END OF SUMMER: BAY CYCLE WAY

 BARROW IN FURNESS TO GLASSON DOCK

 

Cyclists dance with Eric during the Morecambe Bay cycle ride

The start of this ride at Walney Island, just outside Barrow-in-Furness is easily accessible by train.  The journey is a delight, notwithstanding the grumpy guard at Preston who kicks up a stink at the thought of putting six bikes in his little two-bike space.  The train chugs way off the main line passing through stations with names like Silverdale, Kents Bank, Cark, Ulverston and Roose, with a special treat crossing the causeway where the river Kent blends into Morecambe Bay between Arnside and Grange-over-Sands.

To my big-city eyes, Barrow is a nowhere place with ghosts of shipbuilding propping up the bruised pride of a town once famous for helping Britain go to war, bombed but unbowed, memorialised by Nella Last’s wartime Mass Observation diary.  

On a blowy day in August 2015, there’s no sign on Walney Island of airships, warships, foundries and ammo factories, just the West Duddon  wind farm nine miles out in the choppy waters, ever-moving peaks heralding the free energy that’s being harvested.

Hats off to Sustrans for mapping and signing another delightful cycleway. There are downsides such as lack of signage through supermarket car parks, and underwhelming announcements at the start and finish points.  But the downers are well compensated by the uppers, with a route taking us along serene coastline, water meadows, up and over Cumbrian hills, adjacent to treacherous quicksands and bird heaven, and if you’re lucky a tidal wave: the Arnside Bore. 

We set off with the wind behind us, riding the flat coastline past sun-kissed pebble-dash houses whose conservatories and sun-rooms look lovely today, but the back of my mind ponders the prospect of rain-blasted windows staring at a monolithic blank grey horizon where you can’t distinguish where sea meets sky.  We’re lucky to pass through in sunshine.

We roll into Leece, past a dinky village green complete with quaint English pond and brown geese.  The Dusty Miller tea room at Gleaston Mill is tempting but we’re determined to get on so that we can have lunch at the incongruously sumptuous Kadampa Buddhist Centre at Bardsea.  Its golden turrets peek through the trees as we cycle down the driveway of this imposing ex-stately home.   The well-kept premises and restaurant provide leek and potato soup with cake to follow: just right for pedal-turning travellers.

Every Sustrans route seems compelled to include a rough section that is only suitable for mountain bikes.  In this case, the narrow path before crossing the river Crake qualifies for this status, and we grumblingly push our road bikes the short distance to the bridge.

 “This is bank holiday weekend,” we remind ourselves, as the sun uncharacteristically continues to warm our backs.  We're used to negotiating freezing, lashing rain on bank holidays.  We encounter our first serious hill on the road out of Ulverston.  “You see that, on top of that hill,” pointing to the Hoad Monument, Ulverston’s most distinctive landmark, “that’s where we’re going,” says Paula, with the benefit of having been here before.  She’s not a fan of hills, but we manage it with a certain amount of huffing and puffing and wine gums.

Six miles of rolling landscape follow, and a feel-good factor seeps into our bones as we use our cycling skills to negotiate the ups and downs, leaning into the bends, clicking gears high and low through the different gradients.  Panoramic views to the east over the Leven estuary, and northwards to the mountains of the Lake District, are stunning in their bare green and brown hillsides and blue stretches of water.

Our peace of mind is rudely interrupted by a long – I mean looonnnngggg – hill up towards Cartmel.  It starts off quite manageable, but from the halfway stage only the ‘mountain goat’ cyclist in our party is still in the saddle, while the rest of us push our bikes up the increasingly steep incline.

According to the eternal law of cycling, where there’s an up there’s a down, and the descent to Cartmel brings us down alongside the racecourse.  We rest our bikes against the drystone wall just in time to hear, and then see, a bevy of horses thundering towards us, jockeys bouncing precariously over the steeplechase jumps. 

From Cartmel we take a beautiful early evening seven-mile glide, with only one stinker of a climb, to our destination at Grange-over-Sands. 

The next day the lanes out of Grange-over-Sands are flat and fast towards Arnside, and we stop for coffee at Silverdale’s Wolf House Gallery.  We bypass the hill at Warton Cragg, skirt round the edge of Carnforth and follow a long, bumpy stretch along the Lancaster canal, standing on the pedals every so often to catch a glimpse of the majestic vista of Morecambe Bay.

Riding two miles along the prom, the extensive sands covered by the incoming tide, and mountains rising faintly in the distance across the bay, we are pointed onwards by a friendly local woman who presumes we “want to know where Eric is.”  We do indeed, and break into a chorus of Bring Me Sunshine while queuing for a photo with the famous son of Morecambe.

Afternoon tea at the Midland Hotel does not materialise as we haven’t booked two weeks in advance, so we continue on the four mile cycle track to Lancaster.  Our equilibrium is interrupted by a local youth who hooted with mirth as he dumped a bucket of murky liquid over his back fence onto one of our riders.  Grim-faced, we carry on along the path. Entering Lancaster alongside the River Lune, we cross the river and turn right to follow the Millennium Path along the Lune estuary to Glasson Dock.  

As so often, the end of a cycle ride is somewhat of an anti-climax.  We can’t find any mention of the end of the Bay Cycle Way, so have to content ourselves with a sign commemorating the dock’s industrial past.  Its recent notoriety is as the place where coal was imported from Poland to break the Miners’ strike in 1984-5.

We congratulate each other.  We’ve completed the 81-mile ride in fabulous weather. A part of the north has been revealed in the true colours of its diversity and allure.  There were hard bits, high bits, long bits and lost bits, bumpy bits, hard-on-the-bum bits, laughing bits – all adding up to a fantastic way to end the summer. We’re planning to take a group of inexperienced cyclists back next year.