Toward Scotland

too steep, too old

Craig and Laura went to England this April with our bicycles. The plan was to ride from the tip of Cornwall in southwest England up to the northern tip of Scotland, or at least to ride in that direction. We chose a route designed by a British bicycling organization that prioritized scenic roads and minimized automotive traffic. We carried our luggage in panniers and spent the night at inns and bed-and-breakfasts.

We didn’t get to the tip of Scotland. We didn’t even get to the bottom of Scotland, but we did have a nice trip. We saw lots of beautiful English countryside, navigated several hundred turns, avoided innumerable potholes, and pushed our bicycles up many steep hills. After two weeks, Laura started to develop some weakness in her right hand, a common bicycling malady resulting from prolonged pressure from gripping handlebars. The treatment for that is to stop bicycling. We did stop bicycling, took the train back to London from Bristol, put the bikes in a storage locker, retrieved our suitcases, and became normal tourists. Laura’s hand weakness cleared up, but it took a few weeks.

We learned several things on the bicycling portion of our trip:

Southern England in the spring was gorgeous; beautiful farmland, ancient ruins, sunken lanes with hedgerows, interesting villages —all lush and green with wildflowers everywhere. “The sleekest landscape in the world,” according to George Orwell.

The English people we met were welcoming, helpful, and interested in us. We encountered no rude drivers, no dangerous dogs. Bicyclists were expected and accommodated.

We are probably too old for this type of bicycling, at least on this particular route.  I knew our chosen route was hilly but I thought given our training on the mountain roads of our home county we would be adequately prepared. I was surprised; I have never seen such interesting but difficult cycling terrain— narrow lanes, sharp turns, rough pavement, steep hills. We spent a lot of time on foot; scenic but slow, slow, slow. I suspect given a few more months to forget things we will be ready to try again next year. An easier route, a little less luggage, some handle bar adjustments, and we should be back on our way toward Scotland.

Here are some photos:

We started our ride at Land’s End in the county of Cornwall, the southwestern tip of Britain.

We rode many miles on “sunken lanes,” roadways that are considerably below the level of the surrounding land. Such roads are usually one lane wide and follow the route of human foot paths or animal routes that have been slowly carved into the landscape over hundreds or thousands of years. We rarely met other traffic. It was usually easy to lean into the bank to allow cars and farm equipment to pass.

This slightly sunken lane is lined with trees that have been coppiced. Coppicing is an ancient technique of timber management in which trees are cut down to just above the stump every several years. This allows the shoots to be harvested for firewood and building material. Coppicing has been done for thousands of years; it maintains the trees in a juvenile condition, allowing them to become quite old.

For a bicycling trip, we spent a lot of time on foot. This is a steep road up from the harbor in Mousehole, Cornwall.
Merry Maidens Stone Circle, close to Land’s End. There are dozens of these megalithic sites in southwestern England, most thought to date from about 3000-1000BC.
This is Tregiffian Burial Chamber, a neolithic tomb with a walled and roofed entrance passage leading into a central chamber. Craig thinks that you should not lean your bicycle against such ancient monuments; Laura thought that was silly and did it anyway.
English road builders likewise did not seem worried about offending ancient spirits; they built the road right through the tomb in 1843.
Chyoone Cross, perhaps 9th or 10th century. these are called “wayside crosses,” and are found throughout Cornwall. Such roadside crosses are amongst the oldest Christian artifacts in Britain.

St. Newlyn Peaching Pit in Cornwall. Preaching pits are large open-air hollows, typically built into old mining excavations or quarries. Dating primarily to the 18th and 19th centuries, these pits were constructed during a time when Methodist preachers were often barred from speaking inside traditional Anglican churches. Preaching pits allowed them to preach to their large congregations outdoors. John Wesley did not preach here, but he often used a larger pit nearby.

The above two pictures show Laura riding through a desolate, un-English-like landscape. This is the Redruth tin mining district in Cornwall. Tin mining started in Cornwall and the adjacent county of Devon about 2000 BC. This region supplied most of the tin used in Europe and the Mediterranean until modern times. It is hard to overstate how important this was for world history; tin alloyed with copper creates bronze, and bronze tools, weapons and building materials transformed the economies and technologies of prehistoric Europe and the Mediterranean. The last tin mine in England closed in 1998. Four thousand years of mining have certainly left their mark on this landscape.

These two pictures are from the Cornwall Museum in Truro. The first shows a wooden shovel and a mining pick made with an auroch (wild cattle) antler, both dated to about 3500 years of age. The second picture show ancient ingots of Cornish tin. Three ancient shipwrecks (13-14 BC) have been discovered off the coast of Israel that held cargos of tin bearing the specific chemical characteristics of tin from Cornwall. Perhaps this shovel and pick mined the ore that was smelted to produce the tin that was alloyed to form the bronze that decorated Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem. Conjecture of course, but the dates align.

From the mining district we went up and over Bodmin Moor.
Heading down off the moorland to the coast.
The Cornish coast at Bude.
From Bude our route went up from the coast onto the moors of Exmoor National Park in Devon.
With changes in elevation cultivated fields give way to pasture lands which give way to open moorland.
We got a good look at lots of hedgerows.

I’m generally not a fan of bicycle electronics; I would rather just ride and not worry about how far or fast I am going. For this trip however the GPS computer was essential for the complicated navigation. But there is such a thing as too much information; I would have preferred not to know that I am on hill 7 out of 9 for the day, hill 8 is 1.09 miles away, there is 0.44 miles left of the current hill at an average grade of 10%, and it is just about to get steeper.

A look back with Wales on the horizon across the Bristol Channel.
Now we are on top of the moor, above the farmlands.
On the moors at Exmoor National Park.
These are Exmoor Ponies, an ancient breed native to Britain. Most are now domesticated but there are semi-feral bands that roam in the national park.
A row of coppiced trees planted along an earthen bank. These are called hedgebanks and are most commonly found in Devon. Most of these hedgebanks are hundreds of years old.
Hedgebanks with trees that have not been coppiced, in Devon.

Lunch is always a big event on a bicycle trip. Sometimes we could find restaurants or food stands to eat at. More often we would picnic. We learned that churches make good lunch spots. There is usually a bench and many English churchyards are not mowed and in April sported beautiful wildflowers. Leaving churchyards unmowed is now encouraged by the Church of England to promote local biodiversity and support pollinators.

A good lunch spot in Holsworthy, Devon.
Cornish Pasties were historically an all-in-one lunch for tin miners. The thick, crimped edge served as a handle so miners could hold the pie without contaminating the food with their dirty hands, (there may be arsenic in tin ore). They are filled with minced beef, rutabaga and onions.
It’s nice to have a place to sit. This is coming down from Bodmin Moor.
We were lucky to find this nice bench on the moor.
Bus stops can do in a pinch, and are especially good for windy days.
Welcome to Pyworthy.
There were a few days where there was just nowhere better to stop than the side of the road.
Most British sheep will have nothing to do with you. These are town sheep, unusually friendly.

England is a good place for bicycle touring as you are rarely many miles from a place to stay. At least in April, we never had trouble finding lodging and would usually book something the day before. Bed and breakfasts are usually the most interesting option, and provide more opportunity for chatting with the owners and other guests. We also stayed in national chain hotels, country inns, pubs and village hotels.

A bed-and-breakfast in Newquay; cheap, friendly, fun.
Trehellas House Hotel, in the countryside outside Bodmin.
This Fleur-de-Lis wayside cross stands in front of the hotel. Fleur-de-Lis stone crosses are rare; this is the only one in Cornwall. It may be a symbol of the Virgin Mary or perhaps of the Norman French royalty who conquered Anglo-Saxon Britain. In any case, Oliver Cromwell’s army felt the need to knock it over in the 1640s.
The Lion Hotel, our lodging in Dulverton.
The Mitre in Glastonbury, a pub with some rooms above. Can be noisy.
Finally, after the hilly terrain of Cornwall and Devon, some easy, flat cycling in the county of Somerset. This is outside Taunton along the Bridgewater and Taunton Canal.
The towpath along the Bridgewater and Taunton Canal.
A field of rapeseed in bloom. Canola oil is made from rapeseed.
A World War Two pillbox, part of the Taunton Stop Line. This was a line of defenses designed to stop a potential German invasion from the west. The canal would also have slowed down attackers.
Here is a next-to-last picture, a steep Devon sunken lane. This is one way toward Scotland; it is beautiful and scenic, incredible bicycling. But there are other far less difficult routes. Perhaps we will try one of those next year.