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…
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…
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…
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…