Category: Two-quid trundle

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…

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 early 2023, the ‘Stonehenge of the North’ was being hyped in the media: a trio of neolithic earthworks by the village of Thornborough, east of Masham, on the flatlands between Yorkshire’s Dales and Moors. I couldn’t resist a folding-bike visit, enabled by the ongoing £2 flat bus fare scheme. The hyping came about because…

Every list of ‘quirky sights of Yorkshire’ includes the Druid’s Temple, a few miles west of Masham on the edge of the Dales. And every list then quickly stresses that IT’S NOT A REAL DRUIDS’ TEMPLE, but is a folly. It was built not by wise ancients in pointy hats and white robes, but by…

I retraced a historic ride today. It involved arson, miracle wells, religious wars, Britain’s tallest man, a nineteenth-century LGBT film-star, another £2 flat bus fare, and a pint of bitter with 0.012 food miles. The historic ride in question was that of Coifi, a torch-happy pagan high priest whose sudden conversion in 627 to the…

And another two-quid trundle, thanks to the 31X York to Helmsley bus and folding bike. This one featured a mighty ruined abbey, a Michelin-star restaurant, and a local brewery-bar gem. Star quality for all budgets, from £175 tasting menus down to £1.55 pork pies. You can probably guess which end I’m at. The run up…

Another two-quid trundle – that is, a £2-flat-fare bus trip with a folding bike – took me to Ripon. It’s famous for its 800-year-old nightly horn signal, which I’ve experienced before with no clothes on. But my bargain trip today was to visit Yorkshire’s oldest continuously used building, and wander round the nearby Studley Royal…