Across the Pennines on the C2C, Part One

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).

I know, bad form to start a piece with a quote from the Google search engine. But I would be transparently paraphrasing otherwise, so here is the background para on the cycle route across the neck of England popularly known as the C2C. “Opened in 1994, it runs from Whitehaven on the west coast of Cumbria to the northeast coast at Sunderland. It has an average of between 12,000 and 15,000 cyclists completing the route every year.” So there you go. That’s the C2C.

I rode much of it in June, 1997. I started at the Sunderland end, which you are recommended to do, despite the risk of strong westerly headwinds that can make the crossing of the Pennines a bit of a drag. Initially, I wasn’t really intending to follow it all, but it just happened to be going the same way as me, so I availed myself where I could, especially of its off-road bits. I didn’t follow it to its end, though on later rides I was to cover much the same ground all the way to Whitehaven. But I did cover the eastern and middle sections, which are what this write-up is about.

As said, I rode it three years after its opening, and, it is fair to say, as many years again before it really found its feet. The C2C in 1997 was still a half-finished mess of a cycle route.

The ride began with a snack lunch in a Sunderland shopping centre café, where I watched a dishevelled man going from one public phone to another checking for change while a Mexican brass band, of all things, parped away mournfully in the background. I guess they say start at Sunderland to get the worst over first. Some tentative gentrification of a few of the grander streets — period streetlights and that sort of thing — could not hide the fact that the city was still badly depressed in the 1990s.

The first stretch of rail-trail started on the Wear bank, among the silent ship-fitting yards with their idled cranes. Above, the two fine Wearmouth arch bridges, rail and road, sprang between high banks, providing an impressive backdrop for the off.

But the trail, an old railway, was in a truly awful state. Every one of the few signs along it was defaced, and that mattered as it didn’t stick to the old trackbed, but kept bobbing inland to go around factories and brownfield sites. Worse, its heavily rutted, black-mud surface was littered with bricks, glass and often quite bulky rubbish, things you had to ride around. Few cyclists were foolish enough to take this on, so I at least had it to myself.

The one companion I did acquire on this section, a local man out on his mountain bike, helped me get back onto the trail after a failed detour to look at Washington Old Hall, where the first American president’s family resided. Their originally mediaeval stone manor, which I didn’t manage to find, sits oddly in the mass of orangey roofs and numbered zones constituting Washington new town, a loose and unlovely agglomeration of former mining villages.

The rail-trail led on to Chester-le-Street, an ancient but nondescript Great North Road town, notable today mainly for its railway viaduct carrying the east coast main line. Then, with dark clouds beginning to fill the horizon, came a string of places that confirmed your worst suspicions about West Durham. At Annfield Plain, an old mining place, the terrain got hillier and the trail still harder to follow due to sign removal and vandalism. Not a very friendly place either; I got a few jeers here from a bus shelter full of school-kids.

Leadgate was a crossroads cluster of terraced streets, with open views on every hand to wild moorland. Bleak now in early summer, it must have been dismal indeed in the depths of winter. Another mining place, but this time metal. I was confident the name meant “street for (the conveyance of mined) lead,” but the standard references insist it’s “swinging gate.” I’ve no idea how they can be so sure. In this instance, surely the obvious etymology is the likelier one?

With rain and night coming on, I needed to find a room fast. Leadgate had nothing, so it was going to have to be the place next door, Consett. Perched high on a Pennine plateau, this used to be a steel-making town, with furnaces and huge sheds standing starkly, even surreally, against the bare moorland horizon. I had come here years before when the plants were still standing, maybe even working, and what a sight they were then, like great monoliths set against an almost primeval backdrop of endless heather and lowering cloudbank. There was no view like it in all England.

But the heavy industry vanished in the 1980s, leaving the town with windswept, empty horizons, a crisp factory and the worst location in England for getting a job not involving potato-processing. You came here with a sense of awe mixed with pity. Against Consett, absolutely all the cards were stacked. Yet it fought back.

The Phileas Fogg venture was a brave and quirky initiative by a company founded by four self-financing entrepreneurs, including an ex-miner, who took on the behemoths of the global food industry and briefly won. By the time of this ride, though, the suits of United Biscuits had taken over and the brand, no longer so quirky, was in decline. (If not already dead — my notes are not clear).

It was Friday night. The youth of Consett were yelling and revving up along the main drag and slashing through the puddles. A fair few of them were skinheads — whatever happened to skinheads, by the way? — creating a pall of menace. There was nowhere else, though, so I tried the first place with a B&B sign, The Braes at the main crossroads. It had rooms, but, an old man warned, was also running a disco, and the racket would go one till two or three in the morning. The few other places were full or not taking guests.

In the end, I got the last room at the Castleside Inn, a small hotel on the edge of town by a stream clogged up with rubbish. I timed it just right, for the heavens opened as I glided down the hill.

It had been an okay ride, as I quite like knackered old industrial areas, but it was honestly hard to think of a worse introductory section to the C2C for the general tourist. There hadn’t been a single feature of beauty or note since the Wear bridges, though the history of this area really is interesting. Just mud, rubble, graffiti, derelict sheds and yards, dreary streets and the ever higher and bleaker moorland horizon. But the industrialised Pennines were over now. The next day would be different.

 

© Joe Slater 2024