Another long and lovely day of cycling across England’s patchwork nation. Up the pleasant canal towpath from Taunton to Bridgwater this morning (picture). The route – part of NCN3, Bristol to Land’s End – has a scale model of the planets, rather like York’s. This is the sun, as if dumped at Maunsel Locks by…
Category: Britain
Britain 3: Plymouth to Taunton
From Plymouth I went up the first bit of Sustrans’s lovely Devon Coast to Coast route. I did this with Nigel last July. It chucked it down with rain. This May morning it chucked it down too. I must come back to Plymouth in summer one day. If someone knows when the one summer day…
Britain 2: St Austell to Plymouth
Heavy rain is no problem with decent waterproofs, which will keep you dry all day. Unfortunately I only have half-decent waterproofs, so I was only dry for the first half of today. It bucketed down with rain incessantly, so by one o’clock I was soaking wet. Still, I got the authentic Cornish experience – fishing-village…
Britain 1: Land’s End to St Austell
This was me at Land’s End this morning, starting my End to End to End to End. I’d only cycled there from Penzance, ten miles away, but I must have looked knackered when I turned up. Everyone thought I was arriving from John o’Groat’s. Anyway, from Land’s End I set off with an obliging tailwind…
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…