At a pub named the Board & Elbow in this historic market town of Penrith, in the northwestern English county of Cumbria, I tucked into a large meat pie and sipped a pint of something local. It was the perfect fuel for my upcoming bike crossing of England. I don’t know precisely what the British singer/activist Billy Bragg meant when he said he wasn’t looking for a new England, but I was. I needed to get away from London, where my work made it the only England I really knew, with its stand on correct orderliness. I was looking for a different England…and so I went north. Way north.
The town of Whitehaven on England’s northwest coast is the jumping-off point for my voyage, which will follow England’s popular Coast to Coast route. It’s a cross-country trip of 195 miles that was made historically on foot but increasingly by bicycle. It takes in the gorgeous highlights of England’s northern countryside—starting just outside its famed Lake District and ending at Robin Hood’s Bay on the eastern side of the North York Moors.
My guides are James and Ben, affable chaps who are part of the Wilderness England adventure travel company. Ben schools me a little on the dark history of our starting point, Whitehaven, which came to some prosperity as a port town in the 1700s, founded by a British baronet named Lowther. Coal mines, some of which extended as much as five miles under the sea, and the transatlantic slave trade were among Whitehaven’s economic drivers. Like many industrial towns the world over, it’s a region remaking itself, and the Coast to Coast has given local tourism an undeniable boost.
The sun lights up the road in front of us as we grind out the consistent gradients, and I struggle through a 20 percent ramp not far from the base.
The Coast to Coast, sometimes shortened to C2C, is among the most popular British cycle routes. It started in 1973 as a hiking challenge, created by a writer named Alfred Wainwright, and was eventually co-opted by the cycling community. The exact start and finishing points vary depending on who you ask, but it’s a route that encompasses some of England’s most striking places to pedal—from the Lake District, through the Yorkshire Dales and onto the North York Moors, all three of which are national parks.
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