Apparently, the shortest distance for cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats is 874 miles. Google maps will get you there in 837 if you’re prepared to risk arrest and your life on the motorways. Not being in a desperate rush and wanting to see something other than cars flashing by and burger vans in lay-bys, I intend to take the scenic route, or at least my scenic route. Actually, it’s somebody else’s scenic route which I’ve checked carefully and adapted when, after miles of sticking rigidly to country lanes and NCN routes, they inexplicably took the A6 to Penrith when the Forest of Bowland is a more beautiful if longer and hillier alternative.
For some End to Enders it’s more about the achievement than the experience so the sooner it’s over, the better. Tick, done that. I view it as a (perhaps) once in a lifetime experience to be savoured and enjoyed though it will be evident from the daily updates after the ride has begun, exactly how much savouring and enjoying is going on. A lot less if the British Summer continues to live up to its billing.
So how do you go about selecting and mapping a 1016 mile route, heading in a straight line as far as is possible and avoiding traffic? The answer is to follow the yellow roads; Ordnance Survey’s yellow roads that is.
A standard road map of Great Britain that you can pick up for a few pounds at any motorway service station before throwing onto the back seat from where it will fall to the footwell and become a mat for backseat passengers who are usually children and therefore not adept at wiping their feet; uses the following colour code. Motorways are blue and illegal for bicycles to ride on. Major ‘A’ roads are green and to be avoided if you want to arrive with your nerves intact. Smaller ‘A’ roads are red and only to be used to navigate through towns if a ‘B’ road isn’t an option. ‘B’ roads are yellow but these are not the yellow roads I’m looking for. Then there is the criss cross of white roads drawn to a scale where accurate navigation is almost impossible. These are the country lanes I intend to travel on, relics of a bygone era where they were the only (and in some cases still are the only) route between villages.
For clarity (and because I find it interesting) but at the risk of losing your attention, OS maps have a different colour code. Motorways, and major and minor ‘A’ roads are the same but ‘B’ roads are orange and…. stay with me, I’m getting to the point… the smaller roads, white on Road Atlases remember; well, they’re yellow, the yellow roads referred to in the title of this post. Often quiet and traffic free, particularly if they also have little green circles on them – on the map that is is, not the roads themselves. Unfortunately, particularly in Cornwall and Devon, they also have rather a lot of little black arrows which denote steep uphills and downhills. One arrow means between 14% and 20% and two means over 20%. I tend to find climbing 20% gradients easier than descending them but that could have something to do with the quality of my brakes. This is all very well (and a little bit dull), I hear you say but it doesn’t answer the question about mapping and navigating which I mentioned earlier.
Well, it’s quite simple and requires two open browsers, a yearly subscription to OS maps online and a Garmin Edge Touring GPS. In case you want try it at home; open ridewithgps.com and ‘plan’ a new route. Cross-check with OS maps to make sure those are actual roads you’re clicking on and not bridleways through copses that lead to nowhere; then download the file and stick it on your Garmin and you’re away. Almost foolproof.
So when those End to Enders who have taken their short route without scenery, are hurtling along their virtually flat ‘A’ roads with their heads down because there’s nothing to look at other than the tail lights of a BMW disappearing into the mist and drizzle; I’ll be hauling my bike, laden panniers and myself, up and down some pretty steep hills which in most cases don’t even go directly to where I’m heading; and when I get to the top, I’ll pause to take in the vista and look down on the poor End to Enders on the wrong coloured roads who aren’t up there with me.
Land's End to John O'Groats 