Beverley: Wolds apart

Beverley (picture), at the edge of the gentle Wolds, is one of our great secrets: a fine, characterful Georgian market town with its own brand of Yorkshireness.

While it has plenty in common with the county's other market towns such as Richmond – a fondness for turning potentially pedestrianised-showcase market squares into car parks, for instance – it's also distinct, very much East Riding rather than North or West.

So, brick houses, not stone; lumbering cattle, not windblown sheep; the flat vowels of the eastern plains, not the vocal hills and valleys of the moors or dales. And white, not red, phone boxes (picture): a reminder of Hull's unique independent local phone system in pre-privatisation days.


The cycle from Market Weighton was a pleasant trundle along the Hudson Way railtrail (picture) – another legacy of the evil Doktor Beeching, Bond-villain of the train world.

Kiplingcotes Racecourse, just by the station here, is the home of Britain's oldest horse race: its Derby has been run every year since 1519. Astoundingly, every single race has been won by the bookies.


Railtrails in Britain are often something of a punt, too. While the Hudson Way is no problem for a mountain bike, I usually felt the parallel country lanes (picture) were a better bet.

With a tailwind on a cool, tranquil May evening, almost totally devoid of traffic and embellished by birdsong, cycling through this gently rolling, reassuring rural landscape was a lovely little experience.


I've been to Beverley many times. I grew up (though my friends might dispute that term) a dozen miles away. But this was the first time I'd visited by bike, as a tourist.

And what a beautiful approach it was, into the town from the north, along grand early-19th century terraces that spoke of a wealthy mercantile past. Beverley had somehow got grander from when I last visited, two days before by car. The drizzly snap of the market square (picture) doesn't do it justice.


I passed through the famous old red-brick gate, the North Bar. (It was built in 1409; clearly not by the firm that did my extension in 2011, because it's still standing firm and solid today.) Remember that here in East Yorkshire, a street is a 'gate', a gate is a 'bar', and a bar is a 'pub'.

And the quintessential Beverley pub is the wonderful White Horse Inn (picture), aka 'Nellie's'. So I relaxed with a couple of pints of Sam Smith's bitter, £1.80 a pint. That's not a misprint, special offer or journalistic device (aka 'lie'): that's the regular price.

Nellie's hasn't been redecorated for about two hundred years, and its colour scheme has something of a brown theme: chestnut-brown, nicotine-stain-brown, soil-brown, and, er, other types of brown, the sources of which the traditionally agricultural clientele would have been odorously familiar with.

It was friendly, good-humoured and full of locals discussing their latest Premier Inn deal or Skyscanner bargain. Sociable, a little damp-smelling, discoloured and dim, I felt right at home.


I also had a quick cycle round Beverley Westwood, which sounds like an American golfer but is in fact a tract of countryside perfect for picnics, when it's not actually raining. It's right on the edge of the town centre (picture), characteristically East Riding and pastoral.

The racecourse is here too, and every year since 1519, bleary men in suits and tipsy women in frocks have staggered back to the town to miss their coach home.


Beverley has a nice line in silly street names: Toll Gavel, Old Waste, Narrow Racket (picture).

It also does a very nice line in walks round the centre (tourist info is available from Tourist Info) that invite you to spot subtly hidden statues, plaques and artworks: particular fun for naive young minds, such as those inside the head of cycle bloggers forced off their bikes by the drizzle.


Curiously obscure in the town – though it dominates the skyline if you're outside in the country – is the awesome, and deservedly celebrated, Minster (picture) – conveniently, right on several long-distance Sustrans bike routes.

But being Beverley, there's much more, unsung, stuff where that came from. St Mary's, at the opposite end of the centre, is a superb church that would be a famous market-town gem by itself if not for the Minster, perhaps the country's most splendid 'parish church'.

(Lewis Carroll got his White Rabbit character in the Alice books from a strange lagomorphic carving inside St Mary's.)

I liked Beverley a lot, despite the grey weather, surfeit of mid-market Italian restaurants, and mystifying shortage of central chip shops. The surrounding countryside is pleasant, though you wouldn't come here to develop your career as a landscape painter. (The town's favourite native artist, Fred Elwell, specialised in comfy Edwardian middle-class indoor scenes; pictures of his adorn many town walls and of course there's a 'Paint the Town Fred' walk.)

But it has that elusive balance of East Riding and mainstream-Yorkshire, of market-town compactness and service-town facilities. Beverley's economy is developing steadily too: a Carluccio's is arriving, and a Wetherspoon's. (Though even they will struggle to match Nellie's on price, as well as on worn-out dark-wood furnishings.)

I'll be back soon. And by bike.

Market Weighton: Tall stories

A key to understanding Yorkshire is that nothing else, anywhere, will ever be as good as it is in God's Own Country. (That's what Yorkshire people call Yorkshire. It's not what God calls it, but obviously His opinion doesn't count as much as, say, Fred Trueman's.)

Think, for example, of the farmer whose land straddled the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. After years of dispute, it was finally settled that his farm lay in Lancashire. Thank goodness, he said. I couldn't stand another Yorkshire winter.

Because Yorkshire cold is colder than any other cold, you see. Other counties' 'cold' may be, technically, of a 'lower temperature'. But Yorkshire cold is colder, because it's Yorkshire cold.


Anyway, Market Weighton (picture) put me in mind of this effect. I cycled through the small market town on my way from York to Beverley today. It was the birthplace of William Bradley (1787–1820), the tallest man ever in Britain at 7'9" (236cm). Never mind that Frederick Kempster apparently, technically, measured 1cm more: Bradley was from Yorkshire, which makes his 7'9" actually taller than that. He was Yorkshire tall.

The twenty or so miles between York and Market Weighton is as flat as a pint of non-Yorkshire beer, so Bill must have had a good view of all the intervening pig farms from up there.

His home town celebrates him well, with a life-size statue of Giant Bradley (picture). With good Yorkshire image management, this plays down the outsize features seen in contemporary illustrations of him which suggest acromegaly – the symptoms of an overactive pituitary, the developmental equivalent of a jammed accelerator that swells forehead, cheekbones, jaw, hands and feet to monster proportions.

Bradley weighed 27 stone (171kg) and could apparently wolf a whole leg of mutton for tea, though of course he'd've struggled to finish one of my mum's dinners. He exhibited himself with the travelling show Barnum's, along with a dwarf called Edward Calvet from Shiptonthorpe. Once they went out for a night on the town and Barnum's looked high and low for them. (See Ronnies, The Two: BBC1, 1976.)

Bill's giant-sized house is marked: it's now a gift shop, whose lofty ceilings must present quite a decorating challenge. Also visible is his jumbo grave inside the town's church, where he was buried (to deter trophy-hunting grave-robbers) following his death from tuberculosis at 33.


And then there's this rock (picture). According to local legend, the big guy carried it for a bet all the way from Goodmanham, three miles away, to here. Now this is a newsagent's, though then it was probably a farrier's or a charnel-house or soothsayer's or something.

I don't know how much it weighs, but given the choice between the rock and my panniers, jam-packed as usual with sandwiches, tools, electrical goods, emergency bottles of wine, Argos catalogues etc, the Yorkshire Giant would have asked for the rock back.


But Bradley would've appreciated some of the contents of my excess baggage. Such as the Yorkshire Tea (picture) that provided my evening refreshment. Other teas are, of course, all very well. But they're not Yorkshire Tea.

Haworth: Novel experiences

The most literary place in the world is an old vicarage in Haworth.

Many countries in the world are proud enough to boast one major author. Well, this West Yorkshire village boasts three: in the 1840s, the parsonage was home to Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë. Which means this one building (pop. 6) has produced more renowned authors, according to Wikipedia's List of Novelists by Nationality, than Armenia (pop. 3m) Greece (pop. 11m) or Indonesia (pop. 250m).


Haworth is roughly an hour's cycle west of Bradford, and you will feel roughly if you tackle its raw, hilly landscape in bleak weather. I had a sunny, crisp March day though, and enjoyed the surprise view of the magnificent Hewenden Viaduct (pic), a long disused railway now part of a Sustrans bike route.

Several friendly dog walkers were out in the fresh air. The lingering aroma of last night's curry in Bradford was clearly evident to the dogs, and they clearly have a good taste in curry, because they all scarpered whenever they got a whiff of me.


Approaching Haworth village, you see its main street climbing its way up the hillside (pic). The parsonage is at the top, conveniently (for the girls' remarkable father-priest, Patrick Brontë) next to the church. And equally conveniently (for the girls' wayward brother, Branwell) the Black Bull pub.

The parsonage (pic) is now a museum, and well worth the visit. Though it's been bashed about and some bits are much larger than they used to be – I know the feeling – it's full of atmosphere, the displays are very well done, and it gives a superb insight into the internal and external world of the authors of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

My favourite bit was the drawing room table on which these works were written, in particular the letter 'E' carved out of its surface. Wonder which of the daughters did that...

The landscape round here is inseparable from the sisters' turbulent stories. It's also inseparable from your tyres if you try mountain biking round here on a rainy day. But to experience the moors, villages and lanes round here is to experience the atmosphere of the books: West Yorkshire in all its confrontational, harsh intensity.


In the interests of research I visited the Black Bull (pic), the pub where Branwell misspent his youth, and all his money. And other people's. They still have 'Branwell's Chair', where he presumably sat and railed drunkenly against the unfairness of being compared to not one but three over-achieving siblings.

It was chucking it down. After my pints in tribute to Branwell, I took my bike on the Worth Valley Heritage Railway (a one-carriage tram, in fact) from Haworth's oldë worldë stationë to Keighley, and then trained it back to Bradford. Where I had another curry. Great for keeping dogs away.

Middlesbrough: Playing bridge

Middlesbrough, Yorkshire's northernmost industrial town, is home to an iconic Transporter Bridge (pic) – one of only eight or so in the world still operating. It's quite a metaphor for the area, and possibly for me: heavy, old-tech, struggling to grind on into the 21st century.

Transporter Bridges were constructed around the turn of the 20th century: a brute-force engineering solution to cross rivers on marshy plains where contemporary techniques couldn't put bridges or tunnels. They resemble horizontal goods lifts, flying tennis courts, or the mutant offspring of a footbridge, ferry and electricity pylon.


Middlesbrough's shuttles across the Tees every few minutes, and can take 200 people and nine cars (pic). And cycles: I don't know how many, because there was plenty of room when I went across. This rare experience (Newport's Transporter Brige is the only other example in the UK) costs only 60p for a cyclist. Though that's quite a lot in the local context: a beer and burger at Wetherspoon's is £3.99, a pint of real ale £1.75, and a cafe breakfast £1.79.

The economy is not booming, and the chemical factories that dominate the views have long passed their peak. Someone presumably still has the cash to buy a £43 Middlesbrough football shirt from the ground shop, a short bike ride along the river. But mostly it's a poor town, with derelict buildings and abandoned factories aplenty. The river's north bank is a forlorn wasteland; they could twin it with Detroit.

It's not all misery. In the nearby town centre, the shiny MIMA Art Gallery is in a regeneration area with other facilities well-frequented by locals, such as the Magistrates Court. I am, it would seem, the only person who has ever gone to MIMA by bike: when I asked about bike parking they clearly didn't understand. Perhaps they thought I was enquiring about an installation. Well, an installation consisting of six Sheffield racks would be a lot more interesting than most of the tosh in the gallery. This appears to be the nearest bike parking (pic): back at the Transporter Bridge.

Middlesbrough is one end of the NCN65, once called the 'White Rose Route', which runs here from Hornsea via Hull and York. The final stretch, across parks and back streets into the town, is a sparkling example of a leisure cycle route, thanks to the all broken glass. It's a great way to meet locals, such as those who run bike repair shops.

The town is, in some ways, a grim example of the sort of post-industrial decline to be found in many once prosperous parts of Yorkshire. But there's still plenty of positives. Middlesbrough Mela, a big weekend party celebrating the area's Asian- and other multi-cultural makeup, is great fun. We've been a couple of times, and the street food was particularly memorable, in a good way.

But Middlesbrough's residents know all about fusion cooking. The town's celebrated contribution to international cuisine is the Italian-American-Yorkshire parmo, or chicken parmesan. A hearty serving with chips benefits you with 2600 calories – more than your daily requirement in one easy helping! It certainly is a time-saver. (I resisted the temptation. Like I said, a burger and beer at Wetherspoon is under four quid...)

And there are at least some green shoots in the North East's new economy. Wikipedia reckons that the city is a hub for digital animation. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what I did when getting cut up by a fag-smoking taxi driver on my way back to the train station. In fact, it involved two animated digits.