After riding through Sykehouse, England’s longest village, I headed to England’s largest village: Cottingham. Well, so it claims. With a population of 18,000 it’s certainly bigger than many towns (such as Middleham on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, home to under 500 people but also a lot of horses). It’s even bigger than Ripon (pop 16,500) which is a city. But Lancing in Sussex is not a town and has 19,000 folks, and an IKEA, so I can’t rate ‘Cott’ as the country’s top village without a lot of creative accounting.
But Cottingham is certainly Yorkshire’s largest village. I headed there today from Howden, where I left off from my Sykehouse-based trip last Saturday. Today was grey, cloudy and cool, and the bland rural flatlands between Howden and North Cave were unlikely to quicken the pulse. Neither is the pace I cycle.
It was a pleasant enough ride, though. At Eastrington I stopped off at the local nature reserve to watch some birds doing not very much, and exchange hellos with dog walkers on the old Hull and Barnsley railway line.
At Sandholme I admired the vast greenhouses that do things like grow cucumbers, though they were all empty today. I had a holiday job packing such things round here in 1979, and saved enough to buy my first proper bike: I reckon about 50,000 cucumbers equal one Raleigh Clubman.
Past North Cave (no cave) I took the estate road through the grounds of Hotham Hall – open to walkers and cyclists thanks to the inclusivity of the owners – and climbed the foothills of the Wolds to the reassuring sight of a comms tower up on High Hunsley.
It was a long gentle downhill through Little Weighton to Skidby, known for its windmill. Unfortunately it was sailless today – evidently they’d been taken down for the winter – and the cafe was closed.
And now I was in Cottingham, England’s largest village. It definitely is a village – the sign to the centre says so, and everyone I talked to considers it so – though it does feel rather townlike, and postwar development has seen its eastern end turn seamlessly into the outskirts of Hull.
And it’s big. Cottingham has a major hospital, Castle Hill; at least half-a-dozen pubs; a railway station; four supermarkets; a battery of bakeries, restaurants, cafes and takeaways; two intersecting Victorian shopping streets; and that sure-fire signifier of a substantial town, a ‘banking hub’, that replaced all the recently closed branches.
I didn’t find any village blacksmith though. Or an IKEA. I did find a nice pint in the Duke of Cumberland, however, a pub I visited three years ago as part of my Larkin-related bike ride.
The cafe at the train station, the Old Lamp Room, has a replica tile map – the cartographic railway art that I’ve been documenting with recent rides – but alas it’s not currently on show.
So I couldn’t sip a coffee while awaiting my delayed train home and gaze at ceramic depictions of Beeching-axed rural lines in East Yorkshire. But I rather like Cottingham. My sort of village.