From Newark up to Goole was a flat trundle alongside the Trent. Pleasant cycling on a warm morning, but the Danube it’s not. The Trent valley consists largely of power stations – you keep expecting the Super Mario Brothers to pop up out of the cooling towers – relieved by the odd high-security mental institution….
Author: Rob Ainsley
P2G 3: Leamington to Newark
A long hot haul up the Fosse Way today. Unfortunately, the speed I cycle, I couldn’t even get this ford to splash me with cool water. Ab Kettleby is a nondescript little village near Melton Mowbray. But it’s Britain’s top village – alphabetically – thanks to the way computers sort their gazetteers. Staying at a…
P2G 2: Bath to Leamington Spa
After living there a dozen years, but leaving in 1999, it was funny being in Bath for a night again. Half the shops I knew had gone, replaced by chainstores or upmarket shopping courts. Rather like meeting an old partner who has now married someone richer and more successful, who is very polite, but has…
P2G 1: Poole to Bath
Set off from Poole at 9.30ish, having taken a ludicrously early train from Waterloo. At Wimborne I dropped in on the Model Town. This is a one-tenth replica of the town as it was in the 1950s. You can walk up the streets and lanes and imagine being sixty feet tall. The shops have little…
Britain 19: London to Dover
I wasn’t looking forward to my final day. The forecast was for showers, followed by heavy rain, followed by showers. Well, the forecast was wrong. It was heavy rain all day. So today was just a long, long day at the office, into unremitting grey drizzle, with lorries booming past on the A20 in a…
Britain 18: Cambridge to London
Delightful, fast, rural tailwind cycling on a grey day. It was drizzly as we left Cambridge. In a nod to the city’s role in bioscience research, the cycle path is adorned with a representation of the sequence of the gene BRCA2, which is linked to breast cancer, and Great Shelford. From the top of the…
Britain 17: Rutland Water to Cambridge
Round a bit of Rutland Water this morning. The reservoir was still farmland when Abba were in the charts. Now it’s England’s largest lake in its smallest county, and it has a bike track all around it, as well as a half-submerged Italianate church that looks as though it’s taking to sea. It was windy…
Britain 16: Derby to Rutland Water
It rained today. All day. Luckily we were cycling in the frankly dull country round East Midlands Airport, so there was no scenery to miss. We found brief shelter from the rain in this curious bus stop in the village of Kingston on Soar, which has its own two-seater library. As you enter Melton Mowbray,…
Britain 15: Hathersage to Derby
I was staying at Mark’s last night, which means an early start was always going to be unlikely. We went swimming in Hathersage’s delightful open air heated pool, joined by Nigel, who’ll be cycling with me to London, looked at some local gardens, chatted over tea and toast on Mark’s balcony, and waited for the…
Britain 14: Wheelton to Hathersage
Another very early start, hacking out into the Lancashire road system at a drizzly half seven. But with a big tailwind, firmly track-pumped tyres, and all my camping gear left at Si and Sue’s for shipment home and hence half-weight luggage, it felt like the bike was pedalling itself. Maybe I just hadn’t woken up…