Category: Route research

Day of whisk… er, route research in distillery country. I mean, Speyside.

Excellent first day of route research on the Speyside Trail up in the Scottish Highlands.

German Christmas Markets seem to be everywhere these days. We’ve been visiting a few – Leeds, Sheffield, York, Birmingham – in the echt German way. That is, on bikes, and not spending more than we can afford. Which means not spending anything, when they want four quid for a sausage. The Birmingham trip was an…

Cramond Island, five miles or so from central Edinburgh along the coast, is a kind of mini-Lindisfarne: a small isle connected to the mainland by a narrow concrete causeway. Most of the time the causeway is under water. But for a couple of hours at low tide, when the waters recede, it’s perfectly cyclable. Go…

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…

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…

The Waterlink Way, ambling six or so miles south from Greenwich to South Norwood, is one of south London’s pleasantest leisure rides. For most of its length it runs through traffic-free parks alongside the Ravensbourne, a watercourse that can’t decide if it wants to be a stream, a river, or clump of reeds. Today was…

The Abergwesyn Pass (all pics), which bucks and rolls twenty miles between Abergwesyn and Tregaron across a remote part of mid-Wales, is one of the most scenic and spectacular roads in England and Wales. The single-track tarmac filament surfs the massive mountain breakers of Elenydd, a virtually uninhabited upland expanse slashed by lush quiet valleys….

This is one of the strangest tarmac roads in Britain: a 22-mile long single-lane cul-de-sac that simply stops dead at the end of Britain’s most fjord-like loch, many miles from anywhere. I rode it today, with my chum Gary. It’s the road from near Invergarry, on the Great Glen Fault in northern Scotland, to Kinloch…

The 25-mile Scarborough to Whitby railtrail (all pictures), part of National Cycle Route 1, is one of the best cycle experiences in Britain, yet it’s curiously overlooked. It’s longer, more scenic, more varied, and more convenient than the much more feted Camel Trail for instance. But we know the world sometimes works like that: Avebury…