A dawn chorus of sneezes, snores and snoughs in various languages ensured I was up and about by half sixish. I enjoyed a small portion of Korean rice and veg breakfast kindly cooked up by a mature Korean lady. We chatted and I stole a look at their guide, and at the MTB guidebook of…
Category: Other
Camino 2: Los Arcos to Santa Domingo de la Calzada
A day that demonstrated the value of keeping the faith – and I thought I didn’t have enough to justify doing this trip – because at one point it seemed hard going into the wind with much too far to go. But I got there. Maybe there’s more to me than the doubters, such as…
Camino 1: Pamplona to Los Arcos
I walked the beginning of the Camino de Santiago from St Jean-Pied-de-Port to Pamplona a few years ago with my my chum Gary. We were distracted by the tapas and some Swiss hikers, and we got no further. I’d wanted to complete it ever since, but on a bike. So here I was at Portal…
Bealach na Bà: Height of achievement
The road west over the hills to Applecross, on the north-west coast of Scotland, is Britain’s longest steep hill. Simon Warren’s book on Britain’s top 100 cycling hills rated every one out of ten; this one rated eleven. And today, fulfilling a long-held ambition, I rode it. The hill is Bealach na Bà, usually translated…
Dunwich Dynamo: Long ride to the dawn
I just rode the Dunwich Dynamo, the annual 120-mile mass night bike ride from London to the Suffolk coast, which took place on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Here’s how it all unfolded… Saturday 7.30pm Arrive at the Pub on the Park, London Fields, Hackney. The building appears to float in sea of cyclists. Perhaps…
Lee Valley: Britain’s lowest-headroom underpass?
Is this the lowest-headroom cycle bridge in Britain*? It’s on National Cycle Route 1 following the Lee Valley north, in Walthamstow marshes. The cycle path ducks under a railway bridge at Coppermill Lane and leaves you just five feet of headroom, or 152cm – that’s about the minimum required width for a cycle lane. (The…
Gloucester: What a bore (the Severn’s)
It was the year’s only five-star Severn Bore today, a remarkable natural phenomenon that’s ideally visited by bike. So I did, all in the name of route research. The bore is a tsunami-like wave caused by particularly high incoming tides being funnelled up the narrows just south of Gloucester. Like a 168 bus overtaking you…
Quirky London 22: George Inn
Where is it? One of the quirkiest, and best, pubs to cycle to in London is the George Inn in Southwark, just south of London Bridge. What’s quirky about it? The George is just about the city’s only surviving coaching inn, and only one with surviving galleries: the capital’s pubs were virtually all refurbished from…
Quirky London 21: A bit of Cambridge
Where is it? Ely Place (right), parallel to Hatton Garden off Holborn. What’s quirky about it? This immediate area is an exclave of Cambridgeshire in London, technically part of the Diocese of Ely. Exclaves are fascinating – Gibraltar, that bit of Russia round Kaliningrad, the Old Soke of Peterborough, and this. Down Ely Court, a…
Quirky London 20: The centre is a horse’s bum
Where is it? Trafalgar Square, at the top of Whitehall, at the statue of Charles I, just under his horse’s bum. What’s quirky about it? It’s London’s very centre: the point to which a ‘distance to London’, notionally, is measured. It’s the origin of the national roadmap; England’s kilometre-zero. The point used to be marked…