Cycling adventures across Britain and beyond
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…
It’s dubbed ‘the loveliest place you’ve never heard of’. Well, now I have. Markenfield Hall is a (mostly) 14th-century farmhouse just south of Ripon that’s one of the oldest buildings in Britain still inhabited as a family home. The utility room claims to be the country’s only one with both Norman-era double-vaulting and plumbing for…
Stage 3 of the Tour of Britain went through Market Weighton today – a £2 bus ride on the X46 from my house, with bikes welcome on board – so I went along to enjoy the roadside spectating festivities. Watching the race flash past is a bit like an eclipse. There’s an hour or two…
In the early 1960s, a volcanic eruption off the Icelandic coast created a new island: Surtsey, which is still there today. Well, anything other countries can do, Yorkshire can do too. Just a bit flatter, especially the vowels. Until the 21st century, Yorkshire had no islands to speak of. And you know what Yorkshire folk…
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…
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…
Of England’s 32 Minsters, 13 are in Yorkshire. York’s is the best known, biggest, and obviously, best. Ripon and Beverley are familiar too; Hemingborough and Howden less so. Those have been joined in the last thirty years by newly-minsterised churches in Dewsbury, Doncaster, Rotherham, Halifax, Leeds and Hull. I can hear pub quizzers busy scribbling…
In 1984, Yorkshire had 56 coal mines. By 2015 that figure was zero. Little is left of the industry that defined much of the county’s community life and character, except for one vibrant, enduring legacy: a loathing of Margaret Thatcher and her government. But Barnsley can point to another legacy: Barnsley Main. The old entrance…