Category: Slow Dales

For my last main day of fieldwork updating the Slow Travel Guide to the Yorkshire Dales, I took advantage of the last day of the year of the Dales Buses. I took the 875 direct from York to the top of Wharfedale (a three-hour journey via Leeds, Ilkley, and then some spectacular scenery; it goes…

Another day of riding lovely scenery, updating the Slow Travel Guide to the Yorkshire Dales. Today I was checking out the villages of Three Peaks country: Ingleton, Clapham, Horton etc. The peaks themselves (Pen-y-ghent, 694m; Ingleborough, 723m; Whernside, 736m) are a popular walking challenge embraceable by even the most slightly adventurous. Which obviously rules me…

More research for the Yorkshire Dales guidebook today, and several unexpected, quirky delights: an astronomical observatory with yet another solar system scale model; Yorkshire’s other most famous other brewery town; a bit of the Himalayas in the Dales; and another sculpture park with another miniature Stonehenge. After a very pleasant chat about bikes and touring…

Today’s fieldwork for the Yorkshire Dales guidebook update involved the world’s oldest sweetshop, a remote cul-de-sac pub, a hidden gem of a gorge, plenty of lovely scenery, and a hedgehog abducted by aliens. I cycled up Nidderdale from Harrogate via Ripley, a pretty village I’ve blogged about before. I enjoyed a pork pie from the…

It may pose as Cumbria (or worse, now, ‘Westmorland and Furness’) but Sedbergh and environs was in Yorkshire up to 1974. So the 2016 extension of the Yorkshire Dales to include it was only righting a historical wrong. Anyway, I spent three days of fieldwork around Sedbergh for the Yorkshire Dales Slow Travel guidebook that…

Swaledale is the most epic of the Yorkshire Dales. If Wensleydale is a Mozart concerto, and Wharfedale a Sibelius symphony, Swaledale is a Richard Strauss opera. An intense elemental-forces tale of love, conflict, separation, nine-child families and sheep. And cream teas with squirty cream. Our Yorkshire Farm, you could call it, or perhaps Unsere wunderschön…

En route home from yesterday’s ride to all England’s highest roads, I rode from Teesdale to Kirkby Stephen. With a couple of hours to kill before my train, I worked them to death, doing some quick research for the Slow Travel Guide to the Yorkshire Dales that I’m updating. I’d never ridden the B6276 road…

Just a few places to tick off updating today: Askrigg, Bainbridge, Hawes. Just as well, as I had a ferocious headwind all day. I took another lovely little back road that was new to me – between Aysgarth and Cubeck via Thornton Rust, who sounds like a minor 1950s thespian. Fine views over Wensleydale, and…

A circular ride today, Aysgarth – Bishopdale – Coverdale – Aysgarth, involving racehorses, Richard III, a grand castle, and Britain’s weirdest attraction. I breezed through some Bishopdale villages, including the comparatively metropolitan West Burton, with its fine green and friendly pubs and shops (most miraculously still going). It also has a lovely hidden waterfall I…

Another guidebook updating trip, this time to Wensleydale. The lower dale benefits from the wonderful Wensleydale Railway, a heritage line enthusiastically maintained by volunteers with a sequence of station buildings furnished in the style of various 1900s eras. Some of their rolling stock is so ancient that it offers lavish bike spaces, a vision of…