Category: Other

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…

A longish ride today, out west to the little-visited Clee Hills and back. Pretty good countryside: no great climbs or heart-stopping views, which given the lack of defibrillators round here is not a bad thing, but plenty enough to make it worthwhile. It was a misty start to the day, and I could see little…

Workaday Kidderminster, with its busy roads, isn’t near the top of many bucket lists for cycling. Nor its beauty: the Museum of Carpet is the main attraction, and the colour ain’t red, but it does have a handy canal towpath that takes you out of the centre north or south, and the many bike trails…

Yesterday was east; today was west, through Poole to the Isle of Purbeck via chain ferry, then back to Bournemouth via that endless seafront path. After the cycle path which runs north through parkland alongside the Bourne I took roads to neighbouring Poole. I came here in 2010 as the first of my Rhyming Coast…