West Country Rides, Two

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 Riding the Shires. Half a century of cycle-touring.

November 2023, Lyme Regis. Although the whole of the previous day’s ride from Exmouth had been along the “Jurassic” coast, the famous limestone stretch with the fossils only really begins at Lyme. The geology of this coast is fascinatingly complex. I’d ridden through sandstone, limestone and even chalk belts, creating a subtle variety of colour and texture in the soils and the cliffs that plunged into the sea all the way. At Beer, though I didn’t see them in the dark, there had even been chalk cliffs. I had no idea the White Cliffs of Dover had a modest Devonian counterpart.

But now, I meant to leave the coast; today’s ride would take me north through rural Dorset, which I’d entered the previous evening as I rode through the sea mist. First, though, I wanted a proper look at Lyme Regis by daylight.

An old port and shipbuilding centre, and granted the kingly “Regis” name as far back as 1284, Lyme supplied ships to fight the Armada and was the port at which Monmouth landed in 1685 to launch his ill-fated rebellion, which has left a trail of sad memorial sites across Dorset and Somerset. In the following century, Lyme became an early seaside resort, and then a literary shrine after the Cobb breakwater, which protected the harbor, featured dramatically in a novel by Jane Austen. All of this has given it a certain cachet among resort towns along this spectacular coast.

There were few visitors about this morning, though. The storm had passed but the high winds that had chased it away continued to fling tatters of cloud across the sky and roil the waters around the harbour. I spent half an hour walking along the shore watching still swollen waves crashing against breakwaters, and, further off, breaking on the high grey cliffs of the Jurassic coast, giving off plumes of spray visible at a mile’s distance. These cliffs were where the fossils abounded. Each storm like this, I read, prised a new harvest of fossils from the battered rock, leaving them scattered on the beach.

I found the wild shore more inspiring than the town itself, a jumble of steep old streets with shops full of fossil- and pirate-themed tat. “Ethical fudge” sold here, one sign said. I was half-tempted to go in and ask if they had any Machiaevellian fudge instead as I found the ethical stuff a bit bland. Instead, I scoffed a pasty and set off, on the all too accurately named Uplyme road to Axminster.

It was a four-mile slog, mostly up a long wooded river valley, almost all the way to Axminster. Just before that fine town, at Uplyme, I reached the plateau, crossed the A35 and picked up a long, very quiet B-road that would take me nearly all the way to Crewkerne, the early end point of this ride.

One day I should write an article on little-used B-roads, for there’s nothing to beat them on a bike tour of England. Wide, well-surfaced and well-signposted, they nevertheless retain the intimacy and idiosyncracies — the kinks, dips, flowery verges, ancient bridges, darting kestrels — of country lanes. This road, the B3165, typified all this. (Another one used to be the long B-road north through Kimbolton in Cambridgeshire). Between hedges spangled with red hawthorn- and holly-berry clusters, it followed a ridge for about 10 miles, giving long views to open rolling pastureland and, through woodland sprays of green and gold leafage, glimpses of broad vales. Then it dropped down to the village-dotted valleys, where the turning trees were layered with green and brown intermixed and a slight autumnal haze hung in the air. I dawdled over streams and past muddy farmyard entrances, hung behind tractors and sat down by old fingerposts. For long periods, the silence was complete.

I made only one stop on the whole ride, a hilltop church at Marshwood, because the cemetery had a sensational view over the hillsides opposite. Inside the nave, all the pews had been cleared away, and crude children’s paintings hung on the whitewashed walls, as it was doubling as a hall for the 1842 village school that stood next to it. This seemed an excellent use for an underused church building.

From my bench in the cemetery, I watched a bloke unhurriedly mowing the grass between the graves. When the engine cut out, a faint baa-ing from across the valley could be heard. I tried to think of a chat-up line to get some local comment, something that would capture west Dorset in a pithy line or two of dialect, but nothing came to mind. I left him to it and went on my way. This was to be one of the wordless rides.

The road to Crewkerne

The sun held the cloud at bay but never really cleared it. The weather closed in and the terrain flattened out as I drew nearer to Crewkerne, a Georgian market town of grey hamstone (a limestone variant) with a horrible traffic problem and, more importantly for me, a chronic shortage of banking facilities. The ticket machine at the unmanned station didn’t take my card, so I had to go back into town — a long way, by the way — to find an ATM for cash. It turned out that Crewkerne, population over 7,000, now had just one town-centre cashpoint, outside the Nationwide, which was also its only remaining high-street bank as far as I could see. And this was a town with a 20-mile wide hinterland.

For once in a very, very long time, and despite dawdling, I’d managed to arrive at my destination well ahead of schedule. I’d knocked this satisfying little run off in under four hours. One odd thing: Apart from the squirrels of Budleigh Salterton, I saw almost no wildlife in two days. The hedgerows too had been quiet. Perhaps nature too battens down the hatches when storms come.