Calder 2: Dewsbury to Castleford

Day 2 of the River Calder ride featured three aspects of Yorkshire: world-renowned sculpture, a traditional Leeds welcome, and riverside rubbish. (Back to ← Day 1)

I stayed in a cheap and cheerful pub room in Dewsbury. It’s said to be one of England's most divided communities, and not only by Brexit: just over the river in an area called Savile Town, 95% are Muslims of Indian or Pakistani background. There were only white faces in the town centre last night though, skulking outside the takeaways or trying fruitlessly to get me to play them at pool.

The beer was £1.90 a pint, but accordingly mediocre: you’d be more likely to find an imam in there than a CAMRA member. The statue in front of the town hall (pic) seems an appropriately despairing comment on things. Perhaps the sculptor had drunk there too. Or was a Remainer.



Anyway, fortified by the pub’s very hearty Full English breakfast, I set off, pleased that my immune system, fortified by regular cycling, would be able to fight off any mild infections cultivated in the kitchen. The Calder Valley Cycleway runs right alongside the river (pic). It’s a gritty sort of landscape: derelict industry, piles of rubbish, and pale, defeated-looking middle-aged white men in beanie hats, such as cycle bloggers whose bacon was underdone and overeaten.



The cycleway continues with quite a climb out of Dewsbury on a newly refurbed path, looking down on the Calder Valley, and took me through the pleasantly pedestrianised market square of Ossett before tracking a railway line and rejoining the riverside just before Wakefield (pic), one of Yorkshire’s seven cities. (The others are Leeds, Bradford, York, Sheffield, Hull, and the one everyone forgets, Ripon.)



West Yorkshire can be gritty and monumental, so it’s appropriate that it provided two of the 20th century’s great sculptors: Barbara Hepworth, from Wakefield, and Henry Moore, from Castleford. Both are celebrated in The Hepworth, Wakefield’s fabulous art gallery, which sits right over the Calder – the view through the windows complements the artworks nicely (pic).

In addition to works by Moore and Hepworth (whose super 1960s screenprints were a bit of a revelation to me) the gallery was exhibiting its Sculpture Prize entries, one of which used water power from the Calder to drive air through a series of pipes to play music. Very nice, though it sounded like a panda trying to mate with a harmonium.

Pandemonium, in other words.¹



The path from Wakefield follows the canal at some times and the river at others, and sometimes both (pic): at Stanley the two cross via a historic early aqueduct and a modern replacement (pic). The old one is on the left: state-of-the-art in its time, it’s now hopelessly heavy, outdated and even unsafe, needing replacement by a new modern one. Funnily enough, the same applies to my bike.

From here it’s railtrail alongside the final stretch of the Calder, going through this splendid gateway welcoming you to Leeds (pic)...

...though a little further on, an anonymous artist has put up this alternative welcome message (pic).

Perhaps this is the 21st-century face of Yorkshire sculpture.



The last mile of the Calder has a newly surfaced bike path going along its southern side (pic), presumably paid for by the developers who are slinging up the housing estate just up from here. My journey was nearing its end.



Finally, after the tarmac ran out, a muddy path took me to the mouth of the Calder (pic). Its junction with the Aire, on the edge of Castleford, is marked by a wooden bench - evidently a good place for a Yorkshire-style picnic, as demonstrated by the vast pile of empty beercans. (Most were Tyskie, but then Yorkshire is probably one of the most populous provinces of Poland. Na zdrowie! Do dna!)

I’ve really enjoyed this leisurely two-day trip. (It’s perfectly possible to do it in one, though you might need more daylight than a North of England January offers.) The Calder has an absorbing mix of Pennine scenery, ruggedly sophisticated mill towns reinventing themselves, powerful art, and down-to-earth, workaday West Yorkshire friendliness.

Plus, of course, cycleways all along it that are among the best in England. A hotchpotch of the barely adequate and the downright awful, in other words. Trying to find good infrastructure! Getting warmer? No, getting Calder!

¹ Vincent, P. (2014) But First the News: The Two Ronnies. Pilot Productions

Miles today: 25
Total miles: 58

Back to ← Day 1

Halifax: Calder mobile

Halifax (pic), home to almost half Calderdale’s 190,000 folk, is not short of associations. Cat’s-eyes; Quality Street; the eponymous bank; the Eureka family attraction; victim of gratuitously infernal slander along with Hull.

For telly viewers it’s the setting of comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax, while for cyclists it’s the venue of Shibden Wall, a famously tough climb up ferocious West Yorkshire cobbles. I thought about doing that ascent again when I visited this time. That is to say, I thought about doing it last time, too.

I’d come here in the middle of my River Calder ride. Halifax isn’t actually on the Calder – it’s on the Hebble – but then neither is there a Quality Street here: the confection, one of many products of the Mackintosh sweetie empire that grew here, was named after a play by JM Barrie.



I had an appointment to meet up with Andrew Sykes, author of the 'Reggie' cycling travelogues – but first I had a wander round the centre. The library is in an old church, and the splendid rose window (pic) greets you up the stairs as you search in vain for a copy of Bluff Your Way in Cycling. The staff painted an enthusiastic portrait of their town: friendly, lively, rejuvenated. Maybe some of that might rub off on me.

Halifax has a fine selection of Victorian buildings, many of which are being renovated: the market (pic) for instance is having its 1980s modifications stripped out and returned to its original features. Mid-20th century economic doldrums meant that Halifax was not ‘redeveloped’ as brutal concrete blocks, Andrew told me – a benefit, as I know from my time in Bath, which lost more Georgian terraces to the council than it did to the Luftwaffe. It’s meant that those old factory buildings and handsome streetscapes are still there, unrazed, and able to be rescued. The area between the library, station and (blackened and gloomy) Minster is next, apparently.



The most obvious example of Halifax’s citybreak-friendly reboot is the Piece Hall (pic), recently spruced up and now one of the most awesome large public squares in England. It’s a similar size and feel to Salamanca, Andrew and I agreed, though perhaps without the pavement cafes, tapas bars, bell tower, T-shirt weather, and availability of house wine for under a fiver. The Hall’s galleries are home to dozens of boutiques and shoppes. If you’re after artisan jewellery, bespoke gin or fine art this is the place, though on a chilly January weekday afternoon it was very quiet, each unit having a sole occupant at the till who looked up hopefully from their mobile phone as I walked past.

The busiest attraction in the Hall was an Autism Experience van, which offered to give you an insight into what it’s like to be on the spectrum by subjecting you to flashing lights, loud noises and sensory overstimulation. It surprised me how many people were queueing to undergo such an unpleasant experience, but then people queue to get into York’s lagery central pubs of a Saturday evening too.



Piece Hall looked lovely in the evening, I must say (pic). Andrew and I adjourned for a coffee in the Square Chapel next door, and talked cycle-touring most enjoyably. There was a local company function there, with free drinks. Tempting as it was, I didn’t try to pose as an employee. The lycra tights, muddy shorts and tatty mitts might have given me away as an impostor.

Since the 1600s Halifax has been a place to pray for deliverance from, along with Hull (another place benefiting from regeneration) and Hell (which would not qualify for redevelopment funding, being outside the EU). Percy Shaw, the inventor of those cat’s-eyes, might have been the face of Halifax last century – he lived in a house with no carpets or furnishings, just crates of beer and crisps for his pals, and televisions permanently on and tuned to all channels then available. In the eyes of contemporary newspapers this made him an ‘eccentric’. In the eyes of my dad this made him a role model.

But Halifax is changing agreeably. It’s investing a lot of money, and however well it’s working out economically, it certainly makes the place delightful to visit. And yes, there are Wetherspoons here, one of which is called The Percy Shaw. My dad would have approved.

Calder 1: Cornholme to Dewsbury

River Calder

Source   Ratten Clough, Cornholme
Mouth   River Aire, Castleford
Length   45 miles
Towns   Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Dewsbury, Wakefield, Castleford
Route   See on Mapmyride

The second of my Rivers Rides was a two-day, 58-mile trip from the Lancs border to the Aire following the River Calder. Day 1 featured a Lancashire/Yorkshire identity crisis, the Pennines’ hippie capital, and different approaches to dog muck. (On to Day 2 →)



This is the source (pic) of the River Calder, at least as marked on 19th-century OS maps: Ratten Clough, which funnels all that Pennine drizzle ultimately to the North Sea. I did the trip on my Trekking Bike, a modified hardtail MTB (a Scott MX1 Voltage, which may come as a bit of a shock). Having done many stretches of the route before, I knew what sort of rocky, unreliable, treacherous surfaces I’d be facing – Sustrans National Cycle Routes, in other words.

Confusingly, there’s more than one River Calder. As well as Yorkshire’s – the longest – there’s one in Cumbria, two in Scotland, and two in Lancashire. One of the Lancashire River Calders has its source just a few hundred metres from the location above. That’s right: Yorkshire’s River Calder actually rises a kilometre or so inside Lancashire.

It’s a situation as murky as the weather I had for the start of the trip on this foggy, clammy winter morning: while riding up to the source, on the back road over the top of Todmorden Moor, I’d had zero visibility at times.

Indeed, I’d had to cross the historic border (pic) to get here. Lancashire had welcomed careful drivers; Yorkshire hadn’t, but the greeting slogan on the sign for Calderdale described it as ‘Ruggedly Sophisticated’.

As confirmation, the first pub over the line had a placard proudly announcing the availability of Yorkshire Tea.



The rusty-looking Calder gets moving through the town of Cornholme (pic), as did I, freewheeling down the A646 towards Todmorden, and also feeling a bit rusty. This is a dramatic stretch of countryside, hemmed in by lumps of Pennine whose tops are shrouded in mist.

A feature of these towns is these short, cobbled side streets (pic), ending abruptly at the foot of a hill.

One of the Christmas street lights that were still adorning Cornholme’s main street featured Santa Claus riding a bike. Given the cobbles, it had better be a gravel/ adventure bike.



Thanks to the downhill I’d hardly pedalled when I got to Todmorden, historically a town of split red-rose/ white-rose personality: the Calder used to be the Lancs–Yorks border. Now the split is between the post-industrial decay (pic) and burgeoning hip’n’trendy: the mills and factories that used the Calder’s water power in centuries past have largely gone, but on previous trips I've enjoyed chic bistros and stylish cafes that floated my boat, anyway. There's an active free-food movement that grows veg and herbs in help-yourself public beds, and there's a Wetherspoon, where I warmed myself up with some coffee in help-yourself refills.



From Todmorden, the Calder is joined by a canal and railway, threading around allotments along the valley floor; the two watercourses run for long distances right next to each other (pic). Several people were out on the towpath on mountain bikes, sharpening their close-manoeuvre skills by dodging the copious dog turds (not pictured). Perhaps that’s what the sign meant by ‘rugged sophistication’.

At Luddington Foot things were a bit classier: rather than leave extruded canine faex on the towpath, dog-walkers bagged it and hung it on trees or stood it on walls. Sounds like a winner in the next Turner Prize.



Still full of the brown fluid Wetherspoons call coffee, I had no need to stop off at the canalside cycle-cafe in sophisticatedly rugged Hebden Bridge, which I’ve blogged about before. The train out this morning, from Leeds to Manchester Victoria, had been mysteriously empty until we’d got here. Then it had filled up, with all those young professionals who live here in converted mill apartments and work in Salford Quays making TV dramas set in Calderdale. Or perhaps they were just off in search of a bank: recent closures mean that, astonishingly, there are none along the Calder between Todmorden and Brighouse.

The Calder used to be a sewage outlet for the many industries that clustered up the slopes: open cast mines, chemical factories, dye works. (They say the river used to run different colours on different days, depending on factory timetables.)

Thanks to their decline, the river’s a lot cleaner than it used to be, and offers some good day fishing now (pic). Not night fishing, as the fish don’t glow in the dark an more.



I cycled past Brighouse’s answer to the Taj Mahal (pic). The town’s most iconic building, a spectacularly ugly former flour mill, was driving everyone up the wall, so it has been imaginatively repurposed as a climbing centre that also does Escape Rooms, Pilates, and Nerf. And if you don’t know what that is, you'll have to look it up yourself, because I’ve done plenty already, and a nerf is a nerf.

Two honorary members of the Calder Valley club are Halifax (actually on the Hebble) and Huddersfield (actually on the Colne). From Brighouse I took the train the Halifax that evening to meet up with fellow cycling author Andrew Sykes; I've blogged about that in a separate post.

Back in Brighouse later that night, I cycled along dreary roads to my bolthole for the evening in Dewsbury (missing none of the Calder: there’s no riverside routes in that stretch). There I had a pint in the quietest Wetherspoon I’ve ever seen – with three staff and three customers including me at one point, we each had our own personal bar attendant.

I fancied a spot of light reading with my beer but had no book with me, thanks to travelling saddlebag-light. Luckily, the bar staff were comprehensively tattooed.

Miles today: 33

On to Day 2 →

Easingwold: A narrow escape

Easingwold, a dozen miles north of York, is a pleasant market town (pic) – pubs, handsome square, friendly local vibe, farmers chatting by the bus stop – but is unlikely to make those tedious ‘1000001 Places to Visit Before You Die’ lists. Yet it has one very odd, virtually unknown, attraction, and that was why I came up today.

I’d passed through once before, riding Sustrans’s White Rose Route. My seat post had broken on the way in, but despite it being Easter Sunday, I managed to buy a replacement from a shop that sold lawnmowers. Alas, the White Rose Route is no longer signed or supported by Sustrans: evidently, the allure of a cycle ride linking Hull and Middlesbrough had as much staying power as my old seatpost.



I came today to explore Post Office Slip, a back lane running north off the market square area from Costa Coffee. It’s one of the narrowest alleys in Britain, and probably the most challenging to pass through. Because the Slip is a bizarre human-sized catflap, cut out of the corner of a house where its edge butts up against another (pic: it’s in that corner in the middle of the photo).

Yorkshire being Yorkshire, we have the best of everything, of course. Forget anything you’ve heard about Temple Bar in Port Isaac being the squeeziest thoroughfare in the land: that’s a roomy 18 inches 46cm wide, while Dog Loup in Staithes, up the coast from Robin Hood’s Bay, gets down to 15.5 inches 39cm.

I reckon Dog Loup is the narrowest in the country. But while Post Office Slip isn’t numerically as exiguous as Dog Loup or even Temple Bar, it’s certainly more constricting, thanks to its shape (pic).

That's because the Slip narrows at the top, so at my head height it’s only 8 inches 20cm wide. It’s in regular use by locals heading down to the shops, who are used to ducking and sashaying sideways to get round the attenuated bend (pic).

Easingwold is one of those towns where everyone knows everyone (...’s business). As soon as I parked my bike and started snapping, the lady in the house to the left popped her head out the upstairs window and asked me, in a perfectly friendly way, what I was up to.

Then her neighbour, from the house on the right, came out and did similar. She has to put up with shopping-laden locals and backpack-toting visitors bumping against the wall as they clamber through, which makes for a constant noise inside her living room.



Another local to quiz me on my intentions, as she bobbed and weaved through the aperture, informed me that the area behind used to be a printworks and orchard, and that the Slip’s needle-eye causes regular consternation to electric wheelchair users unfamiliar with the area, and to buggy-toting local mums, who demanded that the council enlarge the passage by lopping off a few inches of each house. Approaching from the other side, the way through isn’t even visible (pic).

Post Office Slip is a public right of way for pedestrians, legally cyclable in theory but not in practice. My town bike’s handlebars are 24 inches 61cm wide, clearly too big to fit, as are those of the local kids’ bikes.

Luckily I was on my folder, whose bars are considerably narrower, but it was still easier to fold up the bike to get it through (pic).

Easingwold’s residents are clearly proud of their tiny thoroughfare. And it wasn’t the only thing I managed to squeeze in while I was there. I also managed to cram in a pint, in the George Inn, while waiting for my bus back to York.

Don 2: Sheffield to Goole

Day 2 of the River Don ride featured a lot of weirs, a lot of town centre, a lot of drab flatland, and glimpses of the Netherlands. (Back to ← Day 1)

I stayed in an EasyHotel last night: £20 for a clean, modern, ensuite room right in the centre of Sheffield. No windows – an advantage, as I couldn't hear partying students leaving Wetherspoons next door – and no telly unless I stumped up £5, which was another advantage. The room was minimally small, but just big enough to get my bike in, and almost big enough to get past the bike to the bed.



It was only a few yards to Lady's Bridge (pic), the centre of Old Sheffield, and the start of the Five Weirs walk and bike route which follows the Don.



The route gives a real feel for the industrial character of the city; good surfaces and decent signage mean fast progress (pic), which was handy when getting away from the various louche young men in hoodies hanging around at bridges, smoking and sizing up passers-by.



It's not always a pretty landscape alongside this bit of the Don (pic), but it's good to see that steel is still real. What would a self-respecting touring cyclist do with an aluminium or carbon frame?



The Don winds round Meadowhall's enormous shopping centre (pic), where the cycle path improves markedly. I resisted the temptation to browse the 280 stores. But it was chilly and I needed breakfast and a bottomless coffee, and there was a Wetherspoon's right there, so obviously I couldn't resist that.



From Meadowhall to Rotherham I took the towpath of the canal that roughly parallels the Don (pic). It took me past another Donside football stadium, named the New York Stadium (after the district), which looks the basis of an epic satnav fail for someone careless. What do you mean, Rotherham United? I wanted the New York Yankees...



Rotherham town centre didn't have much to detain me. Or so I thought until, on a back road through an industrial area, I passed JE James, which claims to be England's biggest bike shop (pic). Passed, stopped, turned back, went in.

The staff, I must say, were friendly, proactive and positive (hello Tez and the guys): bike shops have raised their customer-service game massively in the last few years. Next to their range of shiny new road bikes, my bike looked old, cheapskate, shabby and lumbering. Next to the staff, so did I.

From Rotherham the towpath alongside the Don was muddy and drab, so I took the simple option to Doncaster, along the drab but unmuddy main road, past Conisborough Castle and into Donny itself. Despite giving its name to the place, the Don is little in evidence: no waterside esplanades or chic developments, just the odd bridge and glimpses of shrubby banks.



I followed the main road out through the endless retail and industrial fringes to the village of Barnby Dun where the river reappeared for virtually the first time since Rotherham. It's all rather Dutch-looking round here (pic), with long straight drainage channels, barges, lifting bridges and flat, flat farmland. You could almost be in some nightmare parallel-universe version of Holland, in which all the cycle infrastructure was missing.



An entertainingly clanky bridge (pic) took me to the main road that goes all alongside the Don in its final stretch up towards Goole, first north, and then – turning abruptly right, as if suddenly realising it was going in the wrong direction – east.

The Don originally wiggled north-east from Barnby Dun to drain into the Trent, and formed the historic boundary between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. However, in the 1600s, the great Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden drained huge areas of eastern England and managed to divert the Don to its present course, ending in Goole. Sadly he wasn't in charge of cycle infrastructure.



Finally – after a long push along the grassy strip between the Aire and Calder Navigation and the parallel Don, both of which empty in to the Ouse at Goole – I got to the mouth of the Don, and the end of my journey. After miles of nondescript channelling, the muddy, slimy river finishes in Goole docks (pic), the oddity of a port town that's fifty miles inland. The pub by the mouth is named the Vermuyden. No, I didn't have a pint there to celebrate.

The Don is probably the most workaday, least glamorous of the rivers I'll be riding along. But the upper reaches are pleasant and nicely railtrailed, Sheffield is a buzzing city, and overall it's certainly more convenient from York than Scotland's Don, which is a tad longer.

Or indeed Russia's Don, the thousand-mile waterway emptying into the Sea of Azov at Rostov, celebrated in the blockbusting Sholokhov novel Quiet Flows the Don. (And, surprisingly, the more modest English Don actually starts at a higher altitude.)

Goole was twinned, bewilderingly, with Gibraltar in the 1960s; perhaps it could look at twinning with Rostov?

Miles today: 45
Total miles: 77

Back to ← Day 1

Don 1: Dunford Bridge to Sheffield

River Don

Source   Great Grains Clough, Dunford Bridge
Mouth   River Ouse, Goole
Length   70 miles
Towns   Penistone, Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, Goole
Route   See on Mapmyride

The first of my Rivers Rides was a two-day, 70-mile scoot from the Pennines to the Ouse along the River Don. Day 1 featured reservoirs and railtrails, an island brewery, and a comical cycle installation. At least I think it was meant to be comic. (On to Day 2 →)

The Don starts here (pic), where Great Grains Clough dribbles off the Pennines into Winscar Reservoir, a few miles west of Penistone. Those hills up there are the historic border of Yorkshire, and this is as close as you can get with a bike to the river's source, on a track above the north side of the reservoir.

I'd decided to do this trip on my town bike, as the Don mostly makes its way through industrial towns. And, like the Don, my bike is grey-brown, unspectacular, functional, and covered in mud.



Buttery sun tried to sneak through the cold, damp November morning (pic). The infant Don, only a few hundred yards old, starts spectacularly here as Winscar Reservoir, but this is as wide and impressive as it ever gets in its 70-mile life.

I enjoy the geographical wonder of how a river knows a way through the surrounding hills to the sea, going downhill all the way. My river rides are all, in theory, a freewheel from source to mouth. Just like Windows 10 updates download imperceptibly in the background and install with no problems, in theory.



From the reservoir, several miles of good surface railtrail track the Don. It's part of the Trans Pennine Trail, which I cycled in 2011, but which like my CV is rather less than the sum of its parts. This sculpture (pic) decorates the trail just west of Penistone, but has no explanatory plaque. I suggest: See? Helmets do not protect against all types of accident.

I spent nearly an hour in Penistone – not because there's much to see, but because the queue in Greggs was so long.

The railtrail continued beyond, and featured this exciting tunnel (pic) at Thurgoland, a curving concrete-walled job with a spookily echoing acoustic.

Up to Thurgoland tunnel, the cycle route was great – good smooth tarmac – though you only get glimpses of the Don itself, down scenically below. After the tunnel it's unsealed, and today it was all rather muddy. So I came off that and took the A6102 that runs alongside the Don, and I could enjoy this stretch of the river in its full scenic majesty: factories being demolished, sewage plants being constructed, and lots of lavishly-puddled waste ground with JCBs, cement mixers, lorries, and blokes in hard hats holding plans and pointing at things, like politicians on a photo-opp.



Rising up from the Don at Oughtibridge is 'the Jawbone' (pic), one of the major climbs from the Tour de France's visit to Yorkshire in 2014, commemorated in this sign. No, of course I didn't ride up it. I had a two-ton town bike with full panniers. The TdF guys had 7kg carbon-frame bikes. My lunch alone weighed more than that.

The Don's tumbling waters provided power for mills and factories for hundreds of years pre-electricity. Unfortunately it also provided a handy waste pipe for them too, and it was little more than an open sewer.

In the last few decades though regulation has cleaned the river up remarkably, especially above Sheffield, and now it provides good fishing (pic).



South of Oughtibridge, at last, was a riverside cycle path with pleasant scenery (pic). That eventually turned into the A6, which wasn't quite as pleasant or scenic, though it did take me grandly past Hillsborough footy ground...



...and, conveniently, along back streets to the redevelopment area of Kelham Island, home of Kelham Island Brewery and adjacent pub the Fat Cat (pic).

It's a cracking little place, Victorian and unspoilt, with a friendly local atmosphere and excellent beer: yes, from next door, so it has very few food miles, or beer yards, or whatever. I had a splendid pint of Pale Rider (5.2%, hoppy and tangy without being abrasive, well-balanced and characterful, £3).

Which, after a chilly day cycling, brought some colour to this pale rider's cheeks.

Miles today: 32

On to Day 2 →

Ilkley: On Ilkley Moor baht ’elmet

I'd never been to Ilkley. Or Otley. Or Ilkley Moor, with or without a hat. So today I did something about it, cycling up and over Yorkshire's most famous tract of upland: the windswept plateau which gave birth to its 'national anthem', On Ilkla Moor baht' at.

I took the morning commuter train from York to Leeds. It was jam-packed with smartly dressed people going to office jobs, and would have felt like a London rush hour, if it hadn't been for the Northern Railways rolling stock: fairly tatty, thirty years old, working but creaking old toilets, upholstery half-worn out, it was clearly much better than Southern Rail.



I headed west along the Leeds-Liverpool canal towpath, from just by the station, heading salmon-like against the downstream of commuter cyclists (pic).

From here, in principle, you can cycle all 125 miles to Liverpool city centre along the canal, a journey full of surprises. Such as how dull and unpleasant much of it is, how 30 miles on a flat but bumpy towpath is as tiring as 60 miles on a hilly but smooth road, and how accurately feral urban teenagers can throw stones at you.



But I wasn't heading that far. I was only heading the 15 or so mostly well-surfaced miles via Saltaire to Bingley, famous for its Five Rise Locks (pic). With a gradient of 20%, this is perhaps the steepest stretch of canal towpath in the world. (Though I've never cycled the Three Gorges Dam locks in China, as I'm dubious about the availability of real ale in Hubei province.)

This dramatic pentad of staircase locks is one of the Seven Wonders of the Waterways. It takes a boat about half an hour to descend the flight. It takes a bike about half a second.



But I turned north off the canal just after, up some thrilling back lanes (pic) heading from Airedale to Wharfedale over Ilkley Moor. There were sweeping, majestic views of the surrounding moors and valley towns, and of the unforecast rain clouds heading our way.



Evidently the council ran out of tarmac by the radio mast at the top of the moor. For about a mile the old road between Keighley and Ilkley is a moderately bumpy track, easy on my front-suspension trekking bike but unpleasant for a road bike. I now had company (pic): Roger, another cyclist from York who by coincidence was doing a similar day-ride loop to me. It turned out we had plenty in common to chat about, such as a fascination with Spurn Point, which is where I want my ashes spread, though not yet.



The general area here is called Rombald's Moor; Ilkley Moor is only the north-facing slopes, extending from about here (pic) down to Ilkley itself, along a welcome return of tarmac. But it's here, yes here, that – according to folklore – a day-tripping Halifax choir came in the mid-1800s and improvised a comic song called On Ilkla Moor baht 'at over the melody of a traditional hymn. It's become Yorkshire's signature tune, and if the historic county ever became a country in its own right, it would be the anthem played when its athletes queued up to receive their Olympic medals.

The words tell the tale of a young man courting his sweetheart up on the Moor, but – it is strongly implied – he dies from a cold contracted as a result of his being bare-headed. Baht 'at means 'without a hat': baht is a dialect word originating from Old English be-utan, 'without', a word which evolved into the Modern English word but, followed by characteristic West Yorkshire dialect article-dropping and omission of initial aspirates.

But there are serious shortcomings with the narrative. First, there is NO medical evidence to link lack of headgear with coryza, the common cold. It's a virus, whose transmission is not temperature-related. Having wet hair or being hatless is not a factor. Second, a cold is not fatal per se (though complications can prove deadly of course). On Ilkla Moor baht 'at therefore has NO scientific basis, and should NOT be used to guide your wardrobe choices for future hilltop trysts. The song as sung is, I'm afraid, classic victim-blaming.

Furthermore, the tune requisitioned by those mischievous Halifax songsters, Cranbrook, has been forever tainted. How can you now sing While shepherds watched to this, its traditional setting, for example, without the entire congregation falling about laughing? No wonder that Cranbrook has fallen completely out of favour for sacred use, except in some remote and primitive parts of the English-speaking religious sphere where they know little of the world outside, such as the US.



So. Anyway. We hurtled down to Ilkley, enjoying the nice proper road surface, which took us as if predestined to The Commute, a chic cycle-cafe humming with friendly local riders (pic). Ikley itself is a handsome town with many fine Victorian buildings, spiffy enough to have a branch of Bettys, down-to-earth enough to have a Wetherspoon, and a real cycling hub: the lanes round about seemed to sport as many people out for a spin on their road bike as there were motorists.



I would have snapped some of them, but it was now pouring down with that unpredicted rain. I did manage to get a shot back towards Ilkley Moor itself (pic). Cold and windy up there: as clothing bores are wont to say, though, no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate headgear.



En route back to Leeds I briefly visited Otley, which also has some fine Victorian buildings (pic) and a rather super local bike shop chain, Chevin Cycles, though with rather too few bikes that have mudguards and racks for me. From here it was a long tedious climb up and over the hills back down to Leeds, and the train home.

About 45 miles cycled in the day, on a variety of surfaces: a nice workout for my trekker. I raised the handlebars the other day with a bolt-on stem-riser widget I got for a tenner from eBay, and the more upright riding position makes it delightfully comfy for routes like this. I feel sorry for people that don't cycle, because they'll never know the sheer bliss of this sort of thing. Or the simple joy of a post-ride pint.

Then again, they won't get their ear bent by a bloke in the pub who spots your bike, comes over and drones on about their Dawes Galaxy for half an hour, which is what happened to me.

That's wheear we get us ooan back... Yorkshire karma, perhaps?