When asked where I’ve ridden in Britain, I’ve replied ‘everywhere except Skegness’. Well, I’ll have to find a new joke now, because I’ve finally cycled there. I went down the Lincolnshire coast from Cleethorpes via Mablethorpe, and very nice it was too. In parts. A few parts.
After hearing bitterns at the Far Ings nature reserve in Barton, which I had all to myself this cold bright morning, I got the train to Cleethorpes. (I didn’t especially want to cycle past Immingham Docks.)
From the station I cycled along the prom looking over the sandbanks and mudflats north to Spurn Point, where I finished my Yorkshire Coast ride late last year. There were plenty of walking couples, and mothers pushing buggies. The mobile signal must be really good here, because everyone I saw was staring at their phone.
The world revolves around Cleethorpes. It’s true, because it’s on a monument a mile or two south of the train station along the promenade. It marks the Greenwich Meridian Line, which made landfall from the North Pole at the East Yorkshire coast somewhere around Tunstall; I went there recently. It then crosses the Humber and hits terra firma again here. I chatted amiably to a pair of local women well wrapped up against the chilly northerly – a northerly that would assist me like an e-bike all the way south to Skeggie.
I like this stretch of prom; it runs alongside a miniature railway, and eventually darts off inland to the world’s smallest pub (discuss). It was too early for a pint though, and instead I hacked along a bridleway and back lanes to a long B road all the way Mablethorpe, twenty miles away.
I didn’t stop off at Donna Nook, whose viewable beaches are full of pupping seals in November and December, but rather emptier now. I did however stop off at Saltfleet for that rare Lincolnshire thing, an elevated viewpoint, from the top of an especially prominent dune over the marshes, ponds, reeds and sandscapes.
At Mablethorpe I could join the shoreline path which, in principle, stretches all the dozen miles or so Skegness. In practice, not really. The first three miles was pleasant if a bit austere this winter morning: good prom riding past shuttered, windswept seaside shops and beach huts.
However, south of Sutton, the path got very sandy. The easterly sea breeze had dumped plenty of it across the concrete, like those pop-up urban ‘beaches’ you see in summer city centres occasionally where you can pretend you’re at a resort by paying twelve quid for a cocktail.
It all got so thick eventually that I got off and scrambled across to the parallel lane.
This was rather good, thanks to being ‘closed’ for roadworks – closed to motor vehicles but open to bicycles, meaning I had a couple of miles of nice smooth new black tarmac all to myself.
At Anderby Creek the sharing with cars resumed, but I could console myself with a visit to the Cloud Bar.
This is not a place you can buy cocktails, but Britain’s only specialist (free, 24/7) platform for viewing nimbus, cirrus, stratocumulus and nacreous, etc.
There are curved mirrors you can angle to get fisheye-lens esaggerations of the clouds’ shapes, cloud-shaped concrete recliners to sit back and watch the forms roll across the sky, information panels, views over the strand, and – most importantly for me – a sheltered bench for eating my lunch.
At Chapel St Leonards I should have regained the shoreline path which runs four miles to Skegness. However, I managed to get lost on the A52, and then got lost in Ingoldmells.
Perhaps it was the bewilderment caused by the nightmarish steelscapes of the theme park’s roller coasters and adrenaline rides, the rows of shops and bars closed for the off-season, and the garish neon of the very much open amusement arcades and slot machine emporia.
On the other hand, it could have been because I couldn’t stop singing ‘Ingoldmells, Ingoldmells, Ingold all the way’.
Having missed my turning on to the promenade, I spent two miles blocked off from it by Butlin’s, only managing to regain the seaside on the outskirts of Skeg itself.
Say what you like about Skegness. Everyone does. It is many things, including the home of a cartoon fisherman prancing along its bracing beach. But Blackpool it is not.
And I mean that as a compliment. It certainly has the theme parks, lagery pubs, bright lights, piers and sandy beach, if to a lesser extent than its Lancashire counterpart, but didn’t feel as edgy or run-down.
My hotel was inexpensive, clean, comfy, bright and – hooray! – warm, and there was a Wetherspoon calmly set on the edge of some not-unpleasant villa-lined boulevards.
Carry on four miles further south, down a little lane with a separate bike path much of the way, and you get to Gibraltar Point.
Here is one of the Lincs coast’s countless nature reserves with free bird hides and paths to walk the flat, duney, tussocky flatlands.
I sat out a rainstorm in a hut overlooking the Wash, and thought it was high time I had one. It was time to go back home.
