Category: Other

Herefordshire’s tourist people are pushing the county’s cycling trails, and it’s easy to see why, even when your eyesight is as bad as mine. Fans of everything from cider to ley-lines to classical music to picture-postcard villages have inviting routes to explore. (Three of those particularly appeal to me: perhaps you can guess which.) The…

A day of headwinds and three hours of rain. I should have expected that from the BBC weather forecast. Because that had told me it would be breezy and sunny with a brief shower. But I did the research I needed to, though the challenging weather did put me through my paces. Paces up Buttertubs,…

I’m very keen on wild swimming, so long as I don’t have to enter any water to do so. Anyway, that said, I’m doing a recce of my next route for a magazine article, on wild swims. The idea is to come up with a route that’s not only a very good ride of one…

I’ve a soft spot for royalty. It’s a bog in the North Yorkshire Moors… I may not be a fan of hereditary privilege, but I did enjoy cycling through Sandringham Estate today, and visiting an unusual disused royal station. I was in King’s Lynn for three nights, for reasons too complex to relate here. But…

‘England’s Dead Sea’ is in the fens just south of Peterborough. Granted, it’s not quite as low down – minus 2.75m, compared to minus 430m – but it’s the furthest-down dry land you can cycle on in the UK. It’s the country at its most negative, except perhaps for the comments below local newspaper Facebook…

Hard cheese, Stilton. First, it gets stranded on a cul-de-sac. Then, selling its own eponymous (soft, blue) cheese is made illegal. As I was passing nearby with my bike, and being familiar from my own career with tales of gradual decline, I couldn’t resist popping in to the Cambridgeshire village. I wanted to risk tasting…

Dumfries and Galloway is said to have the most roads in Britain per head of population. There’s certainly a lot of empty tarmac. Often the network of single-track, untrafficked lanes winding through the gently hilly landscape can feel like cycle tracks. This area is known for its Dark Skies, and is a great spot for…

I’ve been to both Britain’s shortest place name (Ae) and longest (North Leverton with Habblesthorpe). What Ae lacks in consonants, it makes up with umpteen bike trails in the forest – and wind turbines. I’m going to spell it ‘Æ’, making it a single-letter place name, like Y in France and Å in Norway. (Scotland…

The Solway Firth is hard to tear yourself away from, though that’s because of the quicksand rather than any scenic splendour. Today’s afternoon spin south of Dumfries down by the River Nith was a bit samey, in fact. I spent most of it trying to shake off the one hill that dominated the view, and…

It was tempting, having finished most of my research, to take the easy option today: one that would involve simply dawdling round Kidderminster, maybe having a leisurely breakfast and lunchtime pint, and getting an early train home. Then I asked myself: would this be the behaviour of a cycle-route research professional? I decided it would…