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

by Steven Primrose-Smith

  While staring and mentally-picturing I met a group of walkers who were out strolling the ancient sites of Wiltshire. A group's leader looked at the field and tilted his head.

  “I was expecting more,” he said sadly.

  “You have to use your imagination,” I replied.

  He looked a little longer.

  “I reckon if you join those rocks up it'd make a picture of an elephant.”

  I looked but couldn't see it.

  “Maybe the archaeologists got it wrong. Maybe it wasn't an ancient house or temple, but the druid police's rock outline of an ancient pachyderm murder scene.”

  He looked at me and wrinkled his brow.

  “I don't think England had elephants back then,” he said.

  “I don't think they had druid police either.”

  “So that's stupid then, isn't it?”

  “Yes,” I said, chastised.

  I moved on to the slightly more satisfying 129-feet tall Silbury Hill. No imagination was needed here. Silbury Hill is, well, a hill. The odd thing is that it's man-made and no one knows why anyone bothered. It was built between 2400 and 2300 BC. Over successive generations more and more people lugged more and more soil to the top and it grew and grew. But why? That's anyone's guess. There probably wasn't much on telly back then.

  Next up, a stone's throw up the road, is West Kennet Long Barrow, an ancient burial chamber, one of the longest in Britain and well over 5,000 years old. Its side chambers are perfect isosceles triangles, built thousands of years before the Greeks even devised the word 'geometry' and ruined the lives of millions of school children. At least the archaeologists know what this one is.

  Today's star attraction, though, was Avebury, the ancient site of Britain's largest stone circle. In a misty twilight I imagine this Neolithic ring of stones could be nicely spooky, but in bright sunshine in the middle of the afternoon it was less so. The serenity wasn't enhanced by hundreds of school kids running about the place screaming as though someone had set their hair on fire. I also couldn't help thinking the site's mysticism levels might have been higher had they not built a sodding road right through the middle of it.

  When the kids had gone it was a nice spot to linger. The huge standing stones must have taken some shifting. Sheep wandered between them, although one or two looked a bit diseased. If this place had any magic it wasn't rubbing off on its ovine representatives.

  I went to the Henge Shop, the typical sort of place you see anywhere druids, witches or gullible tourists have ever gathered. It sells a collection of things vaguely connected to the site and the word 'spirituality' in general, such as jewellery twisted into ancient shapes and books on magic, Nostradamus and crop circles. Less mystical, although perhaps more apt, were the Lambs Whoopsies, chocolate buttons masquerading as delicious sheep turds.

  Just before I arrived in the town of Calne, my tent's grassy home for tonight, I passed the Cherhill White Horse, a 40 x 43 metre hillside equine cut out of the chalk landscape in 1780. There are loads of them around here – from my map I counted at least seven in an eight-mile radius of Avebury. This must help trade in the local Tesco's as people wander the country lanes, see one of the horses and then think, “Mmm, I really fancy a burger.”

  But if anything, today was one of regret. Although the last few hours had been stuffed full of bona fide tourist attractions, even if no one knew what most of them were actually for, I later discovered I'd missed two places just off my route. Castle Combe has been called Britain's prettiest village. Missing this wasn't such a big deal. Wiltshire is gorgeous. Just about every place I cycled through could have been a contender for such a title. More annoying was missing out on my growing collection of strange place names. Near Castle Combe is an eight-cottage hamlet called Tiddleywink.

  This highlights something about the diversity of Britain's attributes. You could do a ride like mine, visiting every county without ever actually experiencing a single road that I cycled and still see some great stuff. In fact, you could get luckier than me. You could see the land's prettiest village and the hamlet of Tiddleywink instead of a field full of sticks and stones, a circle of rocks populated by rabid children and mangy sheep and what may or may not have been the final resting place of a murdered elephant.

  *

  Shortly after Stockley, I reached the top of a hill and could see welcome flatness ahead. I tumbled down the other side into a village, the unfortunately named Lacock, whose moniker didn't match its genteel ambience. It was home to four lovely streets and a handful of pubs, which for any village these days is impressive, as well as Lacock Abbey, a building used in TV's Wolf Hall.

  I cycled on to Box and scored me a sausage sarnie from a petrol station. One change from when I lived in Britain is that, for many small communities, the only place to buy anything seems to be the petrol station. It's no longer just a place to fill up the car but a snack bar, a newsagent, an off licence, a mini-supermarket and a coffee shop, all these once local facilities hoovered up by the garage chains. I'd rather not have shopped there but the alternative was to eat nothing, get all light-headed and fall off my bike. So I donated some money to Shell, or whichever company it was, to help in their ongoing project to burn the world.

  This morning there was a story on Radio Four about a severed foot found in a park in Bath. I wasn't looking for dismembered limbs but it was Bath that was the next place on my route. Unfortunately the blue skies and sunny weather of yesterday had been replaced by a grey murk that wouldn't have helped any town, no matter how beautiful. I couldn't complain. I'd had half a week of sunshine. From memories of my youth in Blackburn, that's two summers-worth.

  I cycled around a bit and found a park, mercifully free of body parts. I'd been hoping to locate a cycle-path tunnel that someone had told me about, Britain's longest apparently, but no one knew where it was. Instead I'd ended up here.

  Sitting on a bench were an old couple. She was played by Ab Fab's Patsy Stone's great-grandma, her shrivelled body wrapped in designer shades, while he was the amiable old drunk from The Fast Show. They called me over, as though I were their man-servant. They were both incredibly well-spoken, like the Queen used to be in the 50s before she let herself go.

  They'd lived in Cambridge and spent years in California but had come back home.

  “Where's home for you?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “It isn't a place. It's people.”

  As soon as I spoke, Mr Fast Show descended into a comedy Yorkshire accent, all ee-by-gums and ecky-thumps.

  “I can't help it,” he said.

  But I think he probably could.

  “He just loves a northern boy,” said Granny Stone. “Where are you going?”

  “I've got no route.”

  “We have no roots either,” she replied.

  Their hearing wasn't as highly polished as their accents.

  “No, not roots,” I corrected. “No route.”

  “You've got no food?”

  This was getting me nowhere. They didn't know where the tunnel was either. In fact, the question seemed to confuse them. They thought I was asking for a funnel. It was time for me to move on.

  According to The Telegraph, Bath is Britain's cultural capital but it has a less appealing claim to be Britain's personal debt capital. As of 2014, each person in the BA1 postcode owed on average £2,311 in personal loans. It was costing them an arm and a leg, quite literally for those unfortunates who had their bits scattered around Bath's parks.

  It had taken me longer than expected to get to Bath and so, with the weather closing in, it was time to find a site for the night. The grey sky grumbled over my head. The canal towpath I'd been told about as a pleasant escape from the city was closed and so I was forced on to busy roads. The rain came down, not really adding to the general mood.

  On the soggy campsite there were a couple of motorcyclists visiting from Australia. One of them was originally English although you'd never have known from his accent. The
other had never left Oz before. I looked at his immediate surroundings, the verdant trees, emerald lawn and khaki bushes and compared it mentally to his antipodean deserts.

  “Is this the first time you've ever seen the colour green?” I asked him.

  He smiled.

  “We have some in Melbourne,” he replied, “but today I came over a hill and I said, 'Faakin' hell, mate, now that's green!'”

  I left them there, drinking Fosters, obviously, as I popped to yet another garage – the only place for miles around – to buy my dinner. While there, another motorcyclist paced around, looking a bit sheepish. I asked him if he was alright.

  “Not really,” he replied with a southern Irish lilt. “I used the green petrol nozzle thinking it was unleaded.”

  “And it was diesel?”

  “Yup,” he said sadly.

  His accent made it sound less tragedy and more comedy but he wasn't laughing.

  Inside the garage supermarket I bought ingredients to make a pasta sauce but, back at the tent, the rain returned, buggering any plans to cook and so I had to make do with a couple of Scotch eggs I'd bought as a starter. I was living the dream. So far on this ride, trying to eat British where possible, it wasn't so much Five-a-Day as Five-a-Month, and I don't think I was even achieving that sorry target.

  *

  It was the 18th of May and my birthday. As on most of my previous birthdays while cycle-touring I was being met by Nina. In the past she'd come to find me in such wonderful cities as Berlin, Rome, Athens, Madrid and Istanbul. Today she would top them all. She was coming to Bristol!

  At the end of the last ride, it had seemed like this relationship was over, and indeed it was for the four months following that trip. But in January we got back together and, this spring, I'd spent a lovely three months in Nina's mountain village in Spain. All was well.

  The forecast rain waited until I'd packed the tent away and got myself about one hundred metres down the road before it unleashed its swimming pool-sized load on my head. It stopped soon afterwards but it was in damp clothes that I peeled my way through the layers of main road and dual carriageway to arrive at Bristol's main railway station. The externals of Bristol hadn't given much hope as to what we'd find inside, but, then again, that's true of most cities. Nina got off a bus and my birthday party could begin.

  Bristol is also a county and, at 42 square miles, is the equal second smallest in Britain, tied with Blaenau Gwent. It's been given such diverse titles as the street art and graffiti capital of Britain, the UK's most bike-friendly city, the green capital of Europe, the musical capital of Britain and, a little dubiously, within that region of the world second most likely to see a tornado. Don't get excited; we didn't see any twisters.

  The little apartment we rented was near the Cabot Circus shopping centre. I tend not to visit shopping centres unless it's absolutely necessary, and I hadn't experienced any on this trip so far, but haven't they come on? I mean, this one still sold the same old shit and the food on offer was mass-produced pap but at least the building was interesting, like an indoor version of the town in Bladerunner but in English and with not quite so many replicants running about the place. That said, how would I know?

  Over the next three days we checked out all the city had to offer. It's a damn nice place. It has great street food at the St Nicholas market, where you can get grub from all four corners of an oddly-shaped globe, from huge Middle Eastern pittas stuffed with freshly-frazzed falafel to strange African fish. And Millennium Square was an interesting space with its solar-panelled tree from which you could charge your phone, as well as a solar-powered music machine and raised beds growing fruit and vegetables for a project called Food for Free. A huge silver ball the size of a house dominates the square. And then there are the people. A man passed by on a mobility scooter wearing a pirate hat.

  We popped down to the harbour. It was here not long ago that a monster alien, something that looked like a flashing radioactive squid, was caught on camera. You can find the video on YouTube. But this wasn't a job for that Animal Pathology Field Unit in North Wales. It turned out to be just a P.R. stunt for a new TV programme that no one can remember. Maybe that's a lesson. Never make your stunt more exciting than your show.

  Walking around town one day I was accosted by an activist for Amnesty International, a hipster with a waxed moustache, a look that, when adopted by a recent contestant on Great British Bake Off, caused the internet to explode with rage. The hipster was angry that the Tories wanted to drop Britain's commitment to the Human Rights Act. I should have just nodded and said, Yeah, mate.” Instead, I mentioned how human rights are meaningless unless they're enforced. For example, what's the point of insisting people have a human right to clean water if there are humans who don't have clean water and yet it's no one's job to sort that out? So I got a fifteen-minute lecture when I'd rather have been seeing what else Bristol had to offer.

  The debate had put me in the right fighting mood, however, when I was stopped a few minutes later by a film crew who asked me my opinion on the forthcoming EU Referendum, just over a month away. As someone who's lived and worked in Austria and Spain and benefited from the single currency while travelling everywhere in Europe, it won't be a surprise which side of the fence I was on.

  “To me,” I said with a camera in my face, “seventy years ago we were all killing each other. Every step since the end of the war has been a positive one, moving towards where we are today. If we keep moving forward, keep working together, eventually there'll be a United States of Europe. I know that worries a lot of people, but I'm not sure why. I mean, it worked pretty well for America. If Britain leaves the EU, then that's the first step backwards, the first step away from the European peace project.”

  The reporter shook my hand and said, “You're a star,” but I suspect he would've said that even if I'd drooled incoherently and shouted, “Send 'em all back!”

  We continued on to the M-Shed, a building offering various oddball exhibitions. At one such collection I found Nina stroking her chin and perusing an assortment of toys scattered on the floor.

  “What do you think it means?” she asked thoughtfully.

  A four-year-old child appeared, picked up one of the building blocks and threw it. I looked at Nina, who appeared to gasp.

  “It's a play area,” I said.

  The penny dropped.

  “Don't you dare tell anyone about that,” she replied.

  “I promise.”

  One of the most original things in the M-Shed was Briswool, a model of the city that had been hand-knitted by, I'm assuming given its scale, absolutely loads of people. There were woollen houses by a woollen river on which bobbed woollen boats. A woollen cathedral looked down from a woollen hillside. Woollen cars drove down woollen streets, one of which went to that huge woollen silver orb we'd seen on Millennium Square. Unfortunately they'd forgotten to complete the scene with a woollen nutter in a pirate hat.

  My quest to find foods I'd never eaten before wasn't turning up the culinary treats that my ride around Europe had done, but in Bristol we found a Chinese supermarket and I bought a jar of waxberries. I'd never even heard of them. Imagine a large currant within which is a stone approximately the size of a large currant. That's a waxberry. Don't bother. They're a lot of work for little reward.

  After a final evening in the apartment that included a bottle of tequila and a supermarket pizza that was reduced to a lump of charcoal in the flat's nuclear-powered oven, it was time for Nina to pack up and return home, and for me to continue on my road trip. Bristol had been fun, a British city well worthy of a visit. Go and see it, maybe on a mobility scooter in fancy dress.

  *

  The weather in Bristol had been generally murky, grey with rain and little sunshine, but that hardly matters when you're visiting markets and woollen cities and pondering the artistic merits of a child's play area. Now I was back on the road, things were different. I'd been promised three more days of sunshine. And it was
British sunshine, the most valuable sort of sunshine in the world because, like gold and the talents of Kanye West, it's a scarce commodity.

  I was now in Somerset, a county that feels like it should be different to the ones around it, full of farmers and bales of straw and people with cider-related cirrhosis of the liver. I'd left the city behind and cycled to Cheddar.

  There's no more famous British cheese than the one produced here and I wanted to know what sets it apart from its competitors. I headed to the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company's HQ. It's the only place in town that makes Cheddar, and in their visitor centre you can watch a video of the entire process. If you prefer your cheese-making a bit more rock 'n' roll, you can watch its manufacture live, although they'll almost certainly kick you out each evening with the rest of the groupies. The performance goes on for days, like a Chris Rea song seems to.

  The milk is heated until it separates into curds and whey. The whey is poured off and the curds are sliced into chunks and then compressed to release more whey. This is the process for all hard cheeses. The Cheddar difference is that the compacted cheese is then sliced into pieces and stacked on top of one another in higher and higher towers, a process called Cheddaring, that squeezes out even more whey. It's then put into moulds and aged in nearby Gough's Cave, a two-kilometre-deep cavern in which, 15,000 years ago, cannibals lived. Cannibals don't like cheese, although they're quite partial to Kurds.

  The visitor's centre included some cheesy facts. Apparently, Captain Scott took 3,500 lbs of Cheddar on his Antarctic expedition. When Oates famously left their tent saying that he may be some time, perhaps he was just popping out for some crackers.

  In the centre's accompanying shop, I sampled their Vintage Cheddar, one matured for a full sixteen months. It's wonderfully strong. It reminded me of a description I'd heard for Casu Marzu, the cheese from Sardinia to which fly larvae are added from which sprout maggots that munch the cheese and excrete, I suppose, maggot poo. Apparently, Casu Marzu has such a strong ammonia taste that a nibble can linger in your mouth for up to twelve hours. You've also got to watch for the maggots throwing themselves at your eyeballs. Vintage Cheddar wasn't as powerful as Casu Marzu but it definitely had a tiny hint of ammonia. Anyway, I blessed the cheesemakers with a fiver and carried off a packet of Vintage. If I wanted to take it to the next level, I figured I'd have to find my own maggots.