Category: Two-quid trundle

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…

The road to Castle Howard is one of the oddest in Yorkshire. It bounds straight over slopes of the Hambleton Hills AONB, as straight as a reformed ex-con arrow following a Roman Road with a ruler-defined GPX. And it has some cool gates that are only just big enough to admit a bus, or those…

There are plenty of reasons to come to Goathland, one of the North York Moors’ most characterful and interesting villages. Its setting for the 1990s ITV series Heartbeat. The station’s appearances in Harry Potter. A road built by a giant, or the Romans, or perhaps someone else. Mallyan Spout’s dramatic waterfall. Sheep. For me, though,…

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,…