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“Lost Lanes West is a joy” – road.ccc

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Candyfloss over Abergavenny. This cloud appears to

Candyfloss over Abergavenny. This cloud appears to be asking some kind of question. I only wish I knew the answer.

#clouds #cloudspotting

And so to the 30th and last of my special places f

And so to the 30th and last of my special places from #LostLanesNorth. This is the Wheatsheaf pub in Beetham, towards the end of Ride No. 30 "Brief Encounter", a route which begins at Carnforth railway station (where much of the film Brief Encounter was shot, and which is still recognisable from the ramps to the platforms to the refreshment room). The route heads north through Arnside and Silverdale, hopping by train across the River Kent to Cartmel and the edge of Lakeland before looping back through sleepy Witherslack and a string of limestone villages and country estates.⠀ ⠀

One of these villages is Beetham, and a very handsome village it is. Though a pub may have been on this site as long ago as 1609, this black and white Jacobean revival building with its elaborate oriel window was built around 1900. It's almost ridiculous and commands the corner where it stands across from the church. Anyone passing has to stop and stare. I don't know if the original interior ever matched the extravagant exterior but it's long gone now, replaced by the bland 'upmarket country inn' catalogue style. ⠀
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It's not really a destination in and of itself, rather it's one of dozens of places that will catch my eye in a day's riding: buildings, trees, rocks, fields, almost anything really. I never regret the places I stop at but I am often filled with remorse at those I pass by. There's something about the motion of riding a bike, and the psychology of travel that makes you want to keep on moving when it might be more rewarding to stop awhile. Fortunately, when writing a guidebook, stopping is part of the job. ⠀
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I hope you've enjoyed this series. You can see them all on the #lln30places hashtag. ⠀
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#lostlanes #jacobean #pub #architecture #cumbria

A few moments before the big meadow descent. File

A few moments before the big meadow descent. File under "I never go for a walk without my bike" and "what goes up must go down". #roughstuff #23mm #pinkshorts @rsfarchive #lostlaneswest #dorset #cranbornechase #cycletouring #choosecycling

Looks like a sunset shot but this was 6.30 in the

Looks like a sunset shot but this was 6.30 in the morning during in the heatwave of July 2016. After a bivvy night on Cranborne Chase in which I'd forgotten my sleeping bag but it didn't matter because it was so warm. This is my old friend and fellow travel writer Harry Adès disappearing into a meadow while descending a grassy path on his trusty 23mm tyres. Oh how we baked that day. It was one of several days I spent on Cranborne Chase researching for Lost Lanes West. It's an often overlooked cycling destination that offers plenty of lost lanes and some fantastic rough stuff on ridgeways and old drove roads. .
#roughstuff #23mm #pinkshorts #dorset #lostlaneswest #heatwave #outtakes

My 29th special place from #LostLanesNorth is the

My 29th special place from #LostLanesNorth is the Great Stone of Fourstones. It's from Ride No.29 "Take the High Road", which in 82km crams more variety into a day out than any other ride in the book. From the centre of the elegant city of Lancaster, out on the River Lune cycle path to the viewpoint at Crook of Lune then up into Roeburndale and onto the fabulous Hornby Road to Slaidburn then back via the Cross of Greet climb, the highest paved road in the Forest of Bowland and a return along the Lune. This is a good place to stop for a breather after the big climb. ⠀ ⠀
This elephantine lump of limestone is a glacial erratic. Pushed, dragged and rolled here by passing glaciers the strata are now perpendicular to the ground. The same glaciers carved out the U-shaped valleys of the Yorkshire Dales, the Forest of Bowland and much of Northern England (they didn't make it into the Midlands and Southern England). ⠀
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There were once four stones here (hence 'Fourstones') but the others were broken up and used as building materials. The stone is one of the traditional markers of the Yorkshire-Lancashire boundary. Proud Lancastrians might say that the 15 steps carved in the boulder allow Yorkshire folk to climb to the top and look enviously into Lancashire's land of milk and honey. The 5m tall boulder stands on the last sliver of Bowland that's still in Yorkshire. Traditionally, Slaidburn and much of the uplands were part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, but they've been annexed by Lancashire in the bloodless coup of the 1974 local government reorganisation (though meagre compensation for what Lancashire lost to Cumbria). ⠀
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Looking north the three peaks of the Yorkshire Dales are clearly visible and it's a good place to appreciate the connection between Bowland and the Dales.⠀
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#lln30places #limestone #boulder #geology #yorkshire #bowland ⠀

Socially distanced Friday beers on the hill

Socially distanced Friday beers on the hill

My 28th special place from #LostLanesNorth is the

My 28th special place from #LostLanesNorth is the last Clarion House, from Ride No.28 "The Giant of Ribblesdale". ⠀
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You can't talk about the history of cycling in Northern England without talking about Clarion Cycling Clubs, the socialist societies that sprung up in towns and cities from the 1890s onwards, inspired in great measure by the writings of Robert Blatchford, his newspaper 'The Clarion', and his book Merrie England. As the Guardian once noted "For every convert made by Das Kapital, there were a hundred made by Merrie England." ⠀
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British Socialism - or perhaps it's more accurate to say English Socialism - was more Morris and Ruskin than Marx and Lenin. Nature and the outdoors, friendship and and fellowship, and health of body and mind were at the heart of things. Local branches set up Clarion Houses in rural areas, run by club members, provided refreshments, and often accommodation, for walkers, cyclists and others who wished to escape for a time from the smoky and increasingly crowded towns and cities. ⠀
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Clarion membership reached its peak in 1936, with 233 sections across the UK and 8,306 members. Clarion members went to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War - some riding there by bike. Rather puts today's idea of 'adventure cycling' in the shade. ⠀
The ILP Nelson Clarion House was established in 1912 by socialists from the nearby a cotton milling town of Nelson (where Carradice bags are still made, with Karrimor founded just a few miles away). The last remaining of all the Clarion Houses is still going strong thanks to a new generation of club members and volunteers. It's open on Sunday afternoons (though probably not during the Covid-19 outbreak). A great theme for a bike tour would be to visit long lost Clarion Houses - there's plenty of information on the web. ⠀ ⠀

The motto of the Clarion is "Fellowship is Life, Lack of Fellowship is Death". Not catchy but gets to the point.Clarion cycling clubs are still going and the London Clarion is the cheapest place to get third party insurance and assistance in case of an accident.⠀
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#lln30places #lancashire #clarioncycling #socialsm #clarion #nelson #pendlehill⠀

Here's the Hoober Stand, looming out of the shadow

Here's the Hoober Stand, looming out of the shadows like the prow of a ghost ship. It's my 27th special place from #LostLanesNorth, part of the ritual landscape of the Wentworth Estate. We usually talk about ritual landscapes in relation to prehistoric sites like Stonehenge and Avebury but why not for a landed estate dotted with follies? And what were they worshipping? Money, power, ancestors. The usual stuff.⠀ ⠀

Ride No. 27 is a multi-surface excursion north of Sheffield into the South Yorkshire Coalfield. After La Traversée de Rotherham, with its metaphorical grit and very real streets of broken glass, it comes a as a surprise to emerge into the Georgian arcadia of the Wentworth estate. The Earls Fitzwilliam made a fortune in the iron and coal business and is where the money was spent, well some of it anyway. The big house, Wentworth-Woodhouse, is reputed to have 365 rooms, and house guests were issued with confetti to drop as they wandered the corridors lest they get lost. It's frontage is twice the length of Buckingham Palace. You can walk up the carriage drive but cycling is forbidden. This is a real shame as it would be the best way to arrive. My route picks a way on lanes tracks avoiding the sometimes busy B-roads. On summer Sundays from 2pm to 5pm you can go inside and climb to the top for the view over the treetops (£2.50 entry). ⠀
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The Hoober Stand is one of a several stone follies in the parkland that ensured the earls could look up from their breakfast boiled eggs and see their marks on each horizon. The Needles Eye is nearby, and Kepple's Column is on the far side of the valley. The Fitzwilliams are considered to have been benevolent employers, at least by the standards of the day. During the General Strike of 1926, the earl kept his miners fed and even taught them to play polo on pit ponies on his front lawn. Their politics may have drifted since then. The next in line to inherit the estate is Helena de Chair, whose husband is the hard right Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.⠀
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#lln30places #hooberstand #yorkshire⠀

For my 26th special place from #LostLanesNorth we'

For my 26th special place from #LostLanesNorth we're in the old walled kitchen garden of Cannon Hall, a stately home a few miles outside Barnsley, that's on the route of Ride No.26 "Hammer and Chisel", which goes from Wakefield out via the Hepworth Gallery and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to the edge of the Pennines at Penistone. ⠀
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Cannon Hall was the seat of the Spencer-Stanhope family. There had been a big house here since the time of the Domesday Book if not before. In 1660 it was bought by John Stanhope, a Welsh maker of hay-rakes. The family became active in the local iron and coal industry and amassed a vast fortune. ⠀
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In the 1750s Benjamin Spencer dabbled in the transatlantic slave trade and named his slave ship "Cannon Hall". Many country estates in Britain are tainted, to a greater or lesser degree, by the shame of slavery, though this is often glossed over in their official histories (even more were enriched by empire and colonialism). An iron slave collar was found at the house, a grim artefact that's now at the National Maritime Museum and a photograph is part of the museum's online collection. It's conceivable it was the property of Benjamin's nephew, Walter Spencer-Stanhope, who inherited the estate and was elected to Parliament where he championed the abolition of slavery, alongside his friend and fellow Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce. ⠀
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Later Spencer-Stanhopes were an arty bunch and helped John Ruskin set up the little museum in the estate village of Cawthorne, a fabulous cabinet of curiosities, and the only survivor of Ruskin's dream of a national network of village museums. ⠀
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But back to the kitchen garden. In 1951 Cannon Hall was sold to Barnsley Metropolitan Council, which has run it ever since as an event venue, gallery and country park. The Georgian walled garden houses a collection of over forty varieties of pear trees, but maintaining a kitchen garden this big is a big and expensive undertaking. This part of it has been turned over to wild flowers and the Victorian glasshouse is in ruins. But it's colourful, great for pollinators and an atmospheric place to relax. ⠀
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#lostlanes #kitchengarden #lln30places #Yorkshire

Onwards and upwards. Cucumber plants reaching for

Onwards and upwards. Cucumber plants reaching for the sky.
#growyourown #cucumber

We're into the home straight now with the last six

We're into the home straight now with the last six of my special places from my new book #LostLanesNorth. This, the 25th, is from Ride No.25 "A Calder Caper", a short but intensely varied route from Hebden Bridge over the Pennine watershed and back again through some of the lostest lanes of the Upper Calder Valley.⠀
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My special place is the Rain Stone, a fabulous elephantine slab of weather worn gritstone, part of a disused quarry on Blackstone Edge bang on the Lancashire/Yorkshire boundary. Finds of neolithic axeheads show that this has been a place of comings and goings for thousands of years. The stagecoaches came this way, and the White House pub is still there. Daniel Defoe was caught in a snowstorm here. In August. Chartists walked here in their tens of thousands to rally the cause of a better society.⠀ ⠀

And here, beside a string of reservoirs, is a gravel track with sunset views over the glass and steel towers of Manchester and, on a fine day, the Clwydian Range of north-east Wales. ⠀

But the Rain Stone is not about fine days. It's one of six poems about the weather by Simon Armitage, who hales from over the M62 in Marsden. His words are carved in stone by Pip Hall. The collection is called the Stanza Stones and there's a 47-mile walking trail from Marsden to Ilkley that passes all six stones. Critics have decried it as high class graffiti. But I like it. They are all on cast off quarry stone - debris from industry that was once to be found right across the Pennines. I like Armitage. He is a deep thinker but an accessible poet. A walker and a talker. A perfect choice for Poet Laureate. I'll post "Rain" in the comments. ⠀
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I came here in the golden hour of a late summer evening. The sun's last low beams were glancing off the electricity pylons and striping ripples on the reservoirs. A couple with ropes and harnesses were climbing other side of the rock where there's a decent sized vertical face. I read the poem, scrambled to the top of the rock took it all in, and rode on, absent mindedly leaving my camera tripod in the long grass. ⠀
#lln30places #BlackstoneEdge #StanzaStones #poetry

The 24th of my special places from #LostLanesNorth

The 24th of my special places from #LostLanesNorth is from Ride No. 24 "Wuthering Heights" a sort of packhorses-and-Brontës romp around the hills to the west and north of Hebden Bridge. Wycoller is somewhere I didn't know a whole lot about when I picked it out on the map. It is a hamlet centred on Wycoller Hall, now a ruin, and the village, if you can call it that, is closed to outside traffic and is a sort of country park. ⠀
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When I visited on a sunny May morning it felt like an enchanted place. The stream is crossed by three bridges of increasing antiquity - a packhorse bridge with its thick gritstone slabs worn smooth by passing hoofs and feet. A clapper bridge of big flat stones, built in the way a three year old might build a bridge out of wooden blocks. A little further upstream is the more unusual and older 'Clam Bridge', a span of one slab of stone, possibly prehistoric (finds of flint tools and axe heads at Wycoller indicate that there was a community here from as early as the Stone Age). ⠀ ⠀

Wycoller Hall is the inspiration for Ferndean Manor in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre. She lived just over the hill in Haworth (which comes later in the ride) and would have know this place. I'll put her description of the approach in the comments below. The building is roofless now but there's just enough of it left to imagine it as a place where wealthy people might have lived elegant lives - the neatly carved stone window frames stand out. A scene from the film of the Railway Children was filmed here, in which Jenny Agutter's character is seen sitting on the bridge as the doctor passes on his pony and trap. ⠀
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But you could never know any of the history or cultural associations of this place and still find it beguiling. The gravel track that continues beyond the Wycoller is good, lined with some huge and terrifying beech trees and lots of bluebells (in May). After a bit of very moderate rough stuff it pops you out at the 'col de Watersheddles' above Haworth. ⠀
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#lln30places #lancashire #wycoller #cycling #cycletouring #lostlanes

The 23rd special place from #LostLanesNorth is not

The 23rd special place from #LostLanesNorth is not an under-the-radar choice but somewhere that everyone should visit at least once. Saltaire is a mid-ride stop on Ride No.23, which is a kind of cycling paean to Yorkshire. From Leeds following the traffic free canal towpath through the once mighty industrial heart of the West Riding, before striking uphill onto Ilkley Moor. ⠀ ⠀

Saltaire was the expression of one man's vision for a better way to run a factory. He had his giant textile mills built from stone and iron to reduce the chances of fire. The town's neat rows of workers' houses were luxurious compared to the slums of nearby Bradford. He built a grand, Italianate church and civic amenities including a bath-house, a hospital, institutes for recreation and education including a library, a concert hall, a billiard room, a science laboratory and a gymnasium, allotments, parkland, sports grounds and boating lake. Salt embodied the Victorian ideal of the patrician industrialist. And yet, and yet. It was still capitalism. The work was hard and the days were long. ⠀
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Salt's Mill stopped producing cloth in 1986. Mills across the North became empty husks awaiting demolition. Some were given a new purpose, a new lease of life, and none more than Salt's Mill, thanks to Jonathan Silver, a Bradford entrepreneur with a love of the arts and a life-long friendship with schoolfriend David Hockney. Silver died young and never saw the full fruition of his dream, but he must stand equal with Sir Titus in the story of Saltaire. Today it's an airy and colourful complex of art galleries, cafes, restaurants and shops with the biggest permanent collection of Hockney paintings in the world. And it's all free to see. ⠀
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This was once the largest industrial building in the world. And it feels it as you approach it on a bike along the canal. But it is almost quaint compared to giant factory-campuses in China. Fuji-ta is the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world, and its Tianjin plant covers 300 acres. Saltaire - factory AND village - was just 20 acres. It makes you think. ⠀
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#lln30places #lostlanes #yorkshire #saltaire #saltsmill #davidhockney ⠀

Light at the end of the tunnel / Stairway to heave

Light at the end of the tunnel / Stairway to heaven

Every valley in the Yorkshire Dales has its charms

Every valley in the Yorkshire Dales has its charms but Swaledale is something very special, and it's to Swaledale we go for my 22nd special place from my new cycling guidebook #LostLanesNorth. ⠀
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Ride No.22 from Reeth is on the shorter side at 27 miles but it is incredibly varied in terms of scenery with lots to stop and see along the way - waterfalls and swim spots, Britain's highest pub, and the Dales Bike Centre. At the head of the dale there's a road option from Gunnerside on the B-road via Muker and Thwaite. This would be a highlight of any ride, but it is surpassed by the old way via Crackpot Hall. This 5 mile section, half of it on grass-up-the-middle tarmac and half on a mostly rideable stone track is about as good as it gets.⠀ ⠀ ⠀
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It has everything - field barns, broad pasture and meadow, a steep gorge and waterfalls and an atmospheric ruin. All of it far from the sound of an infernal combustion engine (excepting the shepherd on his quad bike). ⠀ ⠀ ⠀
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Crackpot Hall - what a name! What a place! It's an 18th century farmhouse that was last inhabited in 1953 when it was finally abandoned due to subsidence caused by lead mines underground. The name doesn't mean crazy loon, but is actually derived from the Old Norse words for 'crow' and 'cave'. It was built with quality materials, and fragments of recognisable domesticity are are still there, from the cast iron range to a rusting tin bathtub. ⠀ ⠀
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Today it's home to sheep and rabbits but in the 1930s the Harkers, the last farming family to live here, became minor celebrities, or at least their free range children did. Alice, Dorothy, Martha, Stanley, Raymond and Nathaniel roamed freely in this earthly paradise, and were described by the two local authors who 'discovered' them barefoot and nearly feral, speaking a local dialect that was almost incomprehensible. This was probably an exaggeration for the benefit of readers fascinated by "rustics" but it hints at how much life has changed here within living memory. Follow up a visit to Crackpot Hall with a look around the brilliant Swaledale folk history museum in Reeth.⠀
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#lostlanes #yorkshiredales #yorkshire #cycletouring #roughstuff #lln30places

The 21st special place from Lost Lanes North is fr

The 21st special place from Lost Lanes North is from Ride No.21 "A Grand Day Out", a grimpeur's feast of big hill climbs in the Yorkshire Dales starting at Hawes, home of the famous Wensleydale cheese. Dent Houses is not strictly on the route, but fairly easily accessible from it, on a gravel track off the road across Grinton Moor. ⠀
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They are a pair of stone built shooting huts owned by the Bolton Estate, which manages the moors above Wensleydale for grouse shooting. The great battles for public access to the uplands of the North were fought against grouse shooting interests (the Kinder Scout trespass was just one flashpoint in a much longer story) so it's a measure of how much things have changed that the Bolton Estate leaves these shooting huts open so passers by on foot or by bike may take shelter.⠀
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Some people have mixed feelings about grouse shooting. My feelings aren't mixed, I'm pretty firmly against. Setting aside the ethics of shooting wild animals for entertainment, the great weight of evidence is that moors intensively managed for driven grouse shooting have a poor ecological and environmental record, as well as being pretty bland landscapes in purely aesthetic terms. ⠀
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However, even I must recognise the kindness of the Bolton Estate in leaving this hut (and another, the Greenhaw Hut, a few miles away) open to the public. They are not bothies in the sense of those maintained by the Mountain Bothies Association, so if you roll up you might find them in use by a shooting party or occupied for some other reason. So if you're planning on spending the night, it's worth bringing your own shelter just in case, and some wood for the fire if you intend to use it. As with all bothies be sure to leave them neater and tidier than you found them, and close the door firmly when you leave. ⠀
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#lln30places #lostlanes #bothy #wensleydale #LostLanesNorth

My 20th special place from #LostLanesNorth is hard

My 20th special place from #LostLanesNorth is hardly original. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet about it, Turner painted it, Jim Henson came here to film the Dark Crystal. Gordale Scar is one of several limestone spectacles on Ride No.20 Up Hill Down Dale, a short but strenuous loop west of Settle, the best small town in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. ⠀
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The poet Thomas Gray was the first to bring the 100 metre deep ravine to national attention. He wrote described the "horror of the place" as follows: ⠀ ⠀ ⠀
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"From its very base it begins to slope forwards over you in one black and solid mass without any crevice in its surface and overshadows half the area below with its dreadful canopy... I stayed here (not without shuddering) a quarter of an hour, and thought my trouble richly paid, for the impression will last for life." ⠀
Geologists are divided on whether it's a collapsed cave or was cut through the rock by torrents of glacial meltwaters at the end of the last Ice Age. Nowadays it's fairly dry and there was just a muddy trickle when I came here in the long hot drought of 2018. But even without the water it's a genuinely awe-inspiring sight. The approach from the road is easy, just a few hundred metres on a path through a small campsite that looks like a great place to pitch up. Astonishingly there is a public right of way up the ravine itself, which includes a 10 foot rock climb. With Mastiles Lane nearby this is Rough Stuff Fellowship territory. I wonder, @rsfarchive, has any member ever attempted the ascent of the ravine, with bicycle?⠀
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Before you come here, or after you've been, make a trip to the Tate Britain in London, where you can see James Ward's 1814 painting. He conveyed the sublime impact of the place by going large with the canvas and heavy on the chiaroscuro. At 14 foot by 10 foot, Ward's masterpiece is one of the biggest canvases ever painted, and takes up an entire wall. ⠀
#lostlanes #goredalescare #limestone #yorkshiredales #yorkshire #sublime #ravine #lln30places

It's across the Yorkshire Dales for my 19th specia

It's across the Yorkshire Dales for my 19th special place in #LostLanesNorth, and a village that was once in the West Riding of Yorkshire but is now part of Cumbria. ⠀
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Dent is one of three places on Ride No.19 that also feature in Ian Nairn's fabulous television documentary Nairn Across Britain (the other two are Settle and the Ribblehead Viaduct). If you do this ride, it's well worth looking up the programme on the BBC iPlayer (it's in the last part but all three episodes are gems). If I were ever to make a documentary film I'd model it on Nairn's, which for me is the perfect combination of illuminating storytelling, passionately held opinions and a sense of fun, all set off by artful but restrained camera work and a grooving soundtrack.⠀
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Back in 1972 Nairn admired the spirit of Dent. He saw a real Dales community carrying on its everyday life and not yet overcome by tourism and second homers. He liked the cobbles, he liked the car park surfaced in grass not tarmac. He complained about the motor traffic, and feared for the lack of work and wondered if a small factory might help provide local employment. ⠀
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When I went to Dent over forty years later, not a huge amount had changed, at least on the surface. The cobbles are still there. There are more weekenders and second homers and no sign of the factory. The streets are too narrow for on street parking - joy! - showing that the sky doesn't fall in when people can't store a car on the piece of land immediately outside their house. In his film Nairn walks down the main street between Dent's two pubs, and both are still going. On the wall of the George & Dragon is a cast iron CTC winged wheel - always a nice thing to see. What struck Nairn most strongly about Dent still holds true, "the absolute need for the place to be just like this just here, the hills behind the church and everything huddling in". Architecture in tune with the landscape.⠀
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#lln30places #dent #yorkshiredales ⠀
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Gore Vidal chose the Amalfi Coast for his romantic

Gore Vidal chose the Amalfi Coast for his romantic clifftop hideaway but that's probably because he'd never been to Knaresborough. If he had, he would have settled down here, in some lugubrious Victorian gothic pile overlooking the Nidd, just a stone's throw from Mother Shipton's Cave and its Petrifying Well - England's oldest tourist attraction, or so they say. ⠀
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I imagine him rising late for a mid morning stroll up to the castle to converse with the raven, a bird that has acquired the power of human speech and asks passers by "you alright, love?" (it's true, look it up on YouTube). For lunch, instead of scialatielli ai frutti di mare with a white wine spritz he'd tuck into a still-warm pork pie and wash it down with a half pint of Black Sheep ale.⠀
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Knaresborough, or as I like to think of it, the Positano of the North, is my choice of special place from Ride No.18 "Song of Stone", a ride that is stuffed to the gills with special places: the whacking great west front of Ripon Cathedral; the ruins of Fountains Abbey, the grandest of all the English monasteries; the strange shapes of Brimham Rocks, the shady calm of the Nidd Valley Greenway; and Harrogate with its elegant avenues and sensational steam baths, perfect for a post-ride unwind (Gore would have been a regular here too, I am sure). ⠀

The railway viaduct really makes the scene, together with its watery double. Nikolaus Pevsner hated it ("one of the worst railway crimes in all England") but Gore, like John Betjemin, would have appreciated its camp flourishes. It still carries trains on the slow route between York and Leeds. But it could easily not do, for the whole thing collapsed shortly after it was built and this is take two. I came here early and the cafe owners were still removing the padlocks and chains from their outdoor seating and warming up their cappuccino machines. I'm certain it would have delighted old Gore, who famously once said "Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." There's nowt more Yorkshire than that. ⠀
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#lln30places #knaresborough #lostlanesnorth #yorkshire ⠀ ⠀
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The 17th special place from my new book #LostLanes

The 17th special place from my new book #LostLanesNorth is Bempton Cliffs. It's on Ride No.17, "Hockney's Hinterland", a really varied 86km loop from Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The route passes through Bridlington where David Hockney lived for a while after returning to Yorkshire from Los Angeles as well as a handful of the places Hockney painted for his "A Bigger Picture" exhibition at the Royal Academy. The route links with Ride No. 16 to form a perfect weekend tour from York to the coast, following the band of chalk of the Yorkshire Wolds all the way to here, where the chalk comes to an abrupt halt at the North Sea. ⠀
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As any proud Yorkshire patriot will be happy to inform you, the white cliffs of Yorkshire are higher than the white cliffs of Dover (though they are not quite as high as the white cliffs of Sussex at Beachy Head). But don't just come here for the vertigo. The real stars of Bempton cliffs are its seabirds. As ever, puffins hog the limelight but Bempton is also Britain's largest mainland colony of gannets. In summer the cliffs teem with nesting guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, herring gulls, fulmars and shags. It is run by the RSPB as a nature reserve and the farmland on top of the cliffs is managed as a habitat for farmland birds. Long-eared and short-eared owls have also been seen.⠀ ⠀

I spent a night here last summer, arriving at dusk after a pub supper and finding a sheltered bivvy spot on the edge of a field just outside the reserve. At least I thought it was sheltered. During the night the wind changed direction and powerful gusts woke me up long before my 5.30am alarm, which I had set to catch the sunrise. As I have spent much more time on Britain's south and west coasts I'm accustomed to seeing the sun going down over the sea. On the east coast it's all backwards. The sun rises over the sea, and though it made sense logically, it still felt slightly strange to see the sun peep up over the blue-grey horizon, moving in the wrong direction. It's a small detail but also a big difference and must contribute something to the distictive feel of the North Sea coast.
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#lln30places #yorkshire #bempton #coast #bemptoncliffs ⠀
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