Cycling adventures across Yorkshire, Britain and beyond
Most people come to Whitby for the Goth festivals, the fish and chips, the quaint old fishing-cottage alleys, Captain Cook, the Abbey, or the Dracula shtick. Today, I came for a cobbled lane. Because the rugged harbour gem has a candidate for Britain’s steepest cyclable street. Well, cyclable in theory. Church Road, aka Donkey Track,…
My friend Mark Wedgwood is on a remarkable journey right now: cycling all 204 OS Landranger maps, in order. It’s a 7,000-mile odyssey that will take him everywhere in Britain. To exotic, far-flung places even I’ve never been, like St Kilda, or Skegness. He’s blogging about his journey at ridealltheosmaps.co.uk, and Instagramming on @ridealltheosmaps. Today…
Three of Britain’s most decisive and pivotal battles were each fought a short bike ride from York, which probably explains it. I’ve previously ridden to Stamford Bridge, where in 1066 England beat the Norwegians before losing to the French at Hastings three weeks later. And I’ve been to Towton, a turning point in the Wars…
Little Switzerland; Little Germany; Little Canada; Little Denmark; Little Holland. Yorkshire contains many miniature foreign countries, and I’ve cycled the lot. Which is most convincing? Answers revealed below. But first, today’s trip, in which I completed my globetrotting-at-home set with Thorne. The small town outside Doncaster is nicknamed ‘Little Holland’ for its supposed resemblance to…
‘BERYL BURTON OBE / Was a cycling phenomenon’, states the blue plaque in Morley town centre. The ‘Yorkshire housewife’ (as they called her then, instead of ‘cycling superstar’) indeed was. She dominated women’s road, track and time-trial cycling in Britain through the 1960s: almost unbeatable from 1959 to 1983, winning 90 UK championships and seven…
‘Night riding has a strange fascination of its own,’ opined a recent Cycling Plus article. ‘It’s not about the views, for obvious reasons. The landscapes you explore here are purely psychological. Spookily empty ‘main’ roads. Unpeopled, echoing town centres. Glimpsed nocturnal creatures. Starlit skies (or perhaps inky drizzle). Owls. Somewhere, someone’s on-bike sound system plays….
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…