Ffordd Pen Llech is the nearest you’ll get on a British road to downhill skiing on a bike. The narrow strip of tarmac careers down a hill at the side of Harlech Castle in north-west Wales, blundering in between picturesque stone cottages as if in a panic to get to the bottom. According to the…
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Caen Hill: The ski-slope canal towpath
Canal towpaths are often great for cycling, for four important reasons. They are flat; car-free; scenic; and they are generously punctuated with pubs. When the countryside gets less flat, though, they’re sometimes less great for the narrowboats using them. The Kennet & Avon Canal – built in 1797–1810 as part of the vital waterways link…
Bosham Harbour: Time and tide
So long as you don’t get too ambitious and attempt to head out into the harbour, here’s a place where you can comfortably cycle along the surface of the sea. And get some unique entertainment too. The trim harbourside village of Bosham, near Chichester on the south coast, lets you do that most days. It’s…
Cam High Road: Roman Road, straight up
Here’s a Roman Road with the kind of beeline straightness you associate with those ironing-board landscapes south of the Severn-Trent line – but with the rugged verticality of the North. A Roman Road fit for a Yorkshireman. Via Virilis. You can just imagine Fred Trueman’s eighty-greats-grandfather holding forth over an amphora of Ovis Niger ale:…
Debenham: The 1km-long ford
Britain abounds in a peculiar type of shallow ‘ford’ that stretches the definition to great lengths – lengths such as 100m or more. Unlike a conventional ford, in this sort you go along, not across, the watercourse. It’s an uneasy jobshare between road and stream, with small fish temporarily accompanying you on your journey. Thanks to…
Baths 6: Bath, Scotland
[A lot happened after our final European twin, Aix-en-Provence, in July 1999. We returned home with the cycling leg of the Baths tour completed, and spent a few months backpacking round places called Bath in Canada, the US, Barbados, Jamaica and St Kitts-Nevis. We managed to cycle in a few of them. We then spent…
Baths 5: Aix-en-Provence, France
[After Káposvar, we cycled out of Hungary and through Slovenia and Croatia to meet up with a friend. We then found our way across Switzerland to Lyon, and followed the Rhône down the final European twin: Aix-en-Provence, once the home of van Gogh, whose images strikingly illuminate the place.] Thanks to the generosity of the…
Baths 4: Káposvar, Hungary
[From Braunschweig we dawdled our way through southern Germany, dropping on friends in Miesbach south of Munich, and followed the classic bits of the Danube riverside cycle path from Passau. We got as far as Esztergom before turning south to Budapest, and then headed for our third twin, Káposvar, via the flatlands of Lake Balaton.]…
Baths 3: Braunschweig, Germany
[We spent so long in the Netherlands, having such a good time exploring the sandy (and sometimes car-free) islands in the North Sea, that we had to get a train to our next twin, Braunschweig. We kept quiet about that.] Braunschweig seems to have little in common with Bath, its twin town, at first glance….
Baths 2: Alkmaar, Netherlands
[From Bath, Netherlands we rode along the coast via Delft, where we stopped off for a few days. All the way to Alkmaar, the first twin, we enjoyed the seaside scenery of the LF1 cycle route.] Alkmaar is Bath’s twin in north Holland. The twinning started after the war when a fundraising project in Bath…