Category: Coast to Coasts

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…

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…

Negotiating the stodgy pub breakfast was our first challenge. Negotiating the cycle maze was the second. There are al fresco artworks all along the C2C; most of these are inventive sculptures, figures of cows made out of scrap metal to suggest the industrial heritage of the area for instance. But outside Consett was an earthwork…

The hardest day, up to the highest point on the C2C (606m), but some spectacular roof-of-the-Pennines scenery, and lanes threading their way round stark hills where the traffic jams consisted of sheep. There was plenty of climbing up to Nenthead – a town, not a term of abuse. On the border by the weatherbeaten sign…

Damp, cool, level riding along another railway path out of Keswick, criss-crossing the River Greta in wooded valleys. There was some cumbersome wiggling on side roads to avoid the main road into Penrith; we lunched on baked spuds in a caff in the market. I was struggling up the long hill to Hartside, and its…

[I’ve done the Coast to Coast – the 140-mile cross-country trek from Whitehaven (or Workington) to Sunderland (or Newcastle) – four times. This was the first time, in 1997, three years after it opened.] We drove up from Bath and left the car in a street in Jesmond, then took a train to Whitehaven with…