a couple of miles’ ascent from Wanlockhead, Scotland’s highest village – which, surprisingly for some, is not in the Highlands but down…
The twentyish miles between Killin, on the end of Loch Tay, and Trossachs-gateway Callander, are some of my favourite bits of the National Cycle-route Network. NCN7 runs, and occasionally stumbles over rocks, nearly 550 sometimes questionable miles in its entirety from Sunderland to Inverness. I’ve done this section of it a couple of times before,…
Resuming my trip between place names so long it may be quicker to ride it than say it, I set off from Porthmadog this grey morning after surviving a brush with Storm Lilian. A wet, and hairy, brush. I enjoyed cycling across the Cob, a train/road/bike path causeway over marshland overlooked by hills. Then it…
It blew up, literally, about half four in the morning. The wind abruptly swung from the west and now, unshielded by the hedgerows, I was suddenly getting the full force of 70mph gusts. The tent was being almost flattened, the poles ready to snap. There was no chance of taking the tent down in this…
It’s all gloomy December days right now – grey, blustery, drizzly, cold – which is annoying, as it’s August. The forecast last week when I booked this cycle-camping trip (my first to this part of Wales) was pretty good, but once I’d paid for my train fares, it went as pear-shaped as a pear. A…
I’m in North Wales, doing Britain’s longest possible bike ride. Not distance, but word length: from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch to Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddollônpenrhynareurdraethceredigion near Barmouth, fifty-odd miles away. A day ride that genuinely breaks down barriers. Such as the margins on web pages. You won’t find either name on the OS Maps. The official version of the first (village)…
Drove roads – those ancient tracks once used to move livestock herds across the country to market – can make excellent mountain biking opportunities for people like me who don’t really like mountain biking. Mastiles Lane, running over the limestone hills of the Yorkshire Dales between Malham Tarn and Wharfedale, is a prime example. I…
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…