Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
Drove roads – those ancient tracks once used to move livestock herds across the country to market – can make excellent mountain biking opportunities for people like me who don’t really like mountain biking. Mastiles Lane, running over the limestone hills of the Yorkshire Dales between Malham Tarn and Wharfedale, is a prime example. I…
In popular culture, ‘Yorkshire’ means ‘the West Riding’. If it’s a cliché, a trope or a standing joke, it’s probably going to be from the industrial west of the county: ee-bah-gum, trouble at t’mill, brass bands, see-all-hear-all-say-nowt, Geoff Boycott and Fred Trueman, Norah Batty’s stockings, Yorkshire Airlines, Four Yorkshiremen Talking… The itchy blanket of the…
The East Riding is Yorkshire’s overlooked third. Largely flat, gentle farmland, it’s a Schubert song alongside the Wagnerian grandeur of the North Riding; a trowel compared with the colossal factories and mills of the West Riding. But it’s where I come from and I love it, and the small-scale, intimate dry valleys of the Wolds…
The North Riding of Yorkshire is why it’s dubbed God’s Own Country, much to the irritation of God, I expect. (During the pandemic’s restrictions it was joked that He must be in Yorkshire, because He’d be working from home.) It’s the third of the county with all the dramatic, TV-friendly scenery: the Dales and the…
The market town of Driffield – Gateway to the Wolds – is not associated with codebreaking. Alan Turing never cycled here, and it never had pioneering computers the size of a factory. It’s an East Riding farm-country hub, mainly known for having the largest agricultural show in Britain. But I was there today to explore…
In 2017 I rode to Hessay, a village west of York, to find the Centre of Yorkshire. At the point suggested by the Ordnance Survey as the county’s centroid, all I found was a cowpat. Since then, however, the OS has refined its calculations. It now reckons the exact geographical middle – the point on…
Stir-crazy from deskwork and gloomy weather, I got out today for a micro-adventure: an End to End of the City of York. At barely 14 miles long – from the northern extremity near Strensall, to the southern limit by Naburn – it vies for the title of ‘shortest End to End I’ve done’ with that…
A few miles upstream from York, the River Ure shiftily changes name to become the River Ouse. Why? Where? How? Who? I cycled along both rivers today to find out. The official cut-and-paste story is that the Ure becomes the Ouse at Cuddy Shaw Reach, just before Linton-on-Ouse. For reasons never explained, the hundred-metre-wide Ure…
Pontefract is Liquorice Town. Or was, anyway. The friendly, lively West Yorkshire place, its name corrupted by sweet-chewers, gave the world ‘pomfret cakes’ – chewy aromatic liquorice pastilles, stamped with an image of its historic castle. Liquorice was big business here through the 1800s and early 1900s, with ten factories employing over 5,000 locals. They…
Another cheap day out thanks to the £2 bus fare scheme, the X46 York–Hull service that takes bikes, and the rather good cycle gallery in Hull’s free Streetlife Museum. It’s a friendly, lively and engaging place well worth a visit. The only thing dry about the displays is the lack of moisture, which I was…