Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain

by Steven Primrose-Smith

“No.”

  I tried again.

  “Alster?”

  He shook his head. What else could it be? Maybe it was really unusual.

  “Or Als? Al?”

  It wasn't any of those.

  “It's Olster,” he replied. “Whatever you do, don't call it Alsester to anyone around here or else the church bells will ring and monks will come out with flaming torches.”

  I munched through the food and went to pay. The owner was talking to a woman.

  “Great bacon sandwich,” I said.

  “Best bacon sandwich in Olster!” said the woman.

  “See,” he said. “It's Olster. She's local. Count her fingers.”

  I opened the door of the café to bright sunshine. The forecast had been right. I cycled along lanes under a perfect blue sky with the occasional fluffy white cloud. Lambs frolicked in the lush, verdant fields that surrounded me. Every now and again the green would be replaced by the vivid yellow of rapeseed. The route took me past Feckenham, a name that sounds like the sort of thing Father Jack would shout at bacon.

  Approaching Redditch, county number seven was soon upon me. I'd reached Worcestershire. When it comes to certain details, Worcestershire is very average. Of my 97 counties, it's the 48th largest and the 49th most densely populated, right in the middle of both lists. But, on the plus side, it's the only county with a sauce named after it.

  Worcestershire sauce is one of those food products that should never have been, like Pop Tarts. Its makers produced a barrel of the molasses, tamarind and anchovy condiment and, as it sounds really, decided it was too disgusting to use. Eighteen months later, having forgotten about the barrel, they tasted it again. In the meantime it had fermented and become the worldwide ambassador for Britain that it is today. In many countries it's known as “English sauce”, although in France “English sauce” probably means any gravy that's burnt or has bits of broken glass in it.

  Just short of Bromsgrove I arrived at another of Britain's odd museums, Avoncroft. It's mostly a collection of old buildings that have been collected from around Britain and painstakingly rebuilt here brick by brick. Hitler would have been proud. They have a windmill, a threshing barn, a perry press, an old jail house, a church and loads of others. But it also has a telephone box museum, a collection of kiosks from throughout the ages. They even had a Doctor Who-style police box but, unfortunately, it wasn't bigger on the inside.

  There was also a rebuilt automatic telephone exchange originally from Essex. A guy showed me how it worked.

  “It seems like a lot of effort to look after,” I said.

  “Yes, we have an old fella come in to maintain it,” he said. “He's eighty. We need to get him to train us.”

  “And soon.”

  “Yeah,” he replied sadly.

  Apparently, the first automatic exchange was invented by an undertaker. He'd split from his wife, also an undertaker – their pillow talk must have been grisly – and he came up with an automatic exchange because he suspected the manual one was favouring his ex-wife's business, presumably patching through to her anyone with a bit of a cough. As they always say, mean-spirited rivalry is the mother of invention.

  I wandered around the buildings. It was a great and eclectic collection. A Tudor house had just been finished. Outside, the garden was being replanted with Elizabethan vegetables. In its original location it had been about to be demolished to clear room for a new road. Instead it was teleported to the museum. Inside, they'd tried to make it as authentic as possible, with a large fire burning on the floor and smoke throughout the house. A couple in period costume poked at the embers and answered questions. They worked here as volunteers.

  “This was a very comfortable house,” said the fella. “The home of a rich man. Go upstairs and have a look.”

  At the top of a large wooden staircase was the bedroom complete with straw mattresses. This was the origin of the expression “to hit the hay”. They were a haven for bugs and fleas. For this reason, Henry VIII changed his straw mattress every day, almost as often as his wife.

  We talked about the perry press. It had been a local one. I wasn't aware that Worcestershire made perry and cider but, as it turns out, even Worcestershire's county flag contains pears.

  “Oh yes. And if you want a good one, try the Wildmoor Oak.”

  I wasn't about to ignore such a suggestion, especially when I learned it was near a village called Bell End. Even better, the ride there took me through Lickey End too. British place names are wonderful.

  I sat in the sunshine and tried both a perry called Pickled Parrot and a local cider, both over 6%. I felt decidedly tiddly. Another couple sat in the beer garden outside. They asked where I was going.

  “And it's all been great so far,” I said. “Though Dudley was a bit ropey.”

  They nodded their heads.

  “Good people though,” said the man.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “There are good people everywhere.”

  I hadn't come across any real trouble in any of the 53 countries I'd cycled in Europe. But the couple didn't look convinced.

  “Not everywhere,” said the woman.

  “Really?” I replied. “Where aren't they good?”

  “London. They're not good in London.”

  Over these last two days I'd cycled in a huge circle and was now back at the cheap campsite in the Clent Hills. That evening's meal didn't go according to plan. While kneeling on the ground trying to light the methylated spirits in my stove I dropped the fiddly lighter into the purple liquid and the whole lot went up in flames. With my foot I quickly kicked the stove away from my highly flammable tent and then the lighter exploded with a dull thud, fortunately at a safe enough distance not to blow off a limb or set fire to my tent. I decided to go with sandwiches instead.

  *

  I woke up to more beautiful blue skies, not a cloud in sight. I decided to enjoy my breakfast – some blueberry muffins I'd bought the night before – with some coffee on the site's only flattish picnic table. I treated the stove with a little more respect than last night.

  As I sat there, a woman in her late sixties came up for a chat. She'd once backpacked all over the place but her body wouldn't let her any longer. Regardless, she toured around Britain in her camper van.

  “Do you ever go abroad?” I asked.

  “No need,” she replied. “There are enough beautiful places here.”

  Not everyone was down on Britain.

  I left the site. A few miles past Hagley, I fell upon something glorious that I remembered from previous rides through Britain, the roadside snack van. Operating from this one was a woman from Thailand and her signs offered Hot Pork Sandwiches. Although I'd only had my breakfast an hour earlier I had to take advantage of this.

  “Do you want everything, sweetheart?” she asked in a sing-song Thai-Cockney mix.

  Of course I did. She loaded a large split bun with a mountain of pulled pork and stuffing, and then added a few strips of crackling and a large dollop of apple sauce.

  “There you go, sweetheart.”

  The whole thing was impossible to eat as it was. It had to be picked at until it resembled a sandwich rather than a porkberg but it was amazing. If you're a keen cyclist on Britain's roads, don't expect to find vans like these on the continent.

  I made it to Kinver, the location of a suggestion from Pete, the guy who I'd cycled with a few days earlier. Before I headed to this recommendation I rolled over a lock. A barge was approaching. I'd never seen the process that gets someone through the watery gateway.

  Watching with me was a group of three, an older couple and a younger bloke in an electric wheelchair, who were having an argument. The baddie seemed to be the disabled fella.

  “Why do you have to shout all the time?” the older man asked the younger.

  “I don't shout,” he replied.

  The bargee – that's the barge's driver, not an Indian starter – opened the valve to empty the lock chamber.

  “
Yes, you do,” shouted the woman in the team. “You go all shrill.”

  The bargee opened the lock gate and his boat slowly motored into the chamber.

  “I don't shout,” said the man defending himself and raising his voice.

  “Yes, you do!” they both said at the same time.

  “No, I don't!”

  “You're doing it now!” yelled the woman.

  “Only because you're making me.”

  The older guy shook his head.

  “You need to calm down,” added the other man.

  The guy in the chair stared coldly at him.

  “Oh fuck off!” he screamed and wheeled himself away. I thought they were going to run after him and tip him into the water.

  I walked away to talk to the bargee, who was grappling with the second gate.

  “How many locks do you have to go through a day?”

  “That's like asking how long's a piece of string. Some days it can be hardly any and then you come to a series of twenty-odd locks in a row.”

  “And how long does that take?”

  “It can take three or four hours. But of course, there could be a queue.”

  “At least it's peaceful,” I said, looking towards the trio who were still bawling at each other.

  I cycled on to Kinver's Rock Houses, a sandstone outcrop that had been carved into troglodyte dwellings and are believed by some to be the inspiration for Tolkien's “hobbit holes”. They were lived in until as recently as the 1960s. Unfortunately they were closed to the public on a Wednesday and so I had to view them from afar, but they looked impressive and marginally more homely than a Travelodge.

  I turned the bike round and headed thirty miles south, over loads of those little, round, steep-sided hills that appear on the opening sequence of Postman Pat. They're easy in a van with a black and white cat but not on a heavily loaded bike. I had to get off and push.

  Despite the beautiful weather, a quick glance at the trees told me this mini-heatwave was out of time. They stood in silhouette, black against the bright blue sky, mostly naked, the occasional one just in blossom but most not even beginning to contemplate growing a new outfit.

  At the top of one of the longer hills I looked down at the beautiful rural scene before me, the smoke from a steam train rising from the valley floor. This was the England of old paintings. I'd arrived in Herefordshire.

  Herefordshire is the least densely populated county in the southern half of England with only 219 people per square mile and half of the 183,600 population lives in its five largest towns. It was nice to cycle in the gaps between them. The county is mostly agricultural and famous for its fruit and cider – babies were baptised in the stuff in the 14th century – as well as its Hereford cattle. Taken at face value, its traditional county motto does a good job of describing it: “This fair land is a gift of God.” But then again, so is smallpox.

  I turned a corner and took a step back to a previous century. Two travellers were sitting on the grass outside their colourfully-painted wooden caravans, parked up on the verge, their horses grazing a little farther up the road.

  “Seems like a nice life,” I said to them.

  One of the travellers tilted his head sideways, non-committally.

  “S'alright,” he replied. “It has its moments.”

  “Do you get any grief?” I asked, remembering Romany caravans being hassled by police in Romania.

  The guy was shaving a stick with a large knife, which he raised with a smile.

  “No. No hassle.” He put the knife down. “We just move on.”

  “But how do you manage to support yourself?” I asked, before realising how intrusive a question it was.

  He smiled and then his look turned cold.

  “We have a YouTube channel,” he replied.

  “Really?”

  “Piss off,” he said, exploding with sarcastic laughter.

  Whether he meant it as a command or not I decided to act as though it were.

  I couldn't find any tabloid stories to place any of Britain's capitals in Herefordshire although given that Bulmer's is the largest factory of its kind in the world perhaps Hereford should be the cider capital of Britain, maybe even the cider capital of planet Earth.

  But this lack of capitals amongst its fields and orchards doesn't mean the place is a backwater. After all, in an attempt to be modern and tediously 21st century, the council recently spent a small fortune to rebrand itself. It came up with the utterly empty slogan: “Herefordshire – Here you can!” Indeed, that motto had greeted me on the county's Welcome sign as I cycled into the place. But what is it that you “can” here? The readers of the Hereford Times were scathing about the project, suggesting the only thing you can do around these parts is “put fruit into tins”.

  If local companies want to use the branding on their own promotional bumpf they have to get past the county's Brand Guardian, the end-of-level boss whose job it is to protect those three precious, meaningless words. To find out what it was all about I visited the brand website – hereyoucan.co.uk – and clicked an area labelled “Understand our brand” but unfortunately the link didn't work. Well done, Brand Guardian!

  With some research I found one thing that you “can” do here that you definitely can't anywhere else. Due to an ancient, unrepealed law, you can shoot a Welshman with a longbow on a Sunday on Hereford's Cathedral Close. So that's probably what the council are on about.

  What the area lacks in marketing skills it makes up for in naming ability. You can visit the delightful villages of Trumpet, Cockyard and Booby Dingle before popping on your walking boots and ascending Lord Hereford's Knob. At 690 metres it's quite a big one.

  I rolled into Leominster – pronounced Lemster for no good reason – and found a town with character. I discovered a great, little backstreet that shared many of the properties of Diagon Alley. Despite being the largest place for miles, it seemed almost entirely devoid of chains. Nearly every shop was local. That said, most of them sold antiques. Over the years Leominster has been a popular venue for Bargain Hunt, a TV favourite of the housebound. It's also got a food colouring manufacturers in town. Perhaps that explains why David Dickinson ended up looking like a Cheesy Wotsit.

  I needed to find a campsite and one mile from the centre of town was a pub called Baron's Cross with a field and, for a fiver, that's where I stayed. The sun was still shining. I sat outside with a pint but realised I was at a disadvantage because this was where the locals came out to smoke and some of them wanted to talk. I mean, really wanted to talk.

  “You on a bike?”

  “Yep.”

  “I like all that racing. You know, Bradley Wiggins an' all that.”

  “Yeah, I don't really follow racing.”

  Then followed a fifteen minute monologue about the Tour de France. I'm too polite.

  But the bar staff were lovely and they all came outside too. I don't know who was running the bar. Maybe it was a free-for-all. They constantly took the piss out of the landlady, mainly because she wasn't local, but she took it in good part. Maybe that sort of thing matters around here.

  “So you're going to see every county?” one of the locals asked.

  “That's the plan.”

  “What are you looking forward to the most?”

  “The fleas,” I replied.

  “What?”

  “There are some famous fleas in Hertfordshire.”

  I gave her the rest of the tale.

  “You know which is the most beautiful county?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  I was expecting her to say it was Herefordshire.

  “It's Shropshire.”

  “Good, that's my next one.”

  “And then it's Herefordshire.”

  I'd had an identical conversation with someone else earlier in the day. I wasn't sure what measure they'd used to judge each county's beauty. It would be interesting to see if they were right. But it was certainly beautifully rural around here. Just on
e mile from the centre of the largest population for miles and the phone signal was rubbish.

  I popped into the pub's lounge where the TV told me today had been the warmest day of the year but since it was only the 20th April that wasn't so impressive.

  “But don't get used to it,” said the weather woman.

  She then undid her good work by using phrases like “not going to last” and “wintry showers”.

  “Here you go,” said the barmaid, delivering a steak pie, cheesy mash, peas and an ocean of gravy. I'd decided to give the stove a night off.

  An old woman, easily into her eighties, was also sitting in the lounge, a large Labrador at her feet. She was complaining about her children to a man leaning against the bar.

  “They only want me for my money,” she said. “My son even forged a cheque to get it.” She shook her little, grey head. “An' our Tracy lives in Birmingham. I never see her.”

  The man seemed to be tiring of her, remembered he'd promised to get something for her from the shops and disappeared for ten minutes. She spent the entire time complaining about her kids to her dog. The man returned and handed her a package.

  “Thank the nice man, Boney” she said to her pet.

  The Labrador looked up at her.

  “Go on, Boney, thank him.”

  The Labrador tilted his head wordlessly towards the man.

  “Thank him for Christ's sakes!”

  *

  In the same field as my tent was a camper van. In it was a bloke of about sixty. He invited me in for a morning cup of tea. Unlike the woman the morning before who was exploring the whole of beautiful Britain, this poor fella was lost. His wife had died a year ago and he drifted, here for one week, another site for the next, but rather than travelling purposefully he seemed to be killing time.

  “It's difficult without her, y'know,” he said, sipping his tea. “We used to do this together, but, well, now...”

  He trailed off, looking out of the window, close to tears. Maybe keeping on the move fills the time, but sometimes it's better to stay in one place and get yourself grounded, make some new friends.

  The bananas I'd had for breakfast hadn't done the trick and so, en route northwards to Ludlow, Britain's foodie capital, a smile crept across my face as I spied in a layby a big, red double decker bus that had been converted into a café.