The East Riding is Yorkshire’s overlooked third. Largely flat, gentle farmland, it’s a Schubert song alongside the Wagnerian grandeur of the North Riding; a trowel compared with the colossal factories and mills of the West Riding. But it’s where I come from and I love it, and the small-scale, intimate dry valleys of the Wolds are among my favourite places in the world to cycle.
No Wolds for me today, though, as I rode from York to Beverley, mostly offroad, as the second of my three ‘Yorkshire County Towns’ rides. It was the first serious outing for my new mountain bike – a bargain from Halfords during one of their desperate stock-flushing discounts last autumn. It proved the ideal machine for the route I’d chosen that took me on car-free tracks three-quarters of the time.
Most of this was along railtrail, at first nicely surfaced (York to Riccall) then muddy and unsurfaced (Bubwith to Market Weighton) and then a mixed bag (Market Weighton to Beverley) in which the bag was a sometimes unlucky dip of gravel, mud, grass, and the odd circus-trick staircase.
I started, as with all my County Towns rides, from York Minster – in this case, from the East Side. Here the grand cathedral facade is complemented by the half-timbering of St William’s College – not an ancient part of York University, which dates all the way back to, er, 1963, but originally a kind of medieval Premier Inn for priests. It now functions as a venue for, well, functions.
Mindful of the Ouse’s role as a historic boundary between West and East Ridings, I rode down the sunny east side of the river path to join the York–Selby railtrail at Naburn.
This is the Planets Trail, a route I’ve blogged about frequently, and today I turned left at Pluto to get to Skipwith Common, a rare piece of untouched northern lowland heath. Well, untouched apart from having an old airfield on it.
After a snack in North Duffield I headed to Bubwith to join the railtrail ‘to Market Weighton’. The old railway line – axed by the evil Doktor Beeching – went all the way there, but the last couple of miles is not rideable now and I had to take dull and busy roads instead.
The Bubwith Rail Trail, often overlooked and little celebrated, really deserves some sort of award. Perhaps ‘dullest railtrail in Britain’. It’s ten miles dead straight, unsurfaced and occasionally squelchy, and lined by trees and bushes either side. Even if it wasn’t, there’d be no views: this is farmland as flat as a stiletto-thorned puncture.
My arms were often scored to the point of drawing blood by overhanging branches and protruding briars, my legs regularly nettled. There was plenty of wildlife, though only the sort that stings, bites or scratches.
That said, I was quite happy, rumbling along on my hardtail MTB in the sunshine, chirping hello to dog-walkers, and able to enjoy my thoughts, undisturbed by having to look at views, say.
At Market Weighton I picked up food and drink supplies and joined the rail trail to Beverley. This is mostly a bit better surfaced and more interesting, and actually fulfils its promise of going all the way there.
Just outside Market Weighton is St Helen’s Well, a magic spring associated with Constantine’s mum. He, you will recall, was proclaimed Roman Emperor in York in 306, and soon after became the first Christian Emperor, so you can see it all went wrong from there.
But ma Helen was quite a character, who collected holy relics and would have been quite a guest on a fourth-century version of the Antiques Roadshow.
(‘So, how did you come by this piece of the True Cross…?’ / ‘Holy clothing is becoming quite collectable now, and this piece of Christ’s tunic would be in great demand’ / ‘If this fragment of rope used to bind Jesus came up at action, I would expect it to fetch about two billion shekels…’)
Anyway, I stopped at the well and made a wish. I can’t tell you what it was or it won’t come true, but I’ll be able to say if it worked shortly after the next World Cup Final.
I variously bobbled, glided and squodged along the rail trail the twelve miles to Beverley, a pleasant and salubrious town I’ve blogged about before. I entered via North Bar Without, the old gatehouse. They used to make special pointy-roofed buses to fit through the arch.
County Hall – built in the late 1880s like the other Yorkshire Ridings County Halls, after a shake-up of council organisation – isn’t open to the public, so all I could do was admire it from the outside. It looks very much like the secondary school I went to, but I won’t hold that against it.
Beverley County Hall was, a plaque informs us, the model for Flinton Bridge County Hall in Winifred Holtby’s novel South Riding. Apparently Win would attend council meetings here as research for her book.
I attend council meetings in York sometimes, to put forward York Cycle Campaign’s opinions on the latest fudged infrastructure, and I can only admire her patience and ability to stay awake.
The ride over, I could enjoy hanging around Beverley’s agreeable market square, today buzzing gently with pavement diners and sippers. The best entertainment, though, was round the corner in the tiny shape of the Chequers Micropub.
Before my train back I had just enough time for a fine pint of East-Riding-origin beer, then ones from West and North to compare it with. East won.
Miles York to Beverley: 44