The top 10 bizarre – and frankly bonkers – bike rides in the UK, destined to thrill

Britain abounds in curious places to cycle. Rob Ainsley, author of 50 Quirky Bike Rides, selects his Top 10

Published: Wednesday, 18 September 2024 at 12:44 PM

I’ve always been fascinated by the quirky, the unique, the extreme. Especially if I can cycle to it, says Rob Ainsley

Perhaps it’s a consequence of growing up in a house whose only books were the AA Road Atlas and the Guinness Book of Records. I’ve been collecting weird places to ride ever since.

Netherton Tunnel, in the West Midlands, for instance: a mile-and-a-half-long canal tunnel that’s a psychological challenge rather than physical – the ghostly acoustic and pitch dark is one of Britain’s scariest rides.

Or the vertiginous aqueduct at Pontcysyllte outside Llangollen that’s like cycling a Niagara Falls tightrope: no wonder they ask you to dismount. Or Blackbushe Airfield in Surrey, whose disused runways make the widest ‘cycle paths’ you’ll see in Britain. Or Yate’s ‘Road to Nowhere’ near Bristol: a 1970s dual carriageway that somehow never got properly connected to the road network, and is now used as a film set, making a strange all-to-yourself cycle experience.

And many others. Yorkshire’s Spurn Head, a three-mile spit of sand sometimes barely wider than the tarmac track that goes way out into the North Sea. An underpass on NCN1 in the Lee Valley that could be Britain’s lowest headroom, just five feet: duck or grouse. Church Lane, a cobbled street in Whitby that rises at 50% – yes, 1 in 2. The lonely road to Loch Hourn on Scotland’s west coast, Britain’s longest cul-de-sac at 22 miles… my list goes on.

So, here are 10 of my favourites. They offer not only Instagram amusement, but also the basis of some super rides.

Ed’s note: Just remember that some of these are for experienced cyclists only, so do them carefully and at your own risk, especially Mam Tor, navigating the Holy Island tides and, yes, the ‘Magic Roundabout’ in Swindon…

Weirdest bike rides in Britain

Holy Island, Beal, Northumbria

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Sometimes the waves rule Britannia. Lindisfarne, aka Holy Island, is connected to the mainland by a mile-long causeway that gets inundated by the tide twice a day. Riding across it in the dry is a thrill; safe crossing times are posted up on site and online. But time it right on an incoming tide (check very carefully) and you can enjoy the nearest thing to cycling on water.

Because immediately off the mainland, the road dips and is the first bit to be submerged by the tide. As the tide laps its way surprisingly quickly over the tarmac, you can ride around on top of it, aquaplaning on the water, and getting back to safe, adjacent dry land well before your bottom bracket, or indeed longevity, is threatened. At low tide, explore the road and island at ease.

Perhaps even have a look at the wooden emergency shelter, and marvel at the drivers who push their luck too far and end up stranded in here for hours with nothing to do but watch their car float into the North Sea.

National Cycle Route 1 passes here, and the whole Northumbrian coast is grandly scenic. Coming by train? Beal station is just a mile from the causeway, and characterful Berwick is only a handful of miles away.

Magic Roundabout, Swindon, Wiltshire

The nickname to Britain’s most notorious road roundabout came from a 1960s children’s animation. It stuck, and the signs now officially identify it as the ‘Magic Roundabout’. It’s hardly ‘enchanting’, though: a central roundabout surrounded by five mini-roundabouts, sun-and-planets style, with plenty of scope for going round in unintended circles only to get back where you started. Despite its reputation, it’s been in place unchanged for over fifty years.

Engineer Frank Blackmore dreamed up the layout in 1972 as a way to intermesh several busy feeder roads, and it’s said to have an excellent safety record – perhaps because traffic moves so uncertainly and slowly that collisions are unlikely. Nevertheless, if you’re cycling it – en route to Uffington’s White Horse, the Ridgeway, or just the adjacent local bike shop – it may be best to avoid rush hour. Britain offers plenty of other junction sorcery, but Swindon’s is the original and best.

Electric Hill, Croy Brae, Ayrshire

Of course you’re not actually freewheeling uphill. But the optical illusion formed by a chance combination of landscape contours at Croy Brae, on the A719 a few miles south of Ayr on Scotland’s south-west coast, is a powerful one.

The road seems to descend into a wood, but the gradient in fact goes the other way. Stop at the lay-by (marked helpfully with an explanatory stone), sit on your bike, and lift your feet off the pedals. Slowly but surely you start to move away from that wood ‘below you’, as your bike glides by itself what absolutely, unsettlingly, feels like uphill.

There are many such illusions in Britain and the world, sometimes dubbed ‘magnetic hills’. But Croy Brae – aka Electric Brae – is one of the best known. Curiously, the effect is so specific, it’s limited to eye level: stoop down and normal perception is restored. The unbiased view of the camera often rebalances the spirit level, too.

Serpentine Road, Rothesay, Isle of Bute

No pass in Britain can remotely match Stelvio in Italy, with its 70 hairpins. But this edge-of-town road requires 14 in its short, steep climb east from the pleasant harbour of Rothesay, the ‘capital’ of Scotland’s west-coast island of Bute (which was labelled the ‘Best Place to Live in Scotland’ by The Times in 2022 and takes just 90 minutes to get to from Glasgow).

The climb’s not fringed by mountains – more like parked 4x4s and suburban villas – but it’s a fun little experience. And it’s worth the trip: the cycling hereabouts, especially alongside the remote sea lochs of the Kyles of Bute, is all spectacular, with plenty of opportunities for island- and peninsula-hopping.

You’ll quickly become familiar with Cal Mac’s ferry timetables, and their Gourock–Dunoon or Wemyss Bay– Rothesay services for instance make getting here from Glasgow straightforward. Drink in the scenery. And if you’re drinking in anything else, enjoy another of Bute’s curios: the lavish and ornate public toilets, unchanged since Victorian times, are a candidate for Britain’s most elegant.

Great Dun Fell, Knock, Cumbria

By Andy Stephenson, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=547883

One of Britain’s highest roads is, intriguingly, open to bikes but closed to cars. The tarmac cul-de-sac winds its way five miles up into the Pennine Hills from Knock, near Appleby-in-Westmorland, to the Air Traffic Control radar station on the top of 847m-high Great Dun Fell.

Motor traffic needs a permit to use it, but – being a bridleway – you can cycle it (whatever the home-made signs on the way up try to tell you). It’s a hugely scenic ride up to the giant summit golfball, and the nearest we have to a ‘British Ventoux’. (Scotland’s similar ascent to Lowther Hill radar station near Wanlockhead runs a close second.)

Rough-stuff bridleways continue at the top, so road cyclists just turn round and freewheel down the 10 or so miles back to Appleby. There’s plenty of big cycling round here: England’s highest six road passes are next door in Teesdale, the C2C’s Coast-to-Coast classic is just to the north, and the Yorkshire Dales are only a few miles away to the southeast.

Cape Wrath, Durness, NW Scotland

This is as far-flung as Britain can fling you. Up at Scotland’s far northwestern corner, in a vast area of virtually zero habitation, is the iconic Cape Wrath lighthouse. First you have to get to Durness, an adventure in itself: either an epic drive, or a day’s isolated, spectacular riding from Lairg train station. (The tiny place is also a stop on the North Coast 500 route.)

From Durness you and bike take a tiny boat across the estuary, after which it’s a stony 11-mile track across wild hills with coastline views that eventually stumbles across the lighthouse. This is not a place to hitch a lift: vehicles are there none, apart from the rare ranger’s 4×4 or ferry minibus.

Potentially friendly conditions for hedgehogs, then… except for the absence of hedges, or indeed anything else. This is sparse, inhospitable terrain. At least there’s the lighthouse cafe, which claims to be open 24/7 (presumably it can be left open but unstaffed fairly safely). If you’re cycling here, good ideas include checking the weather forecast, taking tools, warm clothes and provisions – and not missing your boat back.

Disappearing Roads, East Yorkshire coast

Holderness, the vast fertile plain north-east of Hull, has the unwanted title of Europe’s fastest-eroding coast. The fragile cliffs between Bridlington and Withernsea are being gobbled up by North Sea tides at a rate of several yards a year. Since Roman times miles have gone west, or rather, east.

Even roads I remember cycling as a teen are long gone. In places such as Ulrome, Skipsea, Aldborough and Great Cowden, lanes end abruptly at a cliff edge, cordoned off by concrete blocks and signs that get wearily moved even further inland every few years.

Many caravan parks, farms and houses face brief futures. It’s an eerie place to cycle around. Get here by riding the OK-ish railtrail from Hull to Hornsea (the final leg of the Trans Pennine Trail), and maybe continue south to the end of Spurn Point (which involves a half-mile push across a sandy beach: it’s transitioning to an island), itself one of Britain’s most bizarre bike rides.

Tyne Tunnel, Jarrow, Tyne & Wear

In the Netherlands, they’re well used to bikes-only tunnels that duck under estuaries. Britain, less so. Below the Thames at Greenwich and Woolwich, you have to push; the underworld of the Mersey’s Queensway Tunnel allows bikes off-peak, but with hectoring traffic. Not the Tyne Tunnel, though, a period-piece legacy of 1951’s Festival of Britain.

It burrows underneath Newcastle’s waters via two 900ft-long bores, one for pedestrians, one for bikes – both, of course, free. Recent refurbishment means the ceramics are bright as a vintage municipal swimming pool, with an echoing acoustic to match as you ride 40 feet beneath the Tyne. Access is via lifts, with additional inclined lifts and escalators (which will enable 24-hour access) awaiting completion. It sits at the eastern end of both the Coast to Coast route and Hadrian’s Cycleway. Bike paths on both banks of the estuary link the tunnel with Newcastle’s lively centre.

Barmouth Bridge, Barmouth, Wales

Probably Britain’s quirkiest big bridge. The all-wood crossing of the mouth of the Mawddach Estuary, from Barmouth on the Welsh coast, carries trains, bikes and pedestrians, but not cars. It’s like the monster offspring of a Victorian pleasure pier and a giant marimba: cycle across it and you clank, plunk and clunk planks for 900 yards, creating a 10-minute avant-garde percussion sonata.

Built in 1867, the bridge survived being eaten by worms in the 1980s before restoration, and in 2017 tolls stopped being compulsory. You can get to Barmouth the easy way, by train halfway up the remarkable line that hugs the coast from Aberystwyth to Porthmadog. Or do it as part of a mighty ride: it’s on National Cycle Route 8 that traces a magnificent Welsh End to End from Cardiff to Holyhead. This includes a railtrail alongside the Mawddach between the bridge and Dolgellau

Mam Tor, Castleton, Derbyshire

Once you could drive over the Peaks between Sheffield and Manchester on the A625, zigzagging up the side of ‘shivering mountain’ Mam Tor. Except when it was closed for repair… which was often. This is because the area’s unstable geology meant the road was constantly being stuffed with yet more tarmac as the restless Tor kept breaking it up. In 1979 the council gave in, shut it and left the road to its fate.

You can still, sort of, cycle the mile or so of old road, rising west out of Castleton (carefully and at your own risk and all that – Ed). The spectacular fissures, canyons and cliff-edges caused by Mam Tor’s restlessness look like the grisly aftermath of a magnitude-8 earthquake. To get back to Castleton, go down narrow Winnats Pass, one of Britain’s most dramatic and gorgey back-lanes (too narrow to be a mainstream-traffic alternative to the old A625).

Or loop back via Edale, along the splendid little back way north of Mam Tor. That will take you the spectacular Ladybower, Derwent and Howden Reservoirs a few miles away, all ringed by virtually car-free, surfaced tracks easily gravel- or even road-biked. It’s Peak Scenery in every sense.

Inspired? Buy Rob’s book 50 Quirky Bike Rides in England and Wales

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