In June 2024 I set off from my home in Newcastle for a short ride to Hexham. And then I kept going. Until Inverness.

That was the first part of a three month, 4,500-mile trip around the best bits of Britain. Why? To research a bunch of brilliant cycle rides focussing on British history. A selection of these rides will be published periodically on the Routes section of this website so check back regularly for updates. I’m also showing my workings — while I completed the research rides I posted daily updates on a ride blog which have been incorporated into this site in the Research Rides section.

During my three months on the bike, folks could keep tabs on me in the Follow my progress section. That clever chap James Houston wrote code that grabbed my Strava uploads and populated a moving map with my on-the-ground progress between loops.

In the fullness of time A History of Britain in 100 Cycle Rides will be published as a lavishly illustrated book — to get info on this add your email to the "subscribe" box on the "about me" page. 

iPhone selfie taken on Sheep Pasture Incline, Cromford, Derbyshire.

100 Cycle Rides

Some of the routes in A History of Britain in 100 Cycle Rides will be short, suitable for a morning’s outing. Others will be much longer, including some multi-day routes. Several of the one hundred locations could be ticked off in a single ride.

Here are some of the one hundred, historically-themed rides:

• Get lost in 3,000-year-old holloways, such as Dorset’s Shute Lane.


• Hold on to your bike as you’re taken across a surging river at Butley in a tiny historic hand-rowed ferry, a service started by medieval monks.


• Take the train to Hexham and ride the Stanegate Roman Road to Hadrian’s Wall then into Wark Forest on gravel lanes to the remote Northumbrian church where a best-selling author, his extremist dad, and the architect of the NHS were all buried.
• Hop on and off steam trains on heritage lines where bikes are carried in guard’s van luxury.
• Ride to Nelson’s Norfolk birthplace.

• Cycle up and down Shaftesbury’s Gold Hill, the cobbled steep made famous by Ridley Scott's iconic 1973 Hovis TV advert with a boy on a butcher’s bike.
• Relive the golden days of coach-and-horses travel by cycling to Colnbrook on the old Bath Road from London. A short stretch of this road is perhaps the finest example of what a busy turnpike would have looked like in the 18th Century.
• Ride between Runnymede and the hilltop RAF memorial via Windsor Castle.
• Hilly and scenic ride through the Marches near Shrewsbury visiting strategic castles in a loop via Ludlow and over Wenlock Edge.
• Follow in the wheeltracks of Victorian authors H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and composer Edward Elgar, using their diaries and letters to retrace their favourite local rides. Similarly, Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle was also an 1890s “bike boom” cyclist and his rides in Surrey, West Sussex and East Sussex appeared in several Holmes adventures, including his Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist set in Farnham.

• Ride between Thorpe Abbot and Harleston and Pulham Market, a historic aviation triangle, visiting the locations where airships soared in the First World War, and on to the WWII airfield used by USAAF’s Bloody 100th as portrayed in Apple TV’s Masters of the Air TV series.
• Uphill on the High Peak Trail from Derwent valley’s Cromford, home to Arkwright’s Mill, one of the key sites that kickstarted the Industrial Revolution.
• Stratford-upon-Avon to Welford-on-Avon taking in Shakespeare’s birthplace, the iconic Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the historic Holy Trinity Church.
• Burrator reservoir route via Fox Tor Myre, the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

• Remote riding from Carlisle out to the foreboding medieval castle of Hermitage through the Debatable Land, an independent territory that used to exist between Scotland and England, a buffer zone between what was, at the height of the Reivers era before the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the bloodiest region in Britain.
• Challenging ride from Laggan in Badenoch to Fort Augustus on Loch Ness via the Corrieyairack Pass, originally built as a 17th Century military road by General Wade. 
• London’s history by bike, including a meandering Dickensian tour and a six-mile ride taking in the first public building in the world to be entirely lit by electricity, the London home of Benjamin Franklin, the site of the world's first demonstration of television and the building from which Dracula first emerged.

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