It takes a week to cycle from Penzance to Berwick. It took me 40 years. Because on the way, I wanted to include every town in England, in what amounted to some two years of day-rides. Most of these rides were point-to-point, but some were loops, and some looked on the map like a dropped noodle. It wasn’t a continuous line, but many separate lines, and all rides included towns I had not visited before. I used trains to get to starting points. Each ride had to be at least 20 miles, and in each new town, I had to touch a central feature, ideally the market cross or town hall. This is just one of hundreds of rides on this lifetime’s journey. A few more journey writeups can be found at my “Riding the Shires” website, from which this was taken, at ukbicyclist.weebly.com (along with a couple of long memoires of the Soviet bloc).
Standing at their northern foot, on opposite banks of the River Derwent, Malton and Norton command the Vale of Pickering, which forms a large hinterland between the Yorkshire Wolds and the North York Moors. Of these brother towns, Malton got the looks, being a fine old market town with winding, hilly streets of character and a fabric of grey limestone offset by pastel facades and ochrous pantiles. Surrounded by rich farmland and blessed with a good main square for fairs and festivals, it markets itself today as “Yorkshire’s food capital” having built up a thriving little economy of organic cafés and artisan brewers and bakers. Norton by contrast was the more workaday place, with the railway station and the bacon factory.
After the climb onto the Wolds, I had a full seven miles of ridge-riding before the first village, West Lutton, where there was a well-preserved pump and a black drum-like wellhead. At the bottom of the pump shaft, water could just be seen, some 50 or so feet below, I would guess. Lack of surface water — chalk is permeable — was a major reason for the sparseness of modern settlement of the Wolds. All chalk ranges have this problem. In my own home village, residents once had to walk two miles to the bottom of the scarp to collect water in tanks, which were lugged back up the hill by horse-drawn cart. Otherwise, they were stuck with rainwater.
At West Lutton, I turned south for Sledmere, a large cluster of maroon- and white-painted estate cottages once or maybe still connected with Sledmere House. It was again easy, enjoyable riding, along wide empty lanes, with broad if overcast horizons, unbroken except for a couple of telecoms masts, and lifeless but for the occasional pheasant bowling noisily across the road. Dull and too slow-paced a landscape perhaps for hikers, but ideal for cyclists.
So to Wetwang, notable only for its odd name, which standard references speculatively have as old Norse for “field of trial summons.” Not convinced about that; there is no other place-name anything like this, but the Vikings must have had open-air legal proceedings all over the Danelaw.
At Wetwang, I turned again, heading back now via Fimber, the entrance to Fairy Dale. Here, the Wolds quilt of huge fields sloping gently away on every hand gave way abruptly to a deep and grassy dale with a dark line snaking along the winding bottom. A dramatic change of scene.
The dark line was once the Malton-Driffield railway, a case study in branch-line overreach. Marketed as part of a possible through-route from the Humber to Scotland (bonkers branch lines were often promoted as key links in putative and equally bonkers through-routes), it was ruinously expensive to build through the chalk hills, circuitous and steep because promoters could not afford much tunnelling, and for the same budgetary reasons largely single-track. It never carried much apart from quarried chalk and train-loads of schoolchildren returning to their villages. Down to two passenger services a week at the end, in 1958, it didn’t last long enough to face the Beeching axe. The stretch of line I saw was apparently part of a restoration project.
Fairy Dale was so unexpected a treat I took it slowly. There were pockets of woodland at the bottom, and a thin line of skeletal trees at the brow added drama to its profile. I guessed from the steepness and smoothness of its grassy, sheep-dotted slopes that its origins were glacial. With several large cliffs and outcrops, it felt like it belonged more properly in the North York Moors.
Cruising along the cusp of this gorge in the chalkland, I stumbled upon Wharram Percy, a name I knew, as it’s often called England’s premier lost village. I don’t know what qualified it to this title, as I had no trouble finding it myself, but probably it’s because it has retained a ruined church tower, spectacularly cleft down the middle as if by some celestial axeman, creating a Gothic-horror landmark against the valley backdrop.
Wharram Percy was abandoned in the 1500s when the inhabitants were cleared out to make way for sheep. Archaeologists have tinkered here for four decades, finding a trove of everyday artefacts including locks, bits of musical instrument and dice. The people, they established, lived in long “toft and croft” buildings (toft was the area out back for growing or rearing things). These dwellings were shared, by livestock at one end and the people at the other. No sign of them remains at Wharram Percy, apart from dips and lumps in the ground.
Although the Wolds today are de-peopled, the area is rich in archaeological sites. Another lost Wolds village I came across a decade after this ride was at Cowlam, where an intact working chapel remains, tucked away behind the farm that supplanted the vanished hamlet.
On that later ride, I also had a chance to talk to a local farmer, after he caught me peeing into a hedge near his house, which I’d not noticed through the wall of hawthorn. After explaining myself, with as much dignity as I could muster, I asked him the question I always ask farmers: given that you could sell your farm for a million pounds and retire to Thailand, why are you bothering? His answer was the usual one: farmers consider themselves custodians of the landscape. Which, of course, they are, and we should be daily grateful for it.
“We don’t work the land just for its economic value,” he said. “We enjoy the lifestyle, or should do. That’s why we go on. Did you know that part of the Yorkshire Wolds has been proposed for AONB status? Well, that’s down to us. It’s certainly beautiful, but not one square inch of it is natural.”
Rolling back off the scarp into Norton, I found myself following the outer edge of a racecourse — the town is known nationally for racehorse training — and presently heard the sound of pounding hooves. What followed was a rather strange minute or so during which I raced a racehorse, me on the left of the big hedge and the racehorse on the right. I had the considerable advantage of freewheeling downhill on tarmac, but the racehorse swiftly and smoothly drew level and overtook me. All I could see of my rival was the jockey, who sat so stably in the saddle that he might have been on a tractor. He didn’t once look round at me, but just stared ahead. But he knew he was in a race.
The train back from Norton was busy. “She ’ad a mouth like the Mersey tunnel, she did, just wouldn’t stop,” blathered the woman opposite, and nor would she. On and on she droned to her friend. “They’ve got enough money to build new Tesco’s, an’t they, but not ’ouses. .. I’m 45 years old, I am, and now I’ve got to go and live wi’mi dad. .. doctor said I can have it took off, but when the nail’s ingrown it won’t grow back, it’s gone for good .. ” Just before Donny, the train manager sonorously cut into her monologue, in broad Yorkshire: “Change here for York, Darlington, Durham, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Scotland, Wakefield and Leeds, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, Grimsby and Cleethorpes … oh, and the South.” OK, I added the “oh,” but that was the tone of it. Put that in your pipe, London.
More like this can be found at my website ukbicyclist.weebly.com.
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© text & images Joe Slater 2024
