End to End: Lands End to John O'Groats

August 2001 · Fifteen riding days · Our first serious ride

Margaret and I rode it with our daughter, my brother and my nephew — five of us, and five bikes, which turns out to matter later.

Why this ride, and not another

The End to End

Ask a British cyclist of a certain age whether they have done the End to End and you get one of three answers: yes, with a date; no, with a reason; or not yet, with a look. It is the country's benchmark ride. Not the hardest, not the longest, not the most beautiful — simply the one everybody has heard of and the one that gets asked about. Walkers have the same relationship with it, and so, for reasons nobody has adequately explained, do people on lawnmowers.

The two points are 874 miles apart by main road, and about six hundred as the crow flies. The first recorded crossing on foot was made by two brothers, John and Robert Naylor, who walked from John O'Groats to Land's End between September and November 1871 and contrived to take 1,372 miles over it, having gone a long way round to see things. The fastest crossing by bicycle is Michael Broadwith's 43 hours 25 minutes, set in June 2018 — which broke a record that had stood for seventeen years. That record belonged to Gethin Butler, and he set it in 2001: the same summer we were out there doing it at rather less than half his speed.

And there is no official route. None. The Road Records Association, which ratifies the fast ones, says so plainly. Everyone who rides the End to End rides a different ride and calls it the same thing, which is either a flaw in the whole enterprise or the entire point of it.

The question we forgot

How on earth are we going to get home?

You should not start a ride from Land's End to John O'Groats without an answer to this question. Stupidly, it never really entered my mind. Somewhere in the myriad of things to plan I skipped it, and assumed it would sort itself out. John O'Groats is a very long way from home.

It was only after we had reached the finish, had the achievement certified, taken the photographs and ridden back down to Wick that we understood we had a problem. More of that later.

Cornwall and Devon

Don't do this ride unless you love a hill

You get a flavour of Cornwall and Devon simply by riding the few miles from Penzance out to the start. It is bumpy. We went out in the late afternoon, having found somewhere to stay in Penzance, and did what everyone does: photographs under the signpost — which points to John O'Groats, apparently — and a ride registration with the Land's End and John O'Groats people. Then a bumpy ride back.

You may be wondering why start here at all, when you could start from the Scottish end. Many people do. But it was early August, the prevailing winds were westerly, and the ride runs from the far south-west to the far north-east. For the most part the decision worked, and we rode with the wind rather than into it.

Getting out of Cornwall meant a first day of sixty-one miles to Camelford. The town takes its name from a ford across the crooked river — the Camel — and it has been trading on the coincidence ever since: the town hall of 1806 carries a weathervane topped with a golden camel, which is either a fine piece of civic wit or a very old joke, depending on your mood after sixty-one miles. Camelford has a grander claim too, and a shakier one. Slaughterbridge, just outside the town, is one of the traditional sites of Arthur's last battle, and the town itself has been put forward as Camelot. Historians dismiss the second. We were in no state to arbitrate.

A similar distance the next day took us out of Cornwall and into Devon. We rode through a heavy shower in the afternoon and, on a hill above Tiverton, our daughter came off on a slippery corner and ended up in Exeter Hospital. It was precautionary. She was kept in over a weekend, discharged fit, and went home by train with the damaged bike.

Devon to Lancashire

Playing catch-up

The whole episode was traumatic in a quiet way. Our daughter was fine, and — bravely — keen to rejoin us once she and the bike were both repaired. But we were two or three days behind, and catching up meant longer days, a changed route and more miles on busier roads than we had wanted. My brother and nephew had ridden on.

Day three was seventy miles towards Bath. Day four was rain, past Gloucester. Day five brought us to Shrewsbury and a bed and breakfast in the town. After six days we were at Warrington, treating ourselves to a hotel and a bath for the sake of our legs.

We have friends near Carnforth in northern Lancashire, and by the end of that week our daughter had her bike back and had made her way there to rejoin us. We reached them on day seven. It had been a week. We had ridden almost five hundred miles, and we had our group again.

Carnforth is a good place to stop, and not only because of the friends. Its railway station is the one from Brief Encounter — David Lean shot the film there in 1945, partly because wartime blackout regulations made a northern station easier to light and film than one nearer London. The refreshment room is still there and still serves tea. We had ridden five hundred miles to sit in a station buffet, which felt about right.

Cumbria and the border

Through the Lakes and into Scotland

There are several ways to get from one end of the country to the other. The one that goes by the Lake District is the one worth taking. Yes, it is hilly. Yes, there are tourists, and drivers caught between watching the road and admiring the view. It is still the one worth taking.

After two days' rest we moved off as a group again, out of Lancashire into Cumbria — Kendal, Windermere, Ambleside, then Grasmere, where Wordsworth lived at Dove Cottage and where the gingerbread is still made to a recipe from the 1850s in what used to be the village school. The road took us over the fells to Carlisle, and the following day into Scotland at Gretna Green.

Gretna's fame is a piece of legal geography. England's Marriage Act of 1753 required parental consent for anyone under twenty-one; Scotland's law did not, and a marriage could be made simply by declaring it before witnesses. Gretna was the first village over the border on the main coaching road, so it became the place where couples stopped running. The ceremonies were often performed by the local blacksmith, and the Old Blacksmith's Shop is still there. We saw no runaway couples. It was a Tuesday.

Dumfriesshire to Argyll

Scotland in the rain

Crossing the border seemed to bring a colder, wetter climate with it, and the conditions stayed with us for the rest of the ride. The compensation was smaller roads: Annan, Dumfries, Thornhill, and then Sanquhar, where we found a hotel for the night.

Sanquhar has the oldest working post office in the world. It has been handling mail since 1712 — before the Union with England was a decade old, and sixty-odd years before the mail coach reached this part of Scotland at all. It is a small shop on a small high street and it makes no great fuss about itself.

The wet continued. We rode to Kilmarnock, on to the ferry across the Clyde at Gourock, and found a hotel in Dunoon. By then we had been riding two days in rain. We carried only so much spare clothing, and summer accommodation in Scotland does not run its heating, so we were cold and our clothes would not dry. We bought waterproofs, which helped a little.

The next day took us into the Highlands proper — Strachur, Inveraray, Dalmally, and on to North Connel just above Oban. It sits on Loch Etive: wooded hillsides, open water, distant mountains, and the light changing across all of it. Attractive even through rain.

The Great Glen

Fort Augustus, and a canal that climbs

We rode north from North Connel to Fort William, and then along small roads beside the Caledonian Canal. Four miles out of the town, at Banavie, the canal does something absurd: it climbs a hillside by means of eight locks in a continuous quarter-mile of masonry, lifting boats sixty-two feet. Thomas Telford built it between 1803 and 1822 and it is called Neptune's Staircase. A boat takes about ninety minutes to get up it. We took rather less, and we were the ones doing the work.

The rain saw us all the way to Fort Augustus, at the southern end of Loch Ness, where the canal comes down through the middle of the village in a flight of locks. We took a rest day and walked about, curious about the boats, about the small industry that has grown up around a monster, and about how the locks are worked.

The next day we managed sixty-five miles, cleared the north end of the loch, and reached Tain — a small town of sandstone on the southern shore of the Dornoch Firth. We had crossed Scotland. The end was in sight.

Sutherland and Caithness

The last hills

The end being in sight is not the same as the end being close, and Caithness had two hills left.

The climb out of Helmsdale onto the Ord of Caithness is the one cyclists talk about: a long, twisting haul to around 230 metres, paid back with the sea laid out below you. By this point the sun had come out and the rain had thinned to showers.

We rode out of Helmsdale past the spot where The Emigrants now stands, and we did not see it, for the straightforward reason that it was not there. Gerald Laing's bronze was unveiled in July 2007, six years after we came through. Four figures: a man looking ahead, a boy looking to him for what to do, a woman with a baby in her arms looking back at the country behind her. It commemorates the people cleared from these straths. In the summer of 1813 more than a hundred of them, evicted from the Strath of Kildonan a few miles up the river, sailed for Canada, settled on the Red River and founded what became Winnipeg. An identical statue stands there, unveiled the year after this one. Two bronzes, four thousand miles apart, of the same family at the same moment.

Pause and noticeWe would have stopped.

Then a fast descent into Berriedale, and a monster of a hill out the other side, which we walked. That climb has since been rebuilt: the notorious hairpin was removed and the realigned road opened in August 2020, so a rider today will find it steep but straighter. We spent the night at Dunbeath.

The finish

John O'Groats

The final day was quiet — little traffic, and the road running out towards a corner of the country where there is not much left to run out to. We left Dunbeath at about half past nine, stopped at Wick to check into a hotel, have lunch and drop the bags, and rode the last seventeen miles light.

Photographs under a signpost pointing back to Land's End. A certificate from the hotel to say we had done it. Then seventeen miles back to Wick, which nobody mentions when they talk about finishing.

The answer, eventually

How on earth we got home

The problem arrived the next morning.

We had assumed we could put the bikes on the train from Wick to Inverness and change for the south. The assumption was wide of the mark. The service carried two bicycles. We were five people with five bikes, and there was no arrangement, no charge and no amount of politeness that would make the other three spaces appear. Wick had no car hire. We ended up taking two taxis with trailers to Inverness airport, hiring two cars there, and driving home.

If you are riding to John O'Groats, book the way home before you book the first night's bed. Cycle reservations on the Inverness–Wick line are compulsory and the spaces are few. A group of any size should be booking weeks out, not on the morning after.