I woke up to this scene from the sleeper train window this morning. Fresh snow on the mountains. Oh. The nearest you can get to Cape Wrath by train is Lairg, 60 miles away. I cycled from there along Loch Shin to Laxford Bridge, then up to Durness (nearest town to Cape Wrath), where I’m…
Author: Rob Ainsley
Britain -1: London
Am on the Sleeper to Inverness – leave Euston in ten minutes. Bargain Berth, £19, obtained through nerdy monitoring of the ScotRail site with an auto-refresh widget on the morning they became available online back in February. All rather exciting as we wait to leave. And especially pleased that the sleeper berth includes a complimentary…
WoR 4: Pocklington to Bridlington
My nose, carelessly left out unprotected in the sun yesterday afternoon, felt like a hot air balloon this morning. Ow. I cycled out of Pocklington and up through the rising Wolds past Kilnwick Percy and into the hidden gem of Millington: all cosy little lanes, threading their way through dry chalk valleys like railtrails. I…
WoR 3: Ripon to Pocklington
Another cold-nose night in the tend, though the rest of me was toasty. Again, I’d had just about enough dozing episodes to not wake up feeling cheated. It was another sunny but chilly morning. The route was all flat now but, despite the lack of anything vertical to be manouevred round, it was never straight:…
WoR 2: Settle to Ripon
It had been a very, very cold night. I had to wear all my clothes and draw the sleeping bag up and round my head (as I now realised it was designed to do). I managed to doze just enough, and was all packed up and ready to go by half eight. There was nobody…
WoR 1: Morecambe to Settle
I’m one of the first people to be cycling the Way of the Roses (WoR) (it’s April 2010 as I write this; it’s only just opened officially) and I’m riding it for an article for Cycling Plus. The WoR is a recent addition to the list of Coast to Coast routes, and runs 170 miles…
Gloucester: What a bore (the Severn’s)
It was the year’s only five-star Severn Bore today, a remarkable natural phenomenon that’s ideally visited by bike. So I did, all in the name of route research. The bore is a tsunami-like wave caused by particularly high incoming tides being funnelled up the narrows just south of Gloucester. Like a 168 bus overtaking you…
Quirky London 22: George Inn
Where is it? One of the quirkiest, and best, pubs to cycle to in London is the George Inn in Southwark, just south of London Bridge. What’s quirky about it? The George is just about the city’s only surviving coaching inn, and only one with surviving galleries: the capital’s pubs were virtually all refurbished from…
Quirky London 21: A bit of Cambridge
Where is it? Ely Place (right), parallel to Hatton Garden off Holborn. What’s quirky about it? This immediate area is an exclave of Cambridgeshire in London, technically part of the Diocese of Ely. Exclaves are fascinating – Gibraltar, that bit of Russia round Kaliningrad, the Old Soke of Peterborough, and this. Down Ely Court, a…
Quirky London 20: The centre is a horse’s bum
Where is it? Trafalgar Square, at the top of Whitehall, at the statue of Charles I, just under his horse’s bum. What’s quirky about it? It’s London’s very centre: the point to which a ‘distance to London’, notionally, is measured. It’s the origin of the national roadmap; England’s kilometre-zero. The point used to be marked…