Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
A circular ride today, Aysgarth – Bishopdale – Coverdale – Aysgarth, involving racehorses, Richard III, a grand castle, and Britain’s weirdest attraction. I breezed through some Bishopdale villages, including the comparatively metropolitan West Burton, with its fine green and friendly pubs and shops (most miraculously still going). It also has a lovely hidden waterfall I…
Another guidebook updating trip, this time to Wensleydale. The lower dale benefits from the wonderful Wensleydale Railway, a heritage line enthusiastically maintained by volunteers with a sequence of station buildings furnished in the style of various 1900s eras. Some of their rolling stock is so ancient that it offers lavish bike spaces, a vision of…
I’m updating a guidebook – the Bradt Slow Travel Guide to the Yorkshire Dales. The astute will realise this is something to do with travelling through the Yorkshire Dales, slowly. Which is perfect for cycling, perfect for me. So between now and Christmas I’ll be doing what I’d be doing anyway, except tax-deductibly. This week…
The wonderful solar system model on the York to Selby cycle path, which I blogged earlier this week, is not York’s only cyclable scale model of the planets. There’s another on the university campus, installed in 2016, in which the distance between planets is much more walkable thanks to a scale of 1 in 2…
To boldly go between York and Selby, on the flat car-free path that follows the old railway, is to travel the entire solar system. Because you pass a 1:575,872,239 scale model of the Sun and planets, a millennium initiative of York University, getting a vivid feel for just how empty space is. The sun is…
The nearest you can get to Japan in springtime Britain could be Harrogate. Because the Stray – that picnickable green expanse in the heart of the elegant spa town – has two avenues packed with cherry trees. They give you one of the country’s top ten best sakura experiences: a little bit of Kyoto in…
Just two maps left to bag today. But getting from Whitby to the first of them, at Saltburn, was not as easy as the Tile Maps suggest, with their promise of a railway threading a picturesque coastal route all the way. That was one of mass-killer Beeching’s many victims in the 1960s. So I’d have…
Ah, Scarbados! Yorkshire’s Blackpool, its national beach resort. A bit cold for a dip today, but there were consolations. A ludicrously long bench. A superb, if frustrating, cycle path. And a Tile Map. The bench first. It’s on Platform 1 of Scarborough station, and ideal for introverts. Because it’s 139m (456ft) long. Two emotionally repressed…
I started a three-day trip today, relying for directions on a unique map that’s (a) made of tiles and (b) useless. It’s the mural atlas produced 120 years ago by North Eastern Railways showing their train network in Yorkshire, County Durham and Northumberland. They made 25, nine of which survive in their original locations, six…
Yorkshire is a country – sorry, county – of superlatives. Of stuff that matters, anyway. The best beer, finest scenery, tallest people, most interesting phone boxes, oldest and highest pub. And – I was delighted to learn – the World’s Oldest Working Railway. Because in Hunslet, a suburb of Leeds, there’s been a train running…