Category: Yorkshire Ridings

I’ve overnighted while cycle-touring in all sorts of places. Docked ferries, (former) jails, military barracks, tractor sheds. Even a rare-breed tropical spider house in the Amazon – though it wasn’t called that, it was called a ‘holiday lodge’. But last night, in the Yorkshire Dales, I experienced a rather special first: staying overnight in a…

If you only visit one ‘thankful village’ – one of the 53 in England and Wales to have all its sons survive WWI – make it Scruton, up in North Yorkshire, between Richmond and Northallerton. The last of my rides to all five of Yorkshire’s finished here today, at a village where, more than any…

The Egton Bridge Gooseberry Show – on the first Tuesday in August each year – is the world’s most ancient: over two centuries old, having started in 1800. A splendid excuse to visit the North Yorkshire Moors village today on my folding bike, thanks to a £3 trip on the 840 Coastliner from York, Britain’s…

Among England and Wales’s 53 ‘thankful villages’ – ones whose soldiers all survived WWI – Norton-le-Clay and Cundall, east of Ripon in North Yorkshire, are the closest together: neighbours, in fact, only a couple of kilometres of farmland lane apart. Today was baking hot and I wasn’t up for a long ride, so a bus-assisted…

My rides to all five of Yorkshire’s ‘Thankful Villages’ – whose sons emerged unscathed from WWI – continued this summer day with a ride from Hull to Catwick. (See map below). The small East Yorkshire village is that rarity, ‘doubly thankful’: one of only 14 in England and Wales that also came through WWII without…

The poetically named Gypsey Race is East Yorkshire’s most enigmatic watercourse. One that only works part-time, like me, and keeps disappearing unpredictably, also like me. It’s a winterbourne; it’s a chalk stream; and it’s a predictor of disaster. It’s part of the mystery behind the Wold Newton Triangle, Yorkshire’s equivalent of the one in Bermuda….

The Great War of 1914–18 resulted in the loss of almost 900,000 of Britain’s men. Every city, town and village suffered casualties. Well, not quite every village. Historians reckon 53 settlements in England (none in Scotland or Ireland, as it happens) saw all their men return. Of these ‘thankful villages’, as they’ve been dubbed, five…

A quick visit today to the village I grew up in, North Ferriby just outside Hull, to see what has put it on the map: the Ferriby Boats. We have a few claims to fame for a place of under 4,000 folk: Mariinsky dancer Xander Parish, weather presenter Alex Deakin, and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce….

Fans of Ordnance Survey maps – particularly the 204 of the classic Landranger series that cover Britain – spend hours looking for oddities. Two neighbouring, separate villages, both called ‘Great Totham’ in Essex, for instance (map 178). Or a strange dry ‘aerial river’ snaking from Littleport to Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire (map 143). Or the…

If Yorkshire was a clock face, the area roughly at half past four – the string of villages on the south bank of the Ouse – is one of its most obscure corners. And it’s a strange clock that I’m here to see. When I grew up, in North Ferriby just downstream outside Hull, I’d…