The annual three-day York Cycle Festival – a festival of cycling held each year in York for three days, if you’re not familiar with it – moved this year to Driffield and became the Yorkshire Cycle Festival. (Essentially, York Racecourse, where it used to be held, made it too difficult for event’s heroic volunteer organisers to guarantee continuing there.)
I live in York, so the previous one was convenient: walkable never mind cyclable. The new one is in the Showground in Driffield, about 35–40 miles east. Of course I was happy to turn it into a cycle ride, camping equipment and all.
The YCF runs Friday to Monday. I happened to be in Hull on the Thursday night, so cycled up from there on the Friday. I took a scenic route through Cottingham, a claimant for Britain’s largest village, which I’ve blogged before.
From there it was Skidby Mill, which in the last few days has been refitted with its sails that had been down for maintenance for several years. I celebrated with a coffee and cake in the adjacent cafe. I imagined Windy Miller after a cider or two narrowly escaping a whirling-blade disaster as he casually exited his mill in Camberwick Green.
Outside Beverley I couldn’t resist stopping to snap the sign for Killingwoldgraves Lane, Britain’s joint-longest non-compound street or road name along with Pontrhydfendigaid Road. (See Paul Plowman’s splendidly nerdy blog post.)
From there to Driffield was mostly one long, long, straight, straight, narrow, narrow lane almost devoid of traffic save for a horse and cart. Welcome to East Yorkshire.
The Festival itself was great fun. There were maybe 80-100 cycle campers, plus at least as many motorhomes, and a similar number of cars. Being a cycle-camper I was given my allocated spot in the Lightweight Campers area. They obviously know me well. I’ve always been thought of as a lightweight.
One of the main pleasures of the YCF is simply wandering the camping area and seeing people’s bikes and tents, and chatting to them. Every touring bike and every cycle tourer has a story, and you’ll probably hear it. Especially if it’s me.
The bikes were touring and gravel almost entirely, of course. As for brands, there was a heavy Spa Cycles presence. I felt at home because I was on my Spa Cycles Tourer. And it is heavy.
There are also various events, such as vintage bike sales and collections. You could have snapped up a good condition Dawes Galaxy for £250 or a Revolution Tourer for £150, as well as any number of classic steel frame touring and road bikes from the ages.
Very tempting, so it’s just as well I was cycling and not here in a car with space on the bike rack.
The live music also had a vintage air about it – rock’n’roll to the eighties, basically – and the bar was a bus. The film Summer Holiday would have been much better with one of these instead.
There were many other bike-related attractions, including lots of vintage MTBs, races and demos, and dozens of stalls including a very aspirational one by Stanforth with their high-quality touring bikes. I’ll have your Kibo, please.
And there were several tryouts to enjoy, notably these top-top-end recumbent trikes from ICE. No, not that ICE. No masked men forcing you into an SUV at gunpoint, detaining you without legal access for six weeks, then deporting you to a country you’d never actually been to because of some misfiled paperwork in 1982. This ICE is Inspired Cycle Engineering. Their trikes are fast, super-manoeuvrable and huge fun to ride.
As my friends Simon and Sue found. Another lovely aspect of the YCF is seeing friends, by arrangement or by chance. S and S were there very much by arrangement and we spent some quality time over refreshments in their campervan.
We also went for some good rides, the ferocious winds notwithstanding. Some were to Driffield to see the attractions there. Attractions such as the Butcher’s Dog micropub. It must be one of the largest micropubs in Britain.
But we did get into the Wolds for a super half-day ride to Weaverthorpe and back down Garton Bottom, which affords a joyous three-mile downhill through a chalky wolds dry valley.
This was notable for being closed to traffic. Car traffic that is. Not horse traffic. Or cycle traffic. So we had precisely no cars for miles. Not even tractors, which can be more likely in East Yorkshire. It was rather fab.
We also enjoyed some of S and S’s fine campervan cooking, such as Si’s famous breakfast omelette.
The events closed on Sunday evening, but we could stay over that night: three night’s camping is included in the all-in fee of £45, which seemed pretty reasonable for all the entertainment and bike-related stuff.
So I rode back on Monday morning, via some more gloriously quiet Wolds back lanes, to York.
The York Cycle Festival is dead. Long live the Yorkshire Cycle Festival! I’ll be back next year. With any luck, the wind might have died down by then.