Free Country: A Penniless Adventure the Length of Britain

by George Mahood

Yet again, our hosts insisted that we have breakfast so we gladly accepted. Annie gave us our clean and dry boxer shorts and socks and introduced us to their chicken Diamond Lil. Home grown eggs, too.

  We looked at a map over breakfast, and for the first we had a sudden realisation of just how big Great Britain was. We had been on the road for three days yet we had covered only a tiny fraction of the island. We still had nearly 900 miles between us and the top of Scotland and it was incredibly daunting. Even with our new bikes we had only managed 48 miles, and if there was any hope in us reaching John O’Groats within three weeks, we were going to have to significantly pick up the pace.

  Outside, David was doing something to our bikes.

  ‘I noticed that the handlebars on this pink one looked really uncomfortable,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, they are a bit,’ said Ben.

  ‘Well I think I have fixed them.’

  We walked over to him and noticed that Pinky’s handlebars had grown into huge sponges. He had taken a section of foam pipe insulation from the pipes in his garage, and cut them into handlebar-sized pieces, which he had then taped onto the bike. The Falcon also had a big bath sponge taped to its seat, with the intention of making it more comfortable.

  ‘Thanks, David. They look... err... great,’ said Ben.

  ‘Yeah, they look loads better,’ I said suspiciously.

  We gave our thanks to Annie and David and left Nanstallon. David had suggested following a route known as the Camel Trail for a few miles. The Camel Trail was a stretch of old railway that had been converted into a path for walking and cycling. It had two parts; one stretching from Padstow to Bodmin, the other section stretching east towards Camelford, which was the direction we were heading.

  We joined the path just after leaving Nanstallon. It was a pleasure to cycle along, considering it was the first piece of flat ground that we had cycled along since the car park at Land’s End. Accompanied by a chorus of birds, we wound our way through forests and along the bank of the river Camel.

  ‘Excuse me, is this the way to Camelford?’ I asked an elderly walker, who was walking in the opposite direction to us, with a lady who appeared to be his daughter.

  ‘Yes. It’s just a few miles further down the trail,’ he said. ‘Is that where you are heading?’

  ‘For now, yes, but we’re on our way to John O’Groats,’ said Ben.

  ‘Oh really? I walked from John O’Groats to Land’s End a few years ago. I’m actually mentioned in the museum at Land’s End, as I’m the oldest person to walk the route. I’m just along the wall from Ian Botham.’

  ‘And the story of the man who tried to push a pea with his nose the entire way,’ I added.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. The stupid idiot,’ he said.

  Reg Savill was the only person we had spoken to since setting off that morning, and it turned out that he was a Land’s End to John O’Groats record holder. What were the chances?

  He was 74 when he completed the trip and he had walked the entire distance on his own. Fairly early on in his trip, he had a chance meeting with a man named Gil Campbell who was out driving in his campervan. He had noticed Reg walking along the side of the road looking languid, and offered him a lift to the next town. Reg declined the offer, but asked if the man could drop his rucksack at the next B&B along the route. Not only did the man oblige, but he also did the same every day, all the way to Land’s End. They had been close friends ever since.

  ‘He truly was a lifesaver,’ said Reg. ‘I honestly believe if it hadn’t been for him I would never have completed it.’

  ‘That’s incredible,’ I said. ‘We’ve met a few of our own versions of Gil already on our trip.’

  ‘And you’ll meet plenty more. There are lots of them about.’

  ‘So, it looks like you are still keeping yourself fit then, Reg?’ asked Ben

  ‘Well, yes, I used to be a Navy commando, so I was fairly fit. Until last year, I was doing my army training regime every morning; 100 press-ups, 100 sit-ups and 40 chin-ups. I had a hernia operation last year, so now I can only manage 20 chin-ups.’

  Ben and I were both in awe. We had found a new hero. We wanted to hear as many of Reg’s stories as possible, and so spent 45 minutes standing in the middle of the Camel Trail, being treated to tales from his journey.

  ‘I ended up on a motorway one day, by mistake. I was walking along and I took what I thought was the correct road, but it turned out to be a slip road that led onto the motorway. The road was fairly quiet so I decided to keep walking, as it was too late to turn back. The police picked me up after a few miles and drove me back to where I’d joined it. I had to take a different route then, and ended up walking 38 miles in one day. I wouldn’t recommend that.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s almost as far as we cycled yesterday. And you walked it!’ I said. ‘And any particular highlights of the trip for you?’

  ‘The highlands in Scotland are spectacular. If you think it’s pretty round here, just wait until you get to Scotland.’

  ‘How far are you walking today?’

  ‘About 12 miles. My wife and I try to do about 12 miles a day,’ he said, pointing to the pretty young lady beside him. His wife? Nice one, Reg. You da man!

  We left Reg with mixed emotions. We had been truly inspired by his achievements, motivation, and of course his young wife. If I can be half as fit as him when I’m in my late seventies then I’ll be very happy. But on the other hand, it made us both feel that our challenge was somewhat inferior. We were fairly fit young men and we had bikes. He was nearly three times our age, and had walked every inch of his 868 miles on foot.

  Camelford was a pretty little market town on the edge of Bardmin. I say was as I am writing this book in retrospect. It might be a shit-hole now, for all I know.

  It was, however, home to some very strange people. We sat down on a bench in a square just off the main street. It was quiet, apart from a drunk over in the far corner, who was swigging from a bottle in a paper bag and shouting incoherent obscenities to passers-by.

  It was almost midday and we were hungry again.

  We were approached by an odd looking lady. She was about seven feet tall, mid sixties, with a mass of bright blonde hair. I thought she was a transvestite at first, and Ben thought she was a witch. She later became known, between the two of us, as Tranny Witch.

  She had spotted me using my camera and had wandered over.

  ‘What are you taking pictures of?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re cycling to John O’Groats and we’re just taking some photos along the way.’

  ‘How interesting,’ said Tranny Witch.

  Her mouth started to foam in one corner, and the more she talked, the more it foamed. By the end of the conversation she looked like she had a marshmallow stuck to her face.

  She turned out to be a very interesting (ish) lady and told us a story of a pilgrimage of sorts that she had undertaken a few years previously, when she and a group of others had walked to London. They had also relied on people to help feed them and provide them with shelter along the way. She said the reception they got from everyone was astonishing. Fortunately, she didn’t set off in a pair of pants. That’s something I don’t want to even imagine.

  ‘Remember you’re not in England now, you’re in Cornwall,’ she said as she was leaving. ‘Meur ras. Dyw genes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what was that?’ asked Ben.

  ‘That means thank you and goodbye.’

  There was a butcher’s opposite and we wandered over to try and fill up our water bottles.

  ‘Ahhh, no problem,’ said the lady behind the counter.

  She asked us what we were doing and so we told her the story.

  ‘You’ll be wanting some lunch then, too. How about some chicken thighs?’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ I said, ‘but we don’t have any means to cook them.’

  ‘Oh, I see, fair enough. How about a couple of pork chops then?’

  ‘Errr, again, I think we’d
struggle to find somewhere to cook them for lunch. Thanks anyway.’

  ‘Hmmm, so I guess bacon wouldn’t be any use either then? How about some ham?’ she asked, not wanting to be defeated.

  ‘Some ham would be brilliant, thanks. I’m sure we could get some bread from somewhere.’

  ‘There are some cookies for you there, too,’ she said, handing us a carrier bag containing ham, cookies and our water bottles.

  I discovered that in 1988 Camelford’s water supply was accidentally contaminated when 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate was poured into the wrong tank at the local water works. The long-term effects on the residents are still under question. All I can say after meeting the locals is that it explains an awful lot.

  There was little chance that we would have successfully navigated ourselves to John O’Groats without the aid of a map or route book. Asking random strangers ‘which way is Scotland?’ was proving fruitless. We realised that we needed a more organised approach to navigation.

  ‘THE LIBRARY!’ I shouted.

  ‘What about the library?

  ‘We could borrow a map or a route book from the library. It solves all our problems. It will make getting to Scotland a hell of a lot easier, and we don’t even have to spend any money.’

  ‘Genius,’ said Ben.

  The library didn’t loan out maps, nor did it have a vast selection of Land’s End to John O’Groats route books but it did have one – Bike Britain, by Paul Salter. This was to become our bible over the following three weeks.

  Borrowing the book proved far easier than we expected. Despite having no identification, we were able to charm the librarian with our smiles. We promised to return the book to our local library after we had finished and for it to be transferred back to them.

  The book was perfect. It detailed a route from Land’s End to John O’Groats following mostly minor roads. It was spread out over a 21-day schedule. The only problem was that Camelford was on Day 2 of the book. We were halfway through our fourth day, and had the slight handicap of children’s bikes. We needed to get cracking.

  It was going to be a long afternoon, so we decided to try and do a few more miles before lunch. The town of Launceston was a few miles up the road so we set off with the aim of stopping there for a break.

  The route followed the busy A39 out of Camelford, and then cut away from the main road and carved its way through the countryside towards Launceston.

  Just before reaching Launceston, the road dropped sharply into the town. We soon discovered that despite all his kindness, David had actually converted Pinky into a death trap. The foam on the handlebars was so thick that it made it impossible to squeeze the brakes enough for them to work effectively. Ben, who was riding Pinky at the time, had to swerve around a bus that had pulled over, swerve back to avoid a head-on collision with oncoming traffic, weave in and out of a queue of cars that had backed up at a narrow intersection, before eventually coming to an abrupt stop against a wall.

  ‘What the fuck was David playing at?’ screamed Ben. ‘Was he trying to fucking kill me?’

  We both laughed.

  ‘Yeah, stupid David. What a fucking tosser!’ I said. ‘He took us in for the night, gave us dinner, a hot shower, a comfy bed, delicious breakfast, and then he went and fucked our bikes up. What a knob!’

  Launceston seemed to be a town of two parts. One part – the crap part - is at the bottom of the hill, with nothing but a couple of shops and some featureless streets. The other part – the less crap part - sits on the top of the hill dominated by the impressive Launceston Castle.

  There was no charge to visit the area of grass just inside the outer walls of the castle, so we sat on the bank and ate ham and stale bread that Ben acquired from a nearby baker. We had the remains of our pick ‘n’ mix for pudding. The view from the castle was stunning, and the ‘crap part’ of Launceston - that I had shunned just moments before - looked particularly beautiful from up high.

  Ben talked about his anger from the day before, when he had thrown Pinky in the hedge.

  ‘What you saw was only about 10% of the rage that was inside of me,’ he said.

  ‘Seriously? I thought you were just joking around.’

  ‘Noooo, that was all real.’

  ‘Were you pissed off with me?’

  ‘No, I was getting pissed off with myself. I hate holding people up.’

  ‘You weren’t holding me up. I like it when you get off and walk, as then I can get off, too.’

  ‘Well anyway, I’m feeling better today.’

  The Cornish Stannary Parliament launched Operation Chough in 1999, which resulted in the removal or defacing of English Heritage signs from many of Cornwall’s tourist attractions. One of which was Launceston Castle. The reason being, as Tranny Witch had pointed out, was that they weren’t in England, they were in Cornwall. A court case ensued, and charges against the Cornish Stannary Parliament were eventually dropped after they returned all the signs and paid compensation to English Heritage.

  Cornish or English, it was still a beautiful place. The castle itself only costs a few pounds to visit and looked to be well worth a trip.

  ‘Shall we see if Launceston has got a Police Station? They might have some proper bikes lying around that they can give us?’ asked Ben.

  ‘What do you mean? We’ve got proper bikes, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean bikes to get us to John O’Groats.’

  ‘I thought that’s what these were?’

  ‘What? Yeah, right. Very funny. These are just temporary things until we get something better.’

  I was confused. I had thought that we were going to take Pinky and The Falcon all the way to John O’Groats, but Ben had different ideas. They weren’t the best bikes in the world, admittedly, but they were doing the job. People had surely done the trip on worse bikes in the past.

  ‘Ok,’ I conceded, ‘let’s try the police station.’

  Launceston Police Station was situated on the outskirts of town, fortunately in the direction we were heading. A smiling bald man manned the desk.

  ‘We do get stolen bikes in occasionally, but if they’re not reclaimed then they get sent to Torquay,’ he said.

  ‘How far is Torquay from here?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Oooh, I would say it’s about 70 miles or so.’

  Ben looked at me. ‘That’s not too far,’ he said. ‘It’s probably worth a try.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked, in shock. ‘You want to cycle 70 miles out of our way, to somewhere that may or may not have bikes that are better than the ones we already have?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No!’

  Ben looked dejected.

  ‘Is there a tip in Launceston?’ he asked the policeman.

  ‘Yes, follow this road down for half a mile. Right at the roundabout then it’s on the right.’

  ‘It must be here somewhere,’ said Ben after we had taken every possible exit from the roundabout and still not found it.

  ‘Do you really think the tip is likely to have bikes better than the ones we already have?’

  ‘They might. It’s worth a try.’

  ‘Are you hoping that Lance Armstrong might have been holidaying in Cornwall and needed to get rid of a couple of his racing bikes? It’s 3pm already and we want to do another 30 miles today.’

  ‘You do. I don’t,’ snapped Ben.

  We eventually found the tip. They had an exercise bike, half a Raleigh Chopper and a fold-in-half shopper bikes with no wheels.

  ‘It doesn’t look like they have anything,’ accepted Ben.

  ‘That’s surprising.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What’s your problem with upgrading our bikes?’

  ‘My problem is that we’ve got bikes, and we’ve just spent the last TWO HOURS trying to get bikes, and we’ve covered about a mile.’

  ‘But if we can get better bikes, then we’ll be able to cycle more miles each day and we’ll
get there quicker.’

  ‘Why do we need to get there quicker? It’s not a race.’

  ‘No, but these bikes aren’t even comfortable to ride. You seem to like to suffer. They are not even adult bikes, they were made for children. I don’t understand you!’

  And so it went on.

  I could see Ben’s point. If we had got better bikes, we would have made better progress, and the cycling would have felt less painful. The truth was, I was secretly falling in love with The Falcon. Yes, it was far too small for me. Yes, its handlebars were hacking my palms to pieces. Yes, it had the hardest saddle ever invented, and because of the position of the handlebars I was swiftly becoming a hunchback. Riding a stegosaurus to Scotland would have been more comfortable. But there was something about The Falcon that was winning me over. It was partly the added challenge of completing the trip on an inadequate bike; I imagined that it would perhaps make me feel more of a man.

  I was also intensely aware that our trip was all about stripping things back to basics. People have been cycling the length of the country for years, on far crapper bikes, and just because we were living in the 21st century did not mean I needed a 21st century bike.

  The first recorded ‘End to End’ cyclists were two Leeds policemen, who completed the trip on penny-farthings in 1882. It took them 14 days. If the trip could be done in two weeks on a penny-farthing, then I could sure as hell do it in three weeks on a child’s racing bike.

  Reaching the Devon county sign was a pivotal moment, and it caught us completely by surprise. We just turned a corner and there it was. ‘Devon’, it said, as you would expect it should.

  We had cycled across an entire county. We had been warned that Cornwall was the worst bit, and so felt a real sense of achievement having successfully conquered it. We took an obligatory picture of the two of us at the signpost, for which I had to run back through a nettle patch to get in place before the self-timer fired.

  From then on, it promised to be easy. The contours of the land would level out, and we would be in John O’Groats in no time.