I had planned to visit relatives in Lancaster, but ‘The group of companies formerly known as British Rail’ but paid to that. While I could get my bike to Lancaster the previous night, they claimed that they couldn’t take it to Whitehaven the next day before about 1.30. So instead I booked a ticket from York, starting at the ghastly time of 6.18, due to arrive at Whitehaven at about 11.30. Well I was there on time. The driver wasn’t. The driver wandered up 10 minutes late, and by the time he was in Manchester, where my first connection happened, was 20 minutes late and of course the connection had gone. Railtrack person suggests a complicated series of changes - Manchester to Preston, Preston to Carlisle, Carlisle to Whitehaven. In theory the guards could have chucked me off any of these trains since you’re meant to book the bike ahead, but I’ve no idea if they would have.

My mood is not particularly improved in Preston, where it turns out the train there running late as well. In the meantime I go off to buy some film for my camera only to find a stroppy security guard (well her badge claimed she was ‘customer care’, but it wasn’t fooling anyone) start complaining about my bringing the bike into her precinct. On close examination there was a very tiny notice on a plate glass door bolted flush against a wall saying ‘no dogs (except guide dogs), no cycles’. Since I have already made my purchase I remove the bike from the precinct at exactly the same speed I was going to remove it anyway. Afterwards I wish I’d made a fuss, pointed out to the shop that they’d made a sale that they wouldn’t have if the woman had been lurking by the door, but the moment had passed.

While the train at Preston was late the ex-BR people at Carlisle had held the train and were waving and shouting as I descended. I don’t know if anyone else had made a point of asking them to do it. It was good of them. Individuals in the Former BR seem generally helpful. The myriad companies though don’t seem to talk to each other, spend all their time redesigning uniforms and paint schemes and making sure that there’s a well groomed woman in a red poncho lurking on every platform, without doing anything to improve their service. Has travel on what used to be our Railway network improved or got worse? I don’t think I do enough of it to tell. It always used to be a bit shambolic, and it still is. Which just increases your annoyance when you realise just how much money’s been blown on painting perfectly adequate blue trains a different blue instead of installing a comprehensible PA system.

Enough of this I hear you say! I arrived in Whitehaven. At about 1.30. Yes, gentle readers, the same 1.30 that I was trying to avoid by not spending a pleasant evening in Lancaster.

There were a lot of people lining the streets of Whitehaven, waving flags and enjoying themselves as I set off. I presume that there must have been some procession, or parade. I don’t think they can all have been there to see me off.

It took me about 15 minutes to realise how very un-fit I am. I climbed out of Whitehaven towards St Bee’s lighthouse, slipping further and further down the gears. Starting the trend that dominated the rest of the journey I pushed the last bit. I got to the lighthouse at about 2pm, turned straight round and set off across Wainwright’s route. Which after about two miles goes across an uncut hayfield, which isn’t something you can really cycle across. This was followed by a muddy field and then a rocky path going under a cycle route. By this point I’d had quite enough of sticking to Wainwright, so up I went onto the cycle route.

There are people capable of hauling bikes over styles in a flash, but they usually have lighter bikes. And not as much stuff rammed into their panniers. Hauling the bike onto the cycle path was a trial, but suddenly I was able to cycle again. Of I whizz to Ennerdale Water, where Wainwright’s path follows the south edge. OK, I figure, he may not be picking a route that’s possible in it’s entirety, but following the edge of a lake? That should be possible.

Except that it wasn’t. The path’s mainly rocks, and about every 100 yards one of these rocks would cause one of my panniers to shake itself off the bike. After about a mile I met people coming down a staircase who assured me that the path got rougher so I gave up on Wainwright and gave up on paths. While the country was spectacular, it wasn’t enjoyable. When I could move the bike I was having to concentrate on the path a metre in front of my wheels and the rest of the time I was stopped trying to get my bike mobile again.

I sure it could be fun, but not the way I’d set out to do it. My desire was to go a long way away and cycle back home. I’d guessed it would take a week. Not to go out to somewhere with mountains and see if I could cycle up any of them. I turned round, got back to the B- roads and actually started moving. By this time it must have been about 4.

Cycling up hills, even on roads, is a skill, and living in York, it’s not one I’ve had to practice recently. I started off by trying to cycle up hills I should never have even considered, I finished off resolutely pushing up hills that when I finally decided to try in a low gear could be done easily. Following the roads through Lamplugh and Loweswater towards Buttermere actually started me going again. Feeling rather worried about a steep hill shown on the map made me try a forest path leading to and along Crummock Water, which after three miles of smooth, open trail suddenly decided to be the sort of stile infested, treestump laden track that I would have avoided had the path started out that way. There was only about a mile of that though, and it finally brought me out onto a main road with only about two more miles to go.

It was about 7 in the evening when I finally got to Buttermere Youth Hostel, unhelpfully on the far side of the village and up a smallish hill of it’s own. Buttermere Youth Hostel is a nice enough, and the hills around it are spectacular. I’ll have to go back some time, with a Wainwright book and a detailed local map and do it properly. The warden, or at least the bloke with a beard that I took to be the warden, knows his hills.

Before bed I take a serious look at the two mountain passes from which I might leave. Both are tall. Very tall.

34 miles.

Day 2: Sunday 6^th July 1997

Buttermere-Kirby Stephen

Leave the hostel at 9.15. Spend the first half hour pushing the bike up Newlands Pass, to the north of Buttermere. After 15 minutes sitting down at the top with a paperback to recover my breath I set off down the other side. With both breaks pretty much jammed on I’m doing 7mph, and when the road flattens out a bit to a safe 1 in 6 and I relax, I’m topping 30 before I’ve had time to think.

My plan had involved spending the night at Patterdale Youth Hostel. Looking at the maps I had decided that if I could be in Keswick for lunch then this was possible. The sensible route involves climbing most of the way to Penrith and taking a right hand turn back into the lakes proper.

In reality I’d grossly underestimated my ability to cover ground. I barely needed to pedal to reach Keswick, and shot through it at about 10.30. The climb up the A66 to Penrith was a slog, but possible. It was about 11.45 when I reached the turn off for Patterdale and decided not to take it. Had I done so I would have spent another day in the lakes and had to do most of the climb back to Penrith the next day. Instead I decided to press on and see how far I could get.

I’d thought to get something to eat in Penrith, but the road bypassed it and I assumed that there’d be a village pub somewhere. With that in mind I pulled off the A66 and onto back roads, only to find a terrifying number of villages without pubs, without shops, just a few scattered houses in the middle of no-where.

In between the potteries and the next village, Cliburn, I passed a corpse. Not human, and not the usual rabbit. I think it was a polecat. While dead on the road it seemed pretty much intact as I went by, but I didn’t stop for a proper look. That night at the Youth hostel there were a pair of large posters enquiring about pine marten sightings and they got me thinking. I think it was a polecat. The silhouette of the pine marten appeared more solid, and possessed of a more pronounced tail. I think the thing I saw, for a second or three was more a very big weaselly thing.

I pressed on. At about 3.45 I was in Appleby-in-Westmoreland, which claimed to be the country town of Westmoreland. Is there still such a place? It has an impressive looking castle, with 70 different rare breeds, ducks and owls. They seemed a little expensive though, so I didn’t investigate further. Still onwards, still on the B-Roads. The hills begin to build up again as I get into Kirkby-Stephen.

Kirkby-Stephen Youth Hostel is an impressive former Methodist chapel. It’s got a very fine wooden roof to its dining room, which is full of pews, but apart from that you wouldn’t know from the inside. Once inside, and so not moving, it becomes apparent that it really has been rather hot and I’m going to be quite severely sunburnt. One eye seems to be swelling up, and getting the contact lens out is a bother.

And then a problem: I decide to check that there’ll be a bed at the next stop, planned to be Grinton, near Reeth, on the far side of the Yorkshire Dales. There isn’t. A little worried I check out the one after that, Osmotherly - on the slopes of the North Yorkshire Moors, the far side of Northallerton. They have a single bed for the next night and nothing for the night after. The next day’s going to be bad.

51 miles.

Day 3: Monday 7^th July 1997

Kirby Stephen-Osmotherly

It being a Youth Hostel, and a full one a that, people are getting up at about 6.30, and loathe as I am to do disgusting things like that, there doesn’t seem a lot of point fighting the trend. Looking at the swollen face in the mirror and the half closed right eye (I presume that the sunburn was causing the face to contract a bit forcing the eye to bulge. Either way it’s not a pretty sight. Actually getting the contact lens into the eye is far more of a bother than it was getting it out. After the ritual fried breakfast (I never bother at home, but with a long pedal ahead of me it makes a little more sense) I set off into Kirby Stephen in search of some sunscreen.

Faced with a choice between Factor 2 in the 8-10 minimarket and Factor 16 in the newsagent I shell out the £10.25 for factor 16. This seems a rip off. Did Factor 45 really only cost me about £6 in the backstreets of Malaysia {ed. - Yes}. Still there won’t be a chemist open for another half hour and since I seem to have committed myself to crossing the Yorkshire Dales and getting up to the Moors in one day I don’t want to hang around.

My original plan had been to cycle through Keld and then more or less towards Richmond. There should be some pretty damn spectacular scenery there, but I wouldn’t expect to do it fast. Mucho hills. Suddenly that’s not an option. Instead the best route (read fewest extreme contours) is to head more or less due South down what I think is the Eden valley, more or less following the route of the Settle to Carlisle Railway, eventually crossing into Wensleydale. That should be more or less downhill and should place me within striking range of Northallerton. Best of all there are a couple of Youth Hostels in Wensleydale and if I can’t get up to speed I can always try and find a bed in one of them.

Climbing the Eden Valley is depressingly more difficult than I’d expected. It’s not that the climb’s impossible, in fact it’s not significantly steeper than the climb towards Penrith, and not as sustained. You’d have thought it quite easy, but I didn’t get a very good night’s sleep and the previous day had clearly taken more out of me than I thought. I push the bike up the hill out of Kirkby Stephen and start pedalling. I think I must have pushed for about 15 minutes in each hour. It feels like I’m taking forever. Hills to either side of the valley quite awe inspiring.

So climbing the 16 miles into Hawes by 11.30 is a surprise. I had thought that Hawes was a good place to have lunch, but I’m actually early! I stop anyway at the town Spar and buy a two pint bottle of milk, at which point I spot the cheese counter. Spars doe not normally, as far as I know, have cheese counters. This one probably has something to do with the Wensleydale cheese being made about 200 yards from the shop. It would seem wrong not to have a bit of cheese so I purchase two ounces of oak-smoked-Wensleydale. Which is very nice indeed. As is the milk.

Hawes seems given over to cheese and Wallace & Grommit. Small lumps of cheese with their faces on are everywhere, standups lurk in about half the windows. It’s also home to the first traffic jam I’ve encountered, as cars and tour busses vie to deposit tourists in the middle of town. I set off down Wensleydale.

As expected it does seem to be pretty much downhill. There are occasional quite steep climbs, but mainly down. I hit 30 mph, the speed at which I start to worry even on an open road several times. I start wondering about Askrigg for lunch, but sailing through at 12.30 seems still a little early. Leyburn seems the next place to aim for.

It feels energetic enough to come down Wensleydale, so I’m a little surprised by the number of people I meet cycling up it. I suppose that there are probably stupider plans than to come up to Hawes for afternoon tea and coast down again in the early evening. The hills are pretty, but nothing like as spectacular as those I passed getting to Hawes. It’s about this time that I start to curse my tyres.

Since I’m riding a mountain bike it comes with off-road tyres, which are a great help off the road. On the road they just don’t help. I coast down a hill and find that coming up the other side I’m having to pedal just to keep going. The knobbly tyres just waste all that potential energy that would otherwise turn into kinetic energy and back. I expect they also had something to do with my not having a flat tyre during the whole trip (or even the whole time I’ve had the bike) so they aren’t all bad, but next time I’m getting different tyres.

Leyburn depressingly turns out to be at the top of another hill, and I’m not at the top of it until about 1.15. None of the pubs in the town square seem to offer much interesting in the way of beer, and while the food in the Black Swan was Ok, it wasn’t exactly exceptional. It is blisteringly hot outside and I sit in the shade of the town library finishing a Pratchett book before I finally set off at about 2.

Fortunately it is pretty much all downhill to Northallerton. I coast along merrily and get there about a little after 4, by now seriously knackered. While it’s been largely much downhill, there’s been a lot of up as well, and by this point I’ve cycled over 60 miles. Not that much on a well balanced touring bike, but a long way on a laden mountain bike.

The day’s destination is Osmotherly Youth Hostel, on the slopes of the North York Moors. While it takes only about half an hour to ride the final few miles to the village of Osmotherly, the Youth Hostel is on the wrong side of the village and the village is on the slope of a hill. I push. I push a bit more and eventually find the turn off for the Youth Hostel and gaze in disgust at the long drive downwards. What is it with these people? They don’t simply plonk the Youth Hostel in a decline, but in a decline that you’ve got to climb a hill to get to!

I coast down the slope and into the Youth Hostel, order supper, drink a couple of pints of refreshing milk and collapse for a while. Looking at the maps in the Youth hostel makes me worried. The straightish route to Whitby would be to follow the Esk Valley, and this had been my plan. Looking at the map though makes me realise that is just isn’t on. While the valley’s got a railway line running down it, the roads seem to be going up and down like a yo-yo and the railway’s apparently the only (remotely) horizontal ground. This sort of terrain’s great from a car, fun to walk, and probably even pretty good to cycle if you’re fresh, I’m never going to manage it. Not the state I’m in.

65 miles.

Day 4: Tuesday 8^th July

Osmotherly-Whitby

Thinking about the day’s journey before breakfast convinces me that I’m not going to manage the Esk Valley route. Fortunately there is another route, one that cuts some of the most spectacular scenery out, but is possible. Instead of heading straight up onto the moors (to be followed by a trip straight down again, then straight up etc) you skirt them heading northish, and take the more or less flat road running from Guisborough. In a way it’s a cheat, and someday I’m going to go back and do the impressive route when I’m not knackered from already having done 150 miles.

Set off from the Youth hostel at about 8:50, pushing my way up the impossibly steep, impossibly long drive. I thought it was going to be pretty nasty when I went down it and I was right. It took about ten minutes to get to the top of the hill (and along a bit actually - the road I wanted sloped up at about the same angle at first, but after that I was away.

The countryside at on the West edge of the North York moors national park is surprisingly similar to some of the parts of the Oxfordshire (or should they still be Berkshire) Downs I remember as a child. Wooded avenues, overgrown stone walls and the like. The sheep didn’t wander onto the road though, and they didn’t have horns, just blank looking woolly lumps, instead of the savvy black faced beasts that kept lumbering out of my way. One thing we didn’t see though was helicopters.

I spotted the helicopter after I’d been going about three miles: It was flying backwards and forwards across my route about once every five minutes. On the West bound trips it was carrying something slung underneath it, something round, and nothing when it was going East. It was a little worrying, since the only thing I could think of was that it must be dropping water on a fire, which seemed odd. Sure it was blisteringly hot now but it had been pouring the week before. Surely the moor couldn’t have dried out so much as to support a fire?

Answer: No. The helicopter was in fact delivering paving slabs for Park rangers to repair the Cleveland way. Apparently walkers very unreasonably walk two abreast on the path and so wear it away. Or they wear the edges away. Or something. Not really sure why they didn’t just get a tractor to drag the slabs up the hill - surely a helicopter’s about the most inefficient means of delivering heavy objects out there? Either way I’m off down the hill, and beginning to worry slightly about the feel of the cogs.

The pedals are sliding about a bit, which is a pretty good sign that a bearing has shattered. While the pedals are moving slightly (actually only about a millimetre, but it can feel like a lot in the middle of nowhere) they seem to be doing their job so I press on. I’ve come so far I need a proper disaster to stop me.

I coast down the hillside and towards Stokesly, which is back on the flat. I suppose this is the northern reach of the Vale of York, and being flat it’s easy an I begin to get wound up again by the knobbly off road tyres my bike’s got. They are really not helping. Still I press on, through Stokesly and meet a man on a very fast bike with a helmet that appears to have escaped from a science fiction film.

Unlike the normal SF film cycle helmet which seems to be modelled on Darth Vader’s, all sleek, black and streamlined, this one appeared to have escaped from Aliens. It definitely had a small (hand built) rear view mirror on a stalk and I’m fairly sure it had a radio built in as well. The owner invites me to the favourite café of the Great Ayton retired cyclists so I stop, have a ice-cream and a rest. Having a rest is an important part of cross country cycle rides. Ten minutes later, I’m just out of town when disaster strikes.

Pulling out of the town and up a hill, just as I’m passing a couple of students, who I discover are mapping the area as part of a geography degree ("But hasn’t this place already been mapped?" "Yes, but we’re going to do it better."), the bike grinds to a sudden stop as the carrier, on which my panniers are mounted falls off the bike. After some time trying to work out what happened and discovering that all the screws holding the carrier on are both missing. Fortunately the bloke with the interesting helmet had pointed out the village’s bike shop was we passed it, so I leave the panniers with the students, tie the carrier onto the rest of the bike with an anorak sleeve and whiz back to the bike shop. One of the men in the shop (who appears to understand the ‘Tour de France’) pulls out a couple of screws and screws the carrier back on. Back to the students, put the panniers back on the bike and off I go. A stop is one thing, but that was 30 minutes wasted. That’s tedious.

It could be worse: the Vale of York continues it’s flat way and it’s not very much longer before I’m at and past Guisborough and starting the climb back onto the moors. There is a very windy road that threads it’s way onto the moors, and I push my way up it, wondering if I really need to. Probably not, but pushing is less exhausting than cycling. Then it’s up on the top and along. The road isn’t exactly what you’d call flat, but the hills are moderate. I’m only pushing a little, and cycling most of the time. By Scaling reservoir I stop at a pub, who’s name I forget for a pint and I’m assured that it’ll take about 45 minutes to go the rest of the way. I do not believe them. I am also told that the rest route to Whitby would be to branch off the main road and head for Ellerby and do the final approach along the coast. Sounds good to me, so I try it.

Well it didn’t take 45 minutes, more like 1.15, and involved a very exhilarating descent to the sea down a 1:4 hill at Lythe, which while it didn’t go on for as long as the descent from Newlands pass was made more exciting because of the cars coming the other way. That gets me to Sandsend, and at last Whitby comes into sight. Up another hill. Admittedly it’s not a steep hill, even if it does go on a bit. So I go up it, and there I am. Whitby. 192 miles from where I started. Burnt like a bomb survivor. I find the local Tap & Spile, phone friends in York who are able to give me a lift back in return for supper in a rather good fish restaurant (The Magpie if you’re passing), and collapse in a heap for a couple of hours.