Ride all the OS mapsThe trouble with completing a coast-to-coast trip is that I have to get all the way back to the western most point of the next one to start again. Sometimes that can be almost as hard work as cycling through the maps in sequence. Scotland continues to make life far from simple. Today I got […]
If you have ever been to Copenhagen, you have probably been underwhelmed by their famous Little Mermaid statue. If you haven’t, it’s a wonderful city; but the mermaid is not the highlight. Conversely, you might reasonably take the view that a very similar statue on the rocky shore of a small coastal village in Easter […]
You can’t beat a good view, and you would have to work very hard to beat the view that my new friends Geoff and Marianne have from their cosy cottage. It sits above the harbour in Cove, on the west side of Loch Ewe in an extremity of Wester Ross. I first saw it when […]
Sometimes even the best laid plans will come unstuck! I was up at the crack of dawn and arrived at Lochmaddy pier about 6.30am on a pleasant morning, only to be told that the boat would not be sailing. Oh no! Returning to my bnb I spent an hour working out that I was basically […]
Today I cycled almost every road in North Uist. Not literally every mile; but pretty close. Especially those parts that fall within the boundaries of OS map 18. Which is to say most of it. There’s a little bit that falls off the bottom, but that is going to be done next week anyway. In […]
Somehow it’s already a week into June, and my first enforced trip home is over. I spent 2 days getting there after my trip to St Kilda, and it has taken another 2 days to make the very long journey back to OS map 18, where I left off at the end of May. I […]
I have a shiny new bike! I should have started the whole adventure on it; but as is the way of things these days, it wasn’t quite built in time for that. Never mind, I was lucky to find any decent bike available as soon as May, and so this one more or less selected […]
A few people have been asking me for the numbers so far. As best I can measure it (and it is not an exact science), the stats for May’s section of the RidealltheOSmaps adventure are thus: Number of OS maps visited in sequence: 18 Number of “official” OS map miles cycled: 474 Number of “unofficial” […]
One day after St Kilda, after 63 miles of cycling back across Skye in nice weather, and then a truly scenic 5 hour train journey from Mallaig on the Hogwarts Express, I found myself in the centre of Glasgow. Although it is a place I know well, it came as rather a shock to the […]
It took me 54 years; but on Saturday I went to St Kilda. It was worth the wait. Well worth it. What an amazing place. For those who are not familiar, St Kilda is the most remote outpost of Britain. It is a small but spectacular archipelago in the Atlantic, some 40 miles north-west of […]