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

by Steven Primrose-Smith

  After a delicious supper of fish, chips and gravy in the local chippy I finished the day the way that every day should be finished in this attractive little village, at The Anchor Inn supping a beer in Beer.

  *

  Today I was going to visit Dave. If you read Hungry for Miles, you already know Dave. Depending on your opinion, he was either 'the loveable one', 'the indecisive one' or 'the mental one'. All three descriptions fit him equally well.

  One or two of the readers of that book seemed to get the impression that Dave, and the other rider Joe, were in some way mistreated. Believe me, if Dave had been mistreated he was big enough to have dealt with it himself. There was no direct animosity between any of us. There may have been times when they both annoyed me, as I'm sure I annoyed them, but that's what you get when you bring a bunch of strangers together and starve them to death while cycling great distances. We each dealt with our grievances in a very British way, by repressing it and pretending it wasn't happening.

  En route to Dave's I passed into county 37 and Dorset. The route to his home took me on an uneventful ride under a grey sky. I was expecting more of Axminster. Given the perceived qualities of its carpets I imagined its town would be equally plush, but that wasn't the case. It felt more like a piece of lino.

  I did, however, see a genuine first. You know how a normal cake is a tenner but call it a wedding cake and it's suddenly three hundred quid, or to deliver a washing machine to your house is thirty quid but to deliver Uncle Jeff to the cemetery costs billions. Well, in Axminster there was a funeral and outside the church, to prevent inconvenient parking, they had special funereal traffic cones, not orange or red, but black ones. They must have cost the deceased's family a fortune.

  I took a series of grey and green lanes from Axminster, up and down dale, passing near a place called Fishpond Bottom, which sounds like a condition that requires Imodium. I eventually rolled in Beaminster, another one of those towns whose pronunciation isn't obvious. It's Bemster.

  Dave answered the door of his flat wearing his cycling gear and with his trademark smile wider than Brad Pitt's telly. It was great to see him again. We popped to the Red Lion, a pub just five minutes from his house. It was only after three pints that he told me he thought we were going cycling today, hence the cycling outfit. I just assumed he'd already been out. We figured it was probably safer to leave it until tomorrow now.

  He was going to leave with me and start his own tour of various British Cycle Quest (BCQ) sites. Basically, the aim of BCQ is to visit six pre-selected sites per county and answer a question about each that you'd only be able to discover by turning up in person. He didn't have time to do the whole country but he planned to cycle for three months. He had a bigger budget than on our last ride. This time he had a full five pounds a day.

  On the way back we stopped at the supermarket for more cider and a couple of pizzas. While his oven cooked the food he played me his record collection on a tiny, ancient deck. The evening felt nicely retro, listening to his heavy rock staples of AC/DC and Iron Maiden with the occasional Eurythmics thrown in to provide variation and then to spoil it all, his pride and joy, an album by The Worzles.

  “Here,” he said, coming out of the kitchen. “I got this for you.”

  He handed me a bottle of local porter, Black Ven from Lyme Regis.

  “Thanks, Dave.”

  “I bought you a four-pack but I drank the other three last night.”

  It was good stuff. We had our pizzas and worked our way through the cider. Then Dave started to talk excitedly about his fat bike, basically a monster truck driver's rebuild of a BMX. Its tyres are almost as wide as a car's.

  “People think I'm stupid spending money on this,” he said. After all, he wasn't earning much. He was back as a pot washer at the pub he'd been working at before last year's ride. “But I don't care what people think. If I want to spend £1,100 on it, I will do,” he grinned. “It's up to me. In fact, if I want to spend £1,100 on drugs, I will do.”

  He showed me his bike. It really did look a little bit ridiculous.

  “Your bike looks like the sort of decision you'd make after taking £1,100's worth of drugs,” I said.

  The huge tyres are under-inflated to allow you to ride on soft sand. They're not much use on the road. With the cider all gone and drunkenness maximised Dave wanted to give me a demonstration of his monster bike. What better time to do it? It was, after all, gone midnight. He opened his front door, pushed the bike outside and mounted it.

  “Ready?” I said.

  He nodded, his smile splitting his face. The cider had made him happy, but the idea of cider and a fat bike pushed him over the edge. He disappeared down his short pathway, through his gate, over the quiet residential road and bumped the front wheel up the opposite pavement on to a small grass verge.

  Now, at this point, he'd planned to turn, do a half-circle on the grass and return to where he'd started. Instead, he kept going straight on, through a huge clump of nettles and down a steep banking. I ran out to see if he was alright in time to hear a splash, a “Ouf!” and then hysterical giggles.

  A few seconds later he emerged from the nettles, his light grey t-shirt now charcoal thanks to the water in the river at the bottom of the banking and his track suit bottoms soaked.

  “You dick,” I said, failing to hold back a smirk.

  His huge beamer was wider than any smile I'd ever seen before.

  *

  After my night sleeping on Dave's living room floor we set off together the next morning, Dave on his road bike rather than his fat bike. We were heading towards the Cerne Abbas Giant on roads that Dave had described as “not very hilly” but which were, in reality, very hilly indeed. It wasn't as bad as Cornwall but I still needed to push.

  After an hour or so we arrived at the viewing point to see the chalk giant. He stands 55 metres tall with an impressive 11-metre erection. Apparently, postcards of the giant are the only image of an erect penis that can be sent legally through the English Post Office.

  The village of Cerne Abbas was keen to use the commercial power of the hillside nude for its own benefit and a lot of the local businesses included his image, phallus and all, as a part of their own logos. It was all very unBritish. After all, no UK company has employed such a massive knob in its advertising since Iceland fired Peter André.

  The sun was out that morning but it certainly wasn't a given around here. Only seven miles south from here is Martintown, Britain's wettest village. It's not generally damp but holds the record all the same. On July 18 1955, 279 mm of rain fell in 24 hours. That's three months' worth on a single day!

  After lunch we continued over a huge hill through Piddletrenthide. A strong wind blowing from the deep blue sky rippled the long grass on the hillside, creating impressionistic waves of pale green. As our route collided with the A354, we bade each other farewell. Dave was heading north-west to his sister's forty miles away while I had some martyrs to see.

  The towns and villages in this part of Dorset are oddly named. There is a puddle of Piddles and a piddlingly large amount of Puddles. There's Piddlehinton, Affpuddle and Briantspuddle. Puddletown, which stands on the River Piddle, sounds like a CBeebies show about a village of animated ducks. To maintain the urination theme, there's also a neighbouring village called Tincleton, but my destination today was Tolpuddle.

  The Tolpuddle Martyrs were a bunch of young men who, without intending to, started the trade union movement. They campaigned to increase the wages of the average worker and for such insolence were shipped off to Australia and sentenced to hard labour.

  One local landowner complained the workers were trying to determine their own wages, which was “against the natural order of things”, and shows that nowadays, in an age when unions have less and less power, little has changed.

  Although the Tolpuddle museum is free, I was the only person in there. More popular, and not far down the road, is Bovington Tank Museum. If the Tolpuddle museum is about making
life better for the workers of the world, Bovington is about building machines that do the opposite.

  Before reaching the museum proper, there was some sort of racing track for tanks with an information board to show you the types of killing machine flying past. They all seemed to have names like condoms. There was a Trojan and a Titan and a Centurion. There was even one called a Mastiff, for the bestiality lovers out there.

  To justify the thirteen quid entrance fee the tank museum says you can come back any time you like within the next year, but they know there's more than a yearful of tanks in a single visit to the place.

  The first tank I saw was from 1915 and called Little Willie. Presumably the tank designers back then had more confidence in the size of their own wedding tackle rather than bluster with the big penis names of modern tanks.

  Next came a cute, little, white death machine used by the UN. It had originally been named Fieldmouse, but this was deemed too dainty and so was changed to Ferret, which isn't much better. If the opposing forces of European nations had spent as much effort on diplomacy as they did dreaming up imaginative names for their hardware perhaps they wouldn't have needed tanks at all.

  The museum didn't shy away from describing unfortunate tank design issues. There was an Italian Carro Veloce, a tiny, flame-throwing tank, that suffered its own problems. Its cannon frequently backfired and cooked alive its own crew way past al dente.

  The museum glorified war and soldiering, which perhaps isn't so surprising this close to Bovington Camp's army base. But some parts were unnecessary, like the stick-your-head-into-the-scene-and-complete-the-picture of you holding a massive bayonet, presumably just before stabbing it into someone's head.

  The models of the trenches were uncomfortable and the cutaways of the tanks showed just how tightly the soldiers were packed in there. They must have wished they'd done a GCSE and joined the RAF instead.

  It was best to walk around this place without thinking too deeply about it, lest humanity take a mental kicking for its ability to excel at such sadistic creativity. Every single machine in that huge hangar – and there were hundreds – was designed with one aim in mind: to blow other human beings to pieces.

  Feeling slightly ill about the whole place wasn't improved when I turned up at the nearby campsite in Wool.

  “It's £24,” the bloke said.

  Bloody hell.

  “Is that for the week?” I asked.

  He ignored me. There was no alternative, or at least that's what I thought. Popping out to buy provisions later, I saw a sign for another place just a mile away. Never mind, I could still think back to Dave's gurning, dripping-wet head emerging from a thicket of nettles and giggle myself into a better mood.

  *

  I cycled towards the south coast, through the lovely Purbeck Hills, along the track of a firing range. Large numbers were positioned high on the hillside for target practice. Lower down, on the flat plain beneath the hills, burnt out and partially destroyed tanks littered the landscape. Each and every fence was adorned with a Keep Out sign.

  I was heading to Tyneham Village. Down a steep track from the high ridge of the hill I was in for a surprise. For a famously abandoned village it contained more people than any of the inhabited ones I'd cycled through of late, although these were all day-visitors.

  The village itself was just a row of four houses, a rectory, an old school room, a church, a gardener's house and a farm with a barn that had once functioned as a local theatre. The village had been a thriving little community but was acquisitioned during World War Two. For the incoming Ministry of Defence operatives, a sad notice had been hung on the church door:

  “Please treat the church and houses with care. We have given up our homes where many of us have lived for generations, to help win the war to keep men free. We will return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.”

  No one was ever allowed back. It was never made clear, at least to the visitor, why the Army had needed the village. It hadn't been used as target practice. The houses remained as they had been left, minus roofs in most cases. But a community had been torn apart never to reform.

  Under a melancholic sky I trundled onwards, passing dramatic Corfe Castle. I headed towards the Isle of Purbeck, which isn't an island at all. From a high viewpoint, Poole's harbour and wide bay is gorgeous.

  At the end of the headland a boat avoids a twenty-mile diversion around the bay. The link from the Isle of Purbeck to Poole is via a chain ferry that costs a pound. On the same boat were two lycra-clad cyclists, blonde Steph and brunette Nicki. We chatted on the short crossing. Just as we hit land, Nicki piped up.

  “Is my face dirty?” she asked.

  “Yes, it is.”

  It was filthy. She left it at that and we all disembarked before she could tell me the story.

  Through Poole I made my way into Bournemouth where the fire brigade had closed off a main road while they hosed down an abandoned pub that was mysteriously on fire and screamed “Insurance job!”

  I was still moving east, now heading into Hampshire and the Sussexes, some of the wealthiest parts of Britain. Would all this cash lying about the place make it the most desirable part of the country to live in? Er, no, it wouldn't.

  Chapter 9: Down in the Downs

  Hampshire, West Sussex and East Sussex

  After skirting Christchurch I was approaching the New Forest. I had big hopes for the place. I'd heard great things about it. Weirdly, as the signs for the place appeared along with the cattle grids to keep the ponies on the inside, the trees disappeared and were replaced by withered stumps or low shrubs. It was as forest-like as a football pitch, at least for those first few miles.

  In the woods of Brockenhurst I found a huge, expensive and mostly rubbish campsite where hundreds of tents were packed so closely together on this sunny Friday in early June that later we'd be able to hear each other snore. Ponies walked about the place with the kind of protection offered to the street-walking cows of Delhi, which was probably necessary since they appeared to be particularly fond of devouring tents. Given that mine had now been slept in for all but a handful of my 54 days on the road, its internal odour provided, thankfully, a measure of protection.

  *

  I'd always imagined the New Forest to be a rural wonderland instead of the traffic-clogged, uninspiring place that it turned out to be. I suspect I'd been spoiled by the majesty of Wales, and the occasional peacefulness of Cornwall and Devon at least once away from the A-roads and, well, just about everywhere I'd been so far bar the West Midlands.

  The New Forest is in Hampshire, of course. Hampshire sounds like a place with money and if that's correct, and everyone is paying their taxes, the residents would have a pretty good case for acts of public disobedience given the crappy state of their roads. Swansea may have suffered potholes on the way in, but Hampshire's surfaces were unpleasant just about everywhere.

  As I'd cycled around Britain so far, it had been relatively light on road-based teenage knobbery, the sort of driver who overtakes and then holds in his clutch slightly at the same time as accelerating to make his engine roar as loudly and aggressively as possible. But here, in Hampshire, it seemed like everyone was doing it. If you can get that angry while driving through a forest, maybe you should have a lie down. Or buy a bicycle, but just remember to ride somewhere other than Hampshire.

  The route east took me through Romsey, a pleasant enough historic market town, and then on an entirely forgettable A-road to the little city of Winchester.

  Winchester sounds like a classy sort of place, maybe because it usually precedes 'cathedral', and so it was a surprise to see there's a prison here. Maybe it's home to gentlemen thieves like Raffles. But then the town's welcome sign calls Winchester “the City of Kings and Priests” and so perhaps it's just a large paedo wing for the latter.

  Winchester turned out to be a massive disappointment. The highlight was a woman singing in the main shopping street accompanied by a man on a little
keyboard. She wailed like she was giving birth to an eighteen pound baby. And the cathedral wasn't too bad. It's apparently Britain's longest although it has a squat, not particularly attractive main tower. The more I travelled through Britain, and the more great stuff I saw, the less easy it was to be impressed. Sorry, Winchester.

  But the worst element of Winchester was that, in reality, it's just an upmarket Anytown. The centre was still full of chains. They may have been more chic than Poundland, McDonald's and Ladbrokes – Joules, Fat Face and Wagamama were here – but it didn't make the place any less of a carbon copy of elsewhere.

  This is supposed to be a positive tour of Britain and I feel I've done nothing but moan about Hampshire. I deliberately set out to find something wonderful. I tried typing “Hampshire” and “positive” into Google. The first search result was for a HIV support group. Oh well.

  *

  If I was dumping on Hampshire, Hampshire was dumping on me too. I woke up to the sound of a bird expansively unloading on to the roof of my tent. I cleaned it off with a handful of large sycamore leaves. It must have been an albatross.

  The sun continued to shine. If you live in Britain, you might be thinking, “Hang on, I don't remember all this good weather in 2016” and you'd be right. I was being incredibly lucky. While I'd been bathing in the south-west's sunshine it was raining in the south-east. As I edged in the direction of London, the dampness moved westwards. I'd basically had a big hole in the clouds directly over my head since Cardiff three and a half weeks earlier.

  The weather may have been nice but the roads continued to be awful and, lest you think this is just some northern rant against the south, I wasn't the only one who thought so. I bought a local newspaper, The Herald. There were two letters in it from annoyed locals on this topic, including one from Diana, also a cyclist, who'd just come back from a holiday in Somerset and realised how bad it is around here. That said, maybe these things were more noticeable on a bike than in a car. The metre-long ruts in the side of the road every few metres might not even register with anyone sitting on big Michelins. Maybe I should have cycled around the place on Dave's fat bike.