Cycling adventures across Britain and beyond
Torpenhow Hill in Lancashire is sometimes said to the most redundantly named thing in Britain, because all four elements (tor, pen, how, hill) mean ‘hill’. But anything Lancashire can do, Yorkshire can do better. Lake Semerwater, just south of Bainbridge in Wensleydale, also has a quadruple name: ‘lake-sea-mere-water’, each element meaning exactly (or to be…
Jeremy Clarkson calls Buttertubs Pass one of his favourite roads, but that won’t put me off. Because Buttertubs is, indeed, one of Yorkshire’s most impressive cycling experiences. And therefore England’s. And arguably the world’s, though you’d have to be very argumentative to go that far. The road scrambles its way north from Hawes in Wensleydale…
Both the 1980s and 2020s TV settings of All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot’s heartwarming tales of a vet’s life in mid-1900s Yorkshire, were shot mainly in Askrigg and the Dales. But Herriot himself – real name Alf Wight – in fact lived and practised in Thirsk. Nothing about the town is familiar to…
Of all 57 Yorkshire dales, Emmerdale is the best-known. Which is remarkable, as it doesn’t exist. Emmerdale is, of course, fictional: the creation of the long-running TV soap which, from the first episodes in 1972 to 1989, was known as Emmerdale Farm. Which, confusingly, was set in the equally fictional Beckindale, though this was renamed…
We pub pretty well in Yorkshire: 3,725 of them in all (or only 17, if you believe Wikipedia). These include not just the highest of all Britain’s 45,000 boozers (the Tan Hill Inn up in the Dales, 528m up, to be precise); but also the oldest. There are many claimants (this site lists 15) but…
Gravel roads, gravel pits, gravel bike. Perhaps you can spot the theme here: birds. Most weeks I cycle from York to my mum’s, outside Hull. At just the right point for a refreshment stop, about three-quarters of the way, is North Cave Wetlands: a quarry being turned into a 21st-century nature reserve. It has lakes,…
A place called Football. With the 2020 Euros currently taking place right now in, er, June 2021, I couldn’t resist cycling it. Football is a terraced street in Yeadon, on Leeds’s western outskirts. If you’ve ever flown in to Leeds Bradford Intergalactic Airport, you might have glimpsed it during your white-knuckle descent sideways against the…
Day 2 of my Bridges End to End featured awesome Moors landscapes all to myself, and the bizarre Meccano-monster bridge at the top of Yorkshire. I resumed from Malton where I finished Day 1, and conscious of its ‘food town’ image, stocked up with a sausage roll and pork pie from Thomas the Baker in…
Another Yorkshire End to End, this time between two remarkable bridges. Humber to Tees; Suspension to Transporter. South to north; Wolds to Moors. The Humber Bridge, opened in 1981, links Hull – 2017 City of Culture, and home to 300,000 down-to-earth souls – with some fields on the other side. The result of a 1960s…
Before the railways, drove roads were how livestock got from farm to market. Drovers followed well-drained ridgeways, avoiding both bogs and costly turnpikes down below; they were used to handling stubborn, lumbering beasts. All of which also applied to me today, with my trekking bike as the beast in question, and the route being Hambleton…