Cycling adventures across Britain and beyond
Scotland’s highest cyclable tarmac road is, delightfully, closed to motor traffic. It’s the access to a NATS air-traffic control radar station and suite of comms towers up the top of Lowther Hill. They’re a couple of miles’ ascent from Wanlockhead, Scotland’s highest village – which, surprisingly for some, is not in the Highlands but down…
The twentyish miles between Killin, on the end of Loch Tay, and Trossachs-gateway Callander, are some of my favourite bits of the National Cycle-route Network. NCN7 runs, and occasionally stumbles over rocks, nearly 550 sometimes questionable miles in its entirety from Sunderland to Inverness. I’ve done this section of it a couple of times before,…
Resuming my trip between place names so long it may be quicker to ride it than say it, I set off from Porthmadog this grey morning after surviving a brush with Storm Lilian. A wet, and hairy, brush. I enjoyed cycling across the Cob, a train/road/bike path causeway over marshland overlooked by hills. Then it…
It blew up, literally, about half four in the morning. The wind abruptly swung from the west and now, unshielded by the hedgerows, I was suddenly getting the full force of 70mph gusts. The tent was being almost flattened, the poles ready to snap. There was no chance of taking the tent down in this…
It’s all gloomy December days right now – grey, blustery, drizzly, cold – which is annoying, as it’s August. The forecast last week when I booked this cycle-camping trip (my first to this part of Wales) was pretty good, but once I’d paid for my train fares, it went as pear-shaped as a pear. A…
I’m in North Wales, doing Britain’s longest possible bike ride. Not distance, but word length: from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch to Gorsafawddachaidraigddanheddogleddollônpenrhynareurdraethceredigion near Barmouth, fifty-odd miles away. A day ride that genuinely breaks down barriers. Such as the margins on web pages. You won’t find either name on the OS Maps. The official version of the first (village)…
I was itching to get riding. Literally. Leaving my lovely if lavishly midgy waterside wildcamp, I enjoyed the last couple of miles of smooth car-free tarmac alongside Katrine before rejoining the public road network at the ferry pier on its eastern end. Only four more lochs today to complete the dozen in this ‘Lakiest Ride…
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…