Cream of cycle touring: Devon Coast to Coast

I did the Devon Coast to Coast route last week with my chum Nigel, the 100-mile traverse of Devon from Plymouth to Ilfracombe.

It’s 70 per cent offroad, more than half of that being well-tarmacked, flat railtrail (right). This fallen tree blocked our progress at one point - Beeching's Axe was clearly more pervasive than I thought.

The other 30 per cent is definitely not flat, with 1 in 4 descents down winding lanes to a hairpin bend, followed by 1 in 4 pushes up the other side.

Indeed, the GPS height profile resembles an ECG trace of, say, a cyclist riding the hilly sections of the Devon Coast to Coast route.

The route is well signposted (right), when you can actually see the signposts through the rain.

The railtrail sections – notably Drake’s Trail out of Plymouth, the Granite Trail into Okehampton, the stretch of the Tarka Trail from Great Torrington to Barnstaple, and the final swooping descent down to Ilfracombe – are a delight, and well-endowed with fine viaducts, bridges and tunnels (right).

If you’re doing it in the rain like us, don’t expect the tunnels to be a dry haven – they’re as dripping inside as outside.

The route takes you through some thrilling scenery and delightful villages, and gives you all the traditional Devon sights. Such as Polish lorries wedged tight thanks to following their satnav down a back lane (right).

Of course, we offered assistance – we suggested he upgrade to the 2012 data set.

We stayed in Okehampton and Barnstaple, taking a leisurely-ish two and a half days for the route.

Okehampton sported some interesting bike parking (right) appropriate for a convivial trip that involved more calorie intake than expenditure.

Indeed, for a Devon cream tea, drop into the Green Lantern in Great Torrington – £1.90 for the best mid-course refuel we had on the trip.

Barnstaple gave us the most appropriately named Wetherspoons for cycle tourists I’ve ever seen (right).

Anyone know of any more? Is there a Saddle or Pump or Puncture? If so I can see another arbitrary cycle trip coming up...

Anyway, the Devon Coast to Coast is lovely, and we recommend it. Don’t underestimate those hills, though, in between those lovely flat smooth railtrails.

GPS trails (thanks Nigel):
Day 1 – Plymouth to Okehampton goo.gl/maps/lzcx
Day 2 – Okehampton to Barnstaple goo.gl/maps/Dia5
Day 3 – Barnstraple to Ilfracombe and then Lynmouth goo.gl/maps/yav6

NB The above routes are not suitable for HGVs.
UWAGA Powyższe trasy nie nadają się do pojazdów ciężarowych.

Trickle or treat: the Waterlink Way

The Waterlink Way, ambling six or so miles south from Greenwich to South Norwood, is one of south London's pleasantest leisure rides. For most of its length it runs through traffic-free parks alongside the Ravensbourne, a watercourse that can't decide if it wants to be a stream, a river, or clump of reeds. Yesterday was sunny and I had a couple of free years in my diary, so I cycled along it.


It also looks very promising for odd things to see en route. In Deptford you go past this van made of tinfoil emblazoned with the legend I ACCUSE THE OIL COMPANIES OF. Failing to plan ahead, perhaps?


A bit later, on Marsala Road, are the biggest painted on-road cycle symbols I've seen in London. Usually I complain that such symbols are too small and can be missed by drivers. This one must be visible from the International Space Station.


And finally, what was this Motorway Maintenance vehicle doing on a bridleway in South Norwood Park? The M25's miles away, mate...

It's an easy, family-friendly trip of an hour or so. In theory you can follow the fishtail-shaped Sustrans signs all the way to Gatwick airport. In practice you'll probably get bored in the steppes of South Norwood park, which is surprisingly austere, and even more surprisingly crossed by a tram at the southern end.

For your trip back to central London there are lots of train stations and a bewildering web of lines that never quite go to the terminus you expect. I accuse the train operating companies of.

Oh no, not that Tavistock Place story again

Tavistock Place's separate cycle lane is like visiting an ageing relative who always tells the same old stories. You spend ages trying to get through to them, then when you finally do, they won't let you go.

Getting on it, for example. My natural route is to join it from the south and turn right, the same direction as this van is turning in the photo. But thanks to it being a separated cycle lane, I have to cross not one, but three lines of traffic; to wait for a simultaneous gap in not two, but four lines. It's like waiting for planetary alignments. I end up coat-tailing a taxi and making the sort of nervous, promiscuous eye contact you get in a student disco.

Then after a couple of hundred metres I turn left. Except that the way the lights are phased, the traffic turns left first, across the cycle lanes (next photo). What you get is the mild chaos of the above student disco at chucking out time: some cyclists wait patiently; others jag out right to rejoin the car lane and turn left across the two cycle lanes, strictly adhering to the lights; others plough straight through regardless.

So this particular separated cycle lane, as I've banged on about before, only makes things worse in my opinion. As does every other particular example I can think of (such as the fiasco at Waterloo roundabout that plunges you into a bus-stop lagoon). Not only do they create problems at every interface with the rest of the traffic, they also suggest to drivers that cyclists 'ought to be' out of the way.

What I'd like to see more of is permeability, something of a current buzzword. More blotting paper streets, more capillary action, more ease and spontaneity and ability to use any combination of side roads and alleys. That means, essentially, making every one-way street two-way for cycles as of standard. The recent announcement that five City one-way streets will be made two-way for bikes as an experiment this summer is therefore a welcome first step, but a pitifully small and timid one.

As, no doubt, I'll cover in some future post... rather like that loquacious old relative. Nurse! Nurse! They've stolen my clothes!

Taking Liberties exhibition cycle tour of London

I'm currently working at the British Library, editing the website of their exhibition Taking Liberties, the 900-year struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights.

This has involved taking several dozen pictures of London sites associated with exhibition items. The shop where Thomas Paine's Rights of Man was sold in 1791, for example; the house of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft; or the building where the committee for the abolition of the slave trade first met in 1787.

The stop-start process of snapping all these locations, many of them in central London or the City, would have been unmaginably tedious by public transport, with lots of foot-slogging and Oyster-bashing. And by car it would have been impossible. But on a bike, the process was great fun, taking me through lots of Dickensian lanes and passages, and to little enclaves I'd never otherwise have seen.

And gloriously expanding my knowledge of back-alley pubs. For instance, just down the lane from where the worthy abolitionists first met in 1787 is a pub called the Jamaica Wine House (top right), ironically then a meeting-place for the slave-ship masters. It's virtually unchanged from those days, except for a fresh lick of paint, a new front door, and everything inside.

And visiting by bike is the best way to enjoy the psychogeography of these sites and their contribution to history. So I've put some of my favourite Taking Liberties sites on this Google map, and sketched out a suggested cycle route to thread them together.


View Larger Map
There's a large picture for each site, and a link to the relevant item in the Online Exhibition.

I've only chosen central London locations, and any one-way streets used assume you're going clockwise overall. There are many other locations on the exhibition website's various Google maps.

For example, Magna Carta fans might be interested in cycling out virtually all along the river on the Thames Path to Runnymede, perhaps coming back from Windsor by train. En route you might pop in to St Mary's church by Putney Bridge: the site of the Putney Debates of 1647, where following the overthrow of Charles I, the people discussed what the new Republic of England should be like, and what should be in the British Constitution. Being Britain, that's still at the committee stage.

Further afield, there's one of the caves that claims to be the one where Robert Bruce had his encounter with the spider (top right, accompanying our various exhibits on Scottish independence).

I was there in autumn last year with my chums Mark and Si, cycling from Carlisle to Edinburgh one weekend. We were cycling in Dumfries, just past Gretna, through the village of Kirkpatrick Fleming (which put me in mind of Kirkpatrick Macmillan, the man who didn't invent the bicycle). I saw a sign to the cave, and couldn't resist the diversion.


Mark and I scrambled down the muddy path to the entrance of the cave (top right). It is man-made, hollowed out of the rock halfway up a cliff-face as a hidey-hole for treasure. Now there's a wooden access walkway. Our luck was in: the original spider's web was still there (below right).

I was delighted, partly because I'd seen the historic spider, but mainly because I could legitimately take a picture for the website and thereby make the whole weekend tax-deductible.