Category: Other

When asked where I’ve ridden in Britain, I’ve replied ‘everywhere except Skegness’. Well, I’ll have to find a new joke now, because I’ve finally cycled there. I went down the Lincolnshire coast from Cleethorpes via Mablethorpe, and very nice it was too. In parts. A few parts. After hearing bitterns at the Far Ings nature…

The Monsal Trail is one of Britain’s wowest-factor bike paths, stretching eight car-free miles between Bakewell and Annoyingly Not Quite Buxton. Once a mainline railway, it’s excitingly fitted out with half-a-dozen tunnels and several bridges, and offers some lofty views down over the Wye Valley. (Not that Wye. This Wye.) All this is fairly recent….

Lovely easy cycling today under blue skies, on two longish car-free cycle paths. Once they were steamy with locomotives; today they were steamy with cyclist breath on a bright but very chilly day. I cycled past frosty-looking sheep to get on to the Tissington a couple of miles from the hostel. It was early and…

With heavy rain forecast for this afternoon, I just did a short ride today, out on lanes direct from the hostel to do a bit of the High Peak Trail. It was all a bit overcast on the puddly back lanes and gravel tracks, but nicely quiet, and green in a grey sort of way….

I’m on a winter break in the Derbyshire Peaks, staying at YHA Hartington Hall for the bargain price of £13 a night. Up to the 1960s, the gritty tors, sheepy moors and lush dales were criss-crossed by passenger and mining railways. Now some of their trackbeds form four major railtrails: High Peak, Tissington, Monsal and…

I’m here in Northern Spain’s Basque Country for a few days’ winter break, bar-hopping on my folding bike. After a few days in Bilbao doing little but riding around slowly and eating pintxos – this region’s equivalent of tapas – I’m now in Donostia / San Sebastián also riding around slowly and eating pintxos. Yes,…

Milton Keynes, with its grid streets, shopping malls, shiny steel’n’glass newbuild, and sprawling scale, is like America without the guns. Or Trump. But with good bike paths, Greggs and Wetherspoons. So I like Milton Keynes. It was built from scratch starting in the 1970s as a new town halfway between Birmingham and London. Now a…

I’m doing Queen’s (College, Oxford) to Queens’ (College, Cambridge): an academic journey between the two eminent university cities that, over the course of a hundred miles, only moves an apostrophe one letter to the right. Today I did Oxford to the slightly more recent city of Milton Keynes, via a village that isn’t a village,…

Never say Nevers. I’d originally planned to ride all the way to Nevers, sixty-ish k further up the Loire, so had accomm and my transport back home booked there. But with another terrible weather forecast, and the prospect of riding all day into a sleety headwind with no great scenic reward, I decided that a…

Autumn turned up while I was asleep. This morning was misty and cold, and I had to warm my hands around my breakfast tea mug before they worked well enough to take down the tent. There’s an end-of-season feel: several campsites along the way shut early for the year because of rainy weather and dwindling…