Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
What’s Britain’s lakiest day ride? A circuit that makes sense, on quiet roads with good scenery, which visits as many lakes as possible? A bike trip which, short of doing it with Laura Laker and a Los Angeles basketball team to a soundtrack by ELP’s bassist, couldn’t be any more lakey? I’m doing this for…
There’s no comparison between my ride from Dumfries to Glasgow, which I finished today on my comfy touring bike, and Kirkpatrick Macmillan’s on his velocipede in 1842. Mine was harder. Because I actually did it and he didn’t. He was hard at work in his smithy in Keir Mill, hammering away at glowing horseshoes on…
When non-bicycle inventor Kirkpatrick Macmillan didn’t ride from Dumfries to Glasgow in 1842, he would have not gone along the modern-day A76. Not a particularly enjoyable ride then, but even less nowadays. So, seeing as it’s all fantasy anyway, I ‘retraced his steps’ today a much more enjoyable way: via Wanlockhead, Scotland’s highest village and…
I’m riding a legendary route: Dumfries to Glasgow. It’s the one that Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan, ‘inventor of the bicycle’, never rode in 1842, on the nonexistent bike that he didn’t invent. Macmillan features in many a 20th-century history of cycling as a pedalling equivalent of phone trailblazer Alexander Graham Bell, or TV pioneer John…
I’ve ridden through Ulverston a few times, and always found it a friendly sort of place. It’s mainly known as the birthplace of Stan Laurel, who stands alongside Ollie in an irresistibly photographable town centre sculpture. (It’s yet another piece by the excellent Graham Ibbeson, whose popular figures I seem to cycle past a lot:…
Want to sound like an East Yorkshire native? No, I thought not. But if you did, you’d describe today’s route as ‘Pock to Brid, via Drif’. We’re keen on initial syllables as nicknames here. Anyway, after a sound night’s sleep in my own bed at home in York, I got back to last night’s finish…
The Pareto Principle splits things into 80/20 contrasts (such as ‘80% of the work is done by 20% of the people’, an idea most of us in the 20% can agree with). On the other hand, the Football Principle splits things into two halves: usually, along the lines of, ‘we lost the first half 6-0,…
Another hilly day today, though to me it was a walk in the park. Because it’s the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and whenever it got steep I got off to walk. All thrilling scenery, though, as more quiet back lanes wound their way through, up and over the hills of Malhamdale, Wharfedale and Nidderdale. It…
I’m doing the Way of the Roses 1970s-style: the 170 mile coast-to-coast east across northern England, from Morecambe to Bridlington, on a 1978* bike and using only seventies kit. No gadgets, no lycra. A rain cape, not Goretex jacket. Terrible old Ever Ready lights, not LEDs. Fixing accommodation on the hoof, in a callbox or…
Next month, for a magazine article, I’ll be cycling the Way of the Roses, 1970s style: on a vintage bike and with only kit from that era. No lycra, no gadgets. Today was a kind of test-cum-photoshoot – done with a 1970s 35mm SLR, in black and white, on a few train-assisted highlights of the…