Category: Route research

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…

Not far from the Humber Bridge is another crossing that’s a little-known gem, and one that’s effectively only open to pedestrians and cyclists. (Cars can in theory use it, except there’s no road on the other side, only a dirt track.) Horkstow Bridge (pics), just 20 minutes’ bike ride south into Lincolnshire from the Humber…

Stats define us: dress size, batting average, salary. And when suspension bridges get together for a night out, they judge themselves against their peers by socially competing about the length of their main spans. When the mighty Humber Bridge opened in 1981, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, with towers 1410m…

I did the Camel Trail today. The scenic Cornish railtrail follows the Camel Estuary and ends up majestically in Padstow, England’s fish-restaurant capital. (As in, ‘expensive, with a capital F’.) It’s said to be England’s most popular family-cycling route, with half a million users a year. It was sunny and warm all day and the…

Bristol’s tumbledown district of Totterdown has one of Britain’s steepest streets; arguably, a steeper-feeling hill even than Fford Pen Llech‘s 40-per-center in Harlech. The bottom few metres of Vale St, not far from Bristol Temple Meads station, are somewhere around 43%–45%. They come at the end of a shortish, straight descent that feels like about…

Ask a French non-cyclist to name a cycling hill and they’d come up with one of the mighty mountain passes in the Tour: Mont Ventoux, Iseran, Alpe d’Huez, Galibier, Aubisque, Tourmalet… places associated with great feats of endurance and determination. Try it in England and, after a lot of umming and ahing, they’d suggest that…

Britain’s canals have to perform various acrobatics as they trickle their way round the country: they leap over rivers, burrow under granite massifs, stair-jump up and down locks, and even beam chunks of themselves in tanks up and down. But one of their most subtly surprising tricks is in west London, somewhere between Park Royal…

The smallest ferry crossings are often the most interesting. For instance, most souls these days go to Hades on a thousand-lane motorway, with six-million-year delays en route. But cyclists can still go in the traditional way, as travellers did in Ancient Greece, on Charon’s little skiff across the Styx. It’s a much cosier, more personal…

Sigmund Freud would have had all sorts to say about Netherton Tunnel, on the Birmingham canal system. Going through it with a bike is a challenging experience. Not physically, but psychologically: it’s 2768m of arrow-straight pitch-darkness. Your only point of reference once inside is the pinprick of light in the distance, piercing thinly like Venus…