Cycling adventures across Britain and beyond
I’ve cycled most of Yorkshire’s canals, from the aquatic urban highway of the Leeds and Liverpool, to the backwaters of the Pocklington. But I’d never done the Huddersfield Narrow, arguably the most impressive of the county’s lot. Today I put that right with my friend Mark (who’s planning a remarkable British travel odyssey of his…
Yorkshire’s most remote hamlet? Cockayne’s few houses, farms and church sit at the head of Bransdale, in the North York Moors. It’s at the end of two parallel narrow lanes up the valley, and not on the way to anywhere. The only road exit is back down the same valley. Cockayne’s nearest shop is ten…
Yorkshire schoolkids know their triangles. Equilateral; isosceles; scalene; rhubarb. This last, of course, being a three-sided geographical shape with Wakefield at an apex. It’s the world’s rhubarb-growing equivalent of Champagne, or Roquefort, or Newcastle. So forget Bermuda: this is the world’s most famous triangle. The Rhubarb Triangle. The exact corners can vary according to who…
It may be a whisky trail, but it wasn’t a day for shorts. In fact, it was nippy. Day 2 struck north from York a few miles to the village of Sutton-on-the-Forest – no, there isn’t a forest – which is the home of the very agreeable Cooper King Distillery. They started making whisky in…
Yorkshire is like a country in its own right. England’s Scotland. We even have roughly the same population. But, until recently, no whisky to speak of. Well, now we do. So let’s. The county’s first ‘national whisky’ came on stream in 2019 in Hunmanby, outside Bridlington: Spirit of Yorkshire’s Filey Bay. It’s soon to be…
Britain’s favourite 20th-century poet (whose centenary is in 2022) wasn’t initially impressed by Hull. Nice and flat for cycling, was Philip Larkin’s faint-praise damn. But he lived, worked and (early on, at least) rode his bike here for thirty years until his death in 1985. The city inspired his best work. And it’s work which…
Britain’s best phone box is in East Yorkshire. The Wolds village of Millington boasts a disused K6 – the standard red cast-iron British phone booth – refurbished as a free bike repair hub, complete with tools, spares, lube and track pump. Quick tune-up of brakes while passing by on the Way of the Roses? Day-ride…
Three relaxed days exploring ‘Britain’s first seaside resort’ in the winter sunshine. It boasts Britain’s longest bench, a science pioneer, Yorkshire’s fourth or perhaps sixth largest natural lake, lush ravines, Caribbean beaches and more. Caribbean? Well, the locals call it ‘Scarbados’, among other less complimentary terms (like many British seaside towns, Scarborough has its share…
Filey Brigg is one of Yorkshire’s small-scale geological gems: a natural jetty of rock sticking out into the North Sea which, I was pleased to find, you can cycle along, right to the end. If ‘you’ are Danny Macaskill, anyway. If you’re me, you can cycle halfway along, after which the hitherto flat grassy clifftop…
East, West, Yorkshire’s best. We have everything here, including the very first bit of the Greenwich Prime Meridian: zero longitude, the dividing line between East and West. It makes its first landfall after the North Pole at a caravan park in Tunstall, on the windy Holderness coast. Just a few miles of flat farmland later,…