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).
Recently, returning from a bike ride — not this one — I briefly vied for cycle space on the train with a lad on his way home to Nottingham after just completing the John O’Groats to Lands End run. (I should have deferred to him in light of that.) Anyway, after we’d amicably agreed on the disposition of our bicycles in a cramped space, I asked him what had been the best bit of his journey. Scotland, he said, riding past the Cairngorms on empty roads.
And the worst? What had been the hardest going? Now, you might have expected him to reply, crossing the high, rugged Pennines or other northern moors. But, without much reflection, he answered, Cornwall and Devon. These were obviously at the end of his ride, when he must have been tired and jaded, but I wasn’t surprised. I have cycled in every hill range in the country apart from the Cheviots, and it’s what I would have replied too, adding in coastal Somerset and Dorset.
Why? When you’re riding in, say, the Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District, you know that you’re going to have a massive climb. You can see it looming ahead. But usually just one. After it, you can generally count on finding a ridge or upland road, followed by a long, gentle descent. Wensleydale typifies this. So you know what to expect and can pace yourself.
But in Cornwall and Devon, you can rarely even see the summit of the hill you’re toiling up — it’s always beyond the next rise — and once you’re at the top, you immediately plunge back down, on a twisting, narrow lane too steep for free-wheeling, with no view of the road ahead. At the bottom, after about 15 feet of flat going, comes a second big hill, and then a third and a fourth. It’s relentless.
These are not the highest hills in the country, but they are high, especially when they rise from the seashore. Apart from the M5 corridor and parts of central Cornwall, all of the Southwest is like this. Especially the most beautiful bit, the very long and rugged coast.
As I don’t really enjoy hill-riding, I am not a great fan of this region, even though it is where half my family come from. In fact, the ride I’m going to write about here began in our ancestral heartland, at Totnes. But I have never felt much of a bond with the area.
In that connection, let me insert a few words of family history. My great-grandfather, and others of the Devon clan, ended up in Bristol, which used to be a pleasant mix of working-class community, prestigious university town and regional capital. Some of my relatives worked in the Wills tobacco factory and at Filton Rolls-Royce. This was a time when Conservative voters had not yet gone extinct in Bristol; I think my lot were among the last survivors, granted a special reserve in a corner of Clifton Downs to graze away their final years swilling Harvey’s Bristol Cream and moaning about the Channel Tunnel.
Unlike my Lincolnshire mob, the West Country side were quite numerous. I remember a small brigade of delightful old dears who drove Hillman Imps the wrong way up one-way streets, knocked themselves out prising open Tesco freezer doors and had hip replacements every three years. Well, they are all gone now, and so is the war-hardened, self-reliant, deeply respectable, patriotic small-c conservative culture they sprang from.
Today, Bristol is a city of soymilk Sandanistas and the West Country generally a bastion of woke snowflakes. Gone are the days when this was a down-to-earth farming region with a pleasant accent. Instead, the whole area has been infiltrated by second-home owners, retirees and an army of “social justice warriors” who prefer to build their brave new world well away from places like London or Birmingham. People who read the chemical names on their baked beans cans, and keep the faded Ukraine colours fluttering from parish flagpoles and the Waitrose vans beetling along between towering hedgerows. People who proclaim that refugees are always welcome, and who live in places that are always white. I know they are not the majority, and the down-to-earth folk are still there. But, for me, these newcomers set the tone of the area.
It’s not hard to see what attracts them. No stabbings, muggings or inner-city deprivation here. Apart from the second-home issue and the appalling traffic that blights so many town centres, this region has it good. It’s still beautiful, much of it ineffably so. The weather is about as agreeable as it gets in Britain. Apart from a few pockets like Paignton and other places hosting sun-seeking dole dossers, most people have plenty of money. A great many live in charming cottages worth half a million or so.
All this was brought home to me strongly a few months ago, when I did a tour of the topographically similar West Cumbrian coast. Now that is an area where there was once heavy, dirty and dangerous industry, and where the tourist trade never really took root. Nobody today retires to Workington or Whitehaven.
Apart from Sellafield and Barrow, West Cumbria is up the creek. The works and mines are gone, the dairy farmers struggle with milk prices and the parish councils don’t care so much about solidarity with Ukraine. (Or about toppling statues, though Whitehaven was another Bristol in the slaving days). If you know both areas, trying comparing, say, the coastal towns of Budleigh Salterton and Millom. There is real want and dereliction in West Cumbria, worse than anything I have seen even in whiny Cornwall, which at least retains its tourist trade.
Above and below, Totnes
Anyway, enough of this monologue. Let’s saddle up. This autumn 2017 ride was both inland and coastal. It began in Totnes, a very pretty South Devon hill town of winding streets with posh fashion and craft shops, all under the battlements of a big round Norman motte-and-bailey castle. The natural habitat of the West Country progressive. Fair trade shops? Tick. Plastic-free campaign? Tick. Organic bedding outlet? Tick. Fancy cafés with pretentious names? Step forward Nkuku and Que Sera Sera. Liberal Democrat MP? Sort of. Totnes was in the bailiwick of Sarah Wollaston, a Tory who defected to the traditional West Country party of opposition.
But it was another late start after a long train journey, so I left the vegan burgers and fruit-flavoured coffees unsampled, and, after a brief exploration of its charming lanes of pastel-painted and weather-boarded house-fronts, I got cracking.
The destination was Kingsbridge and that bulge in the South Devon coast, like a bunion on the foot of England, below the Plymouth-Torbay line. I had a muggy but clear September afternoon and early evening to get there. But the one-inch map wasn’t encouraging: ahead lay either the direct A-road, or a tangle of twisting lanes with nasty little up and down arrows and densely crammed contour lines. Short of time, I opted reluctantly to start on the A-road, which, I instinctively feared, would be a bastard.
And it was. Not only was it narrow and very busy, but it also often ran between eight-foot banks, which meant I could not easily pull in or even get off the tarmac. As a result, I soon became a major obstacle to traffic, causing little jams of sometimes ten or more cars. I imagined BBC Radio Devon (“.. and on the A381 to Kingsbridge, some idiot on a pushbike going at four miles an hour is causing major tailbacks, so consider an alternative route if you’re heading for the coast at Salcombe …”). Worst of all were the little old ladies. They would hang about 50 yards back, as if afraid I was going to explode in a human fireball, and wouldn’t overtake unless they could see about a mile down the road. I felt bad about pissing off so many motorists, but this got really annoying for me too.
At the village of Harbertonford, I realised I had to get off the A-road, whatever punishment awaited in the lanes. I stopped to study the map, outside a defunct telephone box which was being converted into a defibrillator point. If you’ve ever wondered how much bureaucracy attends the installation of a defibrillator in an old phone box, well, I can report that there is a planning application and a consultation process, in which any responses that could be perceived as “offensive, racist, or otherwise contrary to the principles of equality” may be rejected, since South Hams district council “is committed to encouraging diversity.” There are almost zero ethnic minorities in rural South Devon, yet even parish councillors feel obliged to get involved in this virtue-signalling bollocks.
From Harbertonford, a narrow, stone-built village in a little river valley, I turned into the byways with the nasty little arrows on the map. All of a sudden, the countryside I’d barely noticed while struggling along the A-road opened up like a blooming flower. Down-slopes gave sensational views across green valleys dotted with farms and crowned with woods and copses. From behind the verge hedges came a near constant lowing and bleating, and the wafting smell of hay mixed with cow-shit, somehow almost agreeable in surroundings like these. Every quarter of a mile, the hedge wall would be pierced by a metal gate, momentarily opening up another arcadian vista.
Lovely as all this was, progress was awfully slow. Some lanes were half-grassed over and I lost more time at obscure junctions with no signs at all except Not Suitable for Heavy Vehicles. And, of course, there were the hills. You climbed for 20 minutes, hurtled back down in five, crossed a tiny stream on a low stone bridge, and then the next climb started. I stood it for half-a-dozen miles. But after the third heavy ascent, in increasingly muggy air, I reluctantly returned to the A-road (“.. and unfortunately the idiot cyclist on the A381 we mentioned earlier seems to be back again folks ..) and pedaled as fast as I could to Kingsbridge.
This town isn’t on the coast but it felt that way, as it was at the head of a long estuary and had a pleasant waterfront with a thicket of boat masts reaching into the centre. Another traffic trap, though. As I enjoyed an expensive coffee here, the weather abruptly deteriorated and broke. The last six or so undulating miles to my booked berth for the night, in the hilltop village of Malborough, were done in pouring rain.
At West Alvington, kerb-side parking made the throughway so narrow two cars could not easily pass and often had to stop and blink their headlights at each other invitingly, like two gentlemen on either side of a door both needed to pass through. This must happen many times each day. The big problem here looked to be the difficulty of widening the roads, as so many of them are deeply sunken into the landscape — more like tarmacked trenches than thoroughfares. Many miles of major earthworks would be needed to fix this.
Malborough revealed itself at a distance of two miles; its church spire crowns a long ridge. What I hadn’t seen was the great canyon-like dip before it. Down I swooped into lashing rain, and pushed it up the last mile with glasses fogged and clothes dripping. The fifth or sixth climb. It had taken me nearly five hours to cover 20 miles.
For once, I had no difficulty finding my guesthouse, as it was the old vicarage next to the church. Less easy was getting in. I couldn’t find the keypad to type in the entrance code I’d been given. It took much cursing and some time, including a circuit of the building to check for other entrances, before it occurred to me to just push on the main door. Which was of course unlocked, and readily opened.
I’d been allotted the “last room,” so I assumed the place was full and we were all going to have a jolly evening socialising over Devon ale around the fireplace. But there were just two other guests, taciturn builders from Birmingham here on a roof job. So I dined alone, on a superb mushroom pizza at the inspirationally named The Old Inn. The talk here was anything but rustic. The Daily Telegraph international property pages lay tossed across a window sill, and I overheard a bloke in a cravat remarking, in loud, plummy tones, “well, it’s stochasticism, really, isn’t it, pure stochasticism .. ”
I had to look that word up after the ride. Stochasticism is a “tool used in investment decision-making that uses random variables and yields numerous different results.” Amazing what you can learn from these Devon yokels, isn’t it?
© text & images Joe Slater 2024
