The 22-mile cul-de-sac: Britain's oddest road?

This is one of the strangest tarmac roads in Britain: a 22-mile long single-lane cul-de-sac that simply stops dead at the end of Britain's most fjord-like loch, many miles from anywhere.

It's the road from near Invergarry, on the Great Glen Fault in northern Scotland, to Kinloch Hourn, at the top of Loch Hourn on the epic west coast. (See map - Kinloch Hourn is on the extreme right, the road going east from there.)

It's an astonishing cycle experience: three hours of quite awesome, remote scenery (right), with the road entirely to yourself. On a sunny day, like we had last weekend on our trip there, the panoramas are awesome: cobalt-blue lakes, royal-green hills, polished-mahogany sheep turds.


Apart from a handful of walkers heading for the virtually roadless hiking wilderness of Knoydart, and the odd service vehicle for the hydroelectric dam on vast Loch Quoich (right), you'll see no traffic at all. Kinloch Hourn itself has a campsite, one B&B, a cafe which may or may not be open when you're there. Your chances of mobile phone access are as narrow as the road in its long, steep ascent away from the shore.

The prospect of cycling over 22 miles solely in order to turn back may not be attractive to everyone, but there are two ways to include the remarkable road in a linear trip. (We did it west to east to follow the tailwinds.)


The first is to cycle the rough but rewarding old pony track between the village of Corran and Kinloch Hourn. (The journey to Corran is a major undertaking in itself, probably involving a train to Mallaig, ferries to and from Skye, and a ride round the spectacular coastline of the Glenelg peninsula; or train it to Kyle of Lochalsh and cycle up and over the 350m Ratagan pass to Glenelg.) On a sturdy mountain bike that's no problem, but probably too uncomfortable on a road-touring bike with panniers. You'll bruise your bananas.


So your second option is to get Billy Mackenzie's by-appointment Arnsidale Ferry (above and right) between Arnisdale (next to Corran) and Kinloch Hourn (or wherever else you want him to take you). It's a half-hour trip on a thrillingly fast iron tub of a boat along a jaw-dropping sealoch, between the Glenelg and Knoydart peninsulas. It's reasonably priced too, especially given the remoteness and convenience (think of it as a water-taxi).


Once dropped off at the jetty near Kinloch Hourn, you can admire the very end of Britain's longest no-through-road (right), where it turns into a walking track.


Then you can cycle the extraordinary 22 ½ miles back to civilisation (ie pub) at Invergarry. The first mile or two is a steep uphill (right), too steep to cycle for most; from there you have no major climbs, and the trend is downhill after Loch Quoich.


The oddest thing about the road though is its lack of warnings where it starts, from the A87 in Glen Garry. Not even a 'T' sign, never mind Caution This Road Is 22 Miles Long And Goes Nowhere. Ah, another metaphor for life.

Bike Monopoly 9: Pentonville Rd

Pentonville Road is a half-mile of shabby, stick-straight gradient between King's Cross station and the Angel. Its bottom, by KX, is dirty and dusty, with discarded chicken takeaway boxes swirling round to provide you with slalom practice.

It's a tedious, trafficky, fumiferous slog to cycle up. And an equally tedious freewheel down the other way, enlivened briefly by the final home-straight which dodges down a hairy bus / cycle lane in which you get sandwiched between buses. Then there's an irritating gyratory swoop round to get back in front of King's Cross.


The most interesting thing about it was King's Cross Thameslink station, but that closed in December 2007. Now it's occupied only by security guards looking bored.

I don't like Pentonville Road.



Monopoly's Pentonville Rd costs £120. What could this buy you there? There's a branch of Cycle Surgery halfway up Pentonville Road, if you need some reconnection with sanity. You'd spend your £120 on bike stuff - maybe a Gore-Tex bike jacket, for about that price.

Spell in Scotland

I've been cycling in Scotland for the last week. I was genuinely impressed by how patient drivers in the Highlands are: almost without exception they'd wait behind us for a safe place to overtake, even up to a minute or more of winding rural road. (I've had similar experiences in rural England, notably Somerset.) Given Scotland's notoriously short life expectancy, they might have an excuse for getting a move on, so it was reassuring to see such courtesy and consideration.

(Let's hope TV nonentity chef James Martin, who issued a craven apology yesterday for boasting about trying to run over cyclists in a newspaper column, is too dim to find his way up there.)


Anyway, this sign (right above and below) caught my eye while up in the land of my forebears. It's for the new cycle path between Mallaig and Morar, far up the north-west coast. Some people say educational standards are slipping in Scotland, but look - they've avoided the common mistake of spelling 'principal' wrong, so well done guys! There's an identical one at the other end of the cylcle pa... oh...

Bike Monopoly 8: Euston Rd

Stretching a mile from Regent's Park to King's Cross station, Euston Road vies with Old Kent Road as the most unpleasant Monopoly street to bike along. Like a speeding driver uncertain whether to answer their mobile phone, finish eating their cheesburger, or change the CD first, Euston Road hasn't quite decided whether it's a fast, no-stopping dual carriageway, or a town street with shops and pedestrian crossings and traffic lights. We've had a few unpleasant run-ins with impatient buses and taxis here.


A notable feature of Euston Road is the underpass (right), which dives under the top end of Tottenham Court Road. It's one of those you hesitate to cycle into for fear you'll emerge, computer-game-like, somewhere else completely, such as Blackwall Tunnel or the planet Gliese 581d or Cumbernauld.


The underpass has a half-baked cycle path by-pass on the south side (right): one of those that, however clearly marked as a CYCLE PATH, proves irresistible to pedestrians with iPods.

There's a sort-of alternative for cyclists: a couple of hundred metres south, a separated bike path runs roughly parallel to Euston Rd, along streets such as Torrington Plane and Tavistock Place, though it's the usual messy, make-do confection of fudge and jam. (I've blogged about its shortcomings before, and it doesn't bode well for the promised Cycle Superhighways coming our way in 2010-12.)


Euston Road has a rash of rail stations - Euston, St Pancras, and King's Cross - as well as the Wellcome Collection (right) and the British Library (below right), both underrated visitor attractions. The Wellcome provides parking for a handful of bikes, while the BL's is rather better, perhaps exemplary: hundreds of covered and uncovered places right on the main piazza.


At the BL you can see on permanent display, for free, hundreds of original documents and papers of staggering rarity and value. These range from Shakespeare's credit card statements to Beatles lyrics sketched on exercise-books. There are also two copies of Magna Carta, the iconic 1215 document which embodied for the first time the principle of habeas velonem, or freedom to park a bicycle: "(23) No man shall have his bicycle removed from railings, fences or trees, or be liable for socage, scutage, ullage or wantage thereby".

Monopoly's Euston Rd costs £100. What could this buy you there? A reader's pass at the British Library is free; cycling there is free; you can then consult pretty much any book ever published in Britain or Ireland for free; and use their free wi-fi access. So, on a coffee'n'cake budget of a fiver a day, you could spend four whole working weeks there 'researching your next book' - a BL technical term meaning 'Twittering, emailing your friends, looking at the Beatles lyrics in the Ritblat Gallery, and eyeing up that tasty student with the laptop'.

Bike Monopoly 7: Chance 1 of 3

Most Chance cards seem to be there to chivvy you round the board - advancing to Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square, Marylebone Station, Mayfair or Go, or going back three spaces. It's another of those itineraries you can only do conveniently by bike.

For our first of three Chance squares in this trip round the board, though, we've chosen Speeding Fine £15. The point being, of course, that you can't be done for speeding on a bike, any more than you can on a horse or a skateboard. There is no such offence. Not that it stopped police at Weymouth recently trying to book cyclists for 'speeding' on the seafront, or police in Bournemouth setting up traps to catch 'speeding' cyclists.

You could be had under other laws - 'pedalling furiously', for instance. There's a neat roundup of the law as it applies to cyclists at the trusty Carlton Reid's bikeforall.net website.

But if you're not being furious, you can set off as many speed-camera flashes as you can, and they can't touch you. The fastest I've ever been on a bike was a rather scary 48mph on a 30mph (long, straight, downhill, clear) road in the Peak District. The fastest reported speed I've ever heard was a friend-of-a-friend who reckoned he did 71mph as a courier down some underpass in London.

Yeah, yeah. You know those people who immediately top anything you say? You've got a black dog, they've got one blacker. In fact, their dog is so black, no X-rays can escape its surface. Not even Hawking Radiation.

Bike Monopoly 6: The Angel, Islington

The Angel, Islington isn't a street or locality. Originally it was a pub, then a tea house. In the late 1930s, Yorkshire-based Waddington's Games sent down their MD Victor Watson and his secretary Marjory Philips to scout for London locations to put on the US game they'd just bought the rights for. Vic and Marge, it's said, had a tea and cake at the Angel, which was then a Lyons tea house, and celebrated the fact by putting it on the board.

The building that was the Angel is now a Co-operative Bank (right). It stands at the top of Pentonville Rd, on the corner of the crossroads from which Islington High Street - aka the A1 - runs northwards. Just follow the road to Edinburgh.


There's a tube station here, also called Angel, named after that original pub. But even more excitingly, the building next door to the original Angel is now a Wetherspoon's pub, also called the Angel (right). The railings outside form a handy bike park.

So while it's not exactly authentic, it's an ideal place for a quick bit of refreshment after that long climb up Pentonville Road or St John Street. (What a shame there isn't a train terminus on that last one, because it would be St John St St.) So the English Monopoly is the only version in the world that has a pub as one of its squares.

Monopoly's Angel costs £100. What could this buy you there? As usual in Wetherspoon's, a pint of Ruddles is just £1.99, while a perfectly decent burger'n'chips lunch is just £4.69 including a free pint. So with a hundred quid you can afford to buy lunch or a drink for everyone in there, hen party and all.

Bike Monopoly 5: King's Cross Station

The first of the Monopoly board's four stations, King's Cross is your gateway to the north. But gateways are often awkward to negotiate with a bike.

But the train companies operating from here - four of them, soon to become five - all allow bikes (except for certain rush-hour commuter services). The AtoB website has a regularly updated Bike Rail page with the latest (often complex) situation for each company.


And hooray for National Express East Coast, the main company based here, whose website lets you book tickets on any British train service and reserve a place for your bike! With attitudes like that I'm sure their future with this franchise is assured... oh.

Bike parking at King's Cross has always been a problem. To make things worse, current redevelopment works (the concourse is being completely reworked) have put most of the supposed 418 cycle parking spaces out of action, as well as most of the concourse shops and pub. The parking on platform 8 (below right) is always jammed full, with some desperate cyclists chaining their machines to the metal benches.


Just to the right of these bikes is 'Platform 9 ¾', a jokey installation of half a trolley disappearing into the wall, in homage to the Harry Potter books. It isn't a bike parking facility. When you visit, you'll see some giggling Japanese students or posy American backpackers being snapped pretending to push the trolley. There's something appropriately make-believe and fantasy about the sign next to it, too, which promises more bike parking further up the platform (no there isn't) and on platforms 9 and 11 (no there isn't).


Right outside King's Cross, on the left overlooking the junction, there's the odd sight of a lighthouse. Nobody seems to know quite what it was ever meant to be. Perhaps they could use it as a lookout tower to try and find bike parking.

Monopoly's King's Cross Station costs £200. What could this buy you there? Book well in advance on National Express's website and choose your times carefully, and you could get six returns from King's Cross to Inverness, including bike reservations, and still have enough change (£14) for a few cans of beer to enliven the journey.

On the other hand, if you buy a walk-on first-class single at rush hour from King's Cross to Skegness and hand over your £200, you'll probably get just £6 change back - about enough for a coffee and roll from one of the concourse sandwich shops.