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Time to move the thread along a bit.

After a week in France it was time to head for the ferry at Cherbourg, an easy day, only 35 miles.

Two places on the way above Utah Beach I wish I woulda known more about at the time...

The German coastal battery at Crisbecq near St. Marcouf de L'Isle which according to this road sign was only about three miles out of my way...



The other I stopped at because it did have a sign for it, the Azeville Battery, seven miles inland. A collection of bunkers connected by hundreds of yards of underground tunnels. More than 200 men were assigned here.





Tho why they put a anti-aircraft fixture on top of a structure shielded by tons of concrete I dunno...



When I saw this one with trees and such painted on I thought it was the work of misguided hippies in the 70's, but it turns out the Germans themselves painted it like that, as camouflage...



The commander at Cribecq was a grimly efficient bastard who sank a Destroyer and killed a lot of Americans before making his escape.

http://h2g2.com/entry/A37321751

At Azeville a 14" shell from the USS Nevada eight miles out passed through an artillery bunker without exploding, killing by air compression or shards of concrete everyone in inside.

The Commander of the installation, one Dr. Hugo Treiber, was a less than ardent Nazi and very popular with his men. He saved the lives of most when he surrendered when defeat became inevitable.

http://www.oisterwijk-marketgarden.com/the_azeville_battery.html

Birdwatcher

Then suddenly it seemed like the trip was drawing to a close, all I had left was the 350 to 400 miles back up England to Blackpool.

One concern was the ferries from Cherbourg to England all left towards the end of the day and disembarked at their destination after 10pm. This could have been a real problem for a guy on a bicycle in a big city and at best would probably mean an expensive and short hotel stay.

Fortunately there was a choice of destinations, the built-up urban center of Portsmouth vs. the much smaller Poole. I chose Poole.

Before my screw-up of disembarking in Brittany instead of Normandy I had originally intended to cross over from Calais so as to witness the migrant camps and to see the famous white cliffs of Dover. As it was the much less renowned beige cliffs of Poole would have to do instead



Even landing in a smaller community, I was still facing something of an ordeal getting off the ferry as I did close to 11pm. My options were 1) find a quiet and safe spot to sleep, not easy to do after dark and Poole, small as it was, was still not country. 2) Find a campground, but the nearest was four miles off and some sort of "resort", not ordinarily the sort of place that welcomes homeless-looking tent traveller. Or 3) a hotel, this was a distant third, I just weren't into paying $100 or so just for a roof at that point.

As it was I didn't have to worry, there were lots of folks parked in lines overnight waiting for an early-morning ferry, in an area provided with showers and free bathrooms for the nominal fee of 5 pounds per night



I set up my tent without stakes on pavement in a sheltered spot out of the wind and slept until daylight.

Cork/Cobh back in Ireland had been a tremendous natural harbor, a small opening leading to a series of sheltered bays. The morning light revealed that Poole was the same way. Hordes of private craft, big and small. England is a crowded place.







One thing that struck me from the get-go, the older rows of houses were so distinctively British Isles, in stark contrast to the ones in France just a short distance away across the Channel.

Heading north out of Poole at Knowlton; just yer average 900 year old British church inside yer average 4,500 year old British earthwork. I was proud of myself, having just come from there, by then I already new what Norman architecture looked like.

I look at places like this and see all the stories there. 900 years ago this was quite the status symbol for the local big shots. I wonder where they thought the earthwork came from and why they put their church in it.









And not far away, a different sort of antique...



..and shades of Terlingua, which just then seemed very far away, I've been there....



Further along, something I'm now kicking myself over.

I didn't take the time to go into Salisbury Cathedral, beautiful as it undoubtedly was inside and out. After all I was just at Bayeux. But damn, I didn't know they had an original copy of the MAGNA CARTA on display.

http://www.salisburycathedral.org.uk/magna-carta/visiting-magna-carta



Next time I'm through there on a bicycle I'll be all over it

Nudging the thread along some more.

I found Britain to be prettier than Ireland, there's more parts to it, different landforms, whereas away from the West Coast Ireland seemed sorta uniform; rolling glaciated terrain.

Much of the south of England has always been surprisingly open terrain, seemingly shallow soils over an underlaying bedrock of chalk. So it was more'n 50 miles inland from the coastal chalk cliffs, in the 19th Century the locals could create two rival images of a horse by scraping away the overlaying dirt. Here's one....



Not far from Stonehenge, this general regions IIRC is referred to as the Salisbury Plain...






There was a large and sparsely populated military training area and RAF facility. While crossing this area on a quiet backroad I had my second great good fortune of the trip.



Moments after taking that grassland pic towards the end of a long day, one of the bolts holding the front luggage rack to the forks, one that bore most of the weight, sheared off and broke after three years and more'n 5,000 miles of use. I had no extra bolts long enough to replace it so was effectively sidelined.

Not five minutes after that happened a former Serviceman and plane mechanic pulled up in his worked-over Landrover to see if I needed help. One of them natural genius mechanics, the guy was hauling around practically a parts department in his vehicle. He found a bolt that fit and directed me to an inexpensive pub/campground not far away.

One of three former British Servicemen I conversed with on this trip, and in every case I was impressed.

Birdwatcher

Avesbury.... home of the largest stone circle in Europe, I just saw parts of it passing through. A 4,000 year-old ring and ditch complex, hundreds of yards across complete with what was then a fifty ft deep ditch and avenues extending outwards a mile or more. Sixty miles inland I was still on chalk so the gleaming whiteness of the excavations when new must have been something to see...

Coming in from the east , a stone avenue....



Part of a main ring....







...and the encircling ditch. Sixty miles inland this was still over a chalk bedrock, originally more than fifty feet deep this ditch and bank system must have been gleaming white when new, all of this done by hand without iron tools.



England is very old, and also very crowded, especially the South. This was only about 100 miles west of the London Metropolitan Area and quite unlike when I was a kid, nowadays lots of people in the UK own cars.

The result is the highway infrastructure is way overcrowded, especially off of the Motorways (Interstates). What you have is a whole network of "A" and "B" roads, for the most part all just two lane, with absolutely no shoulder to speak of most places and with long stretches where hedgerows or stone walls extend up to or even overhang the asphalt.

As a result you end up riding the fog stripe with vehicles passing about two or three feet off your right handlebar, while lots of times brushing the hedgerows on your left side (they drive on the left in the UK and Ireland). Semi trucks and buses were the worst.

I had two wrecks in England, only ones of the whole trip, both of which actually dropped me out in the middle of the lane. One was early in the trip up in Northumbria where in heavy rain,not able to see the ground under deep puddles, I put a wheel of the edge of the asphalt. The other of which, north of Poole in the far South, was caused by my bags on the left side catching a dead tree branch laying under a hedgerow and pulling it under the bike. I just got lucky both times that there was no one passing right then.

Despite these riding conditions, road cycling at speed has become enormously popular in England (by "MAMILs"; middle-aged men in lycra ). Singles and packs of these guys are a familiar road hazard for Brit drivers, and your average driver or trucker over there is enormously patient by US standards when stacked up behind these guys on the usual heavily-traveled narrow roadways. Even so, when they do manage to pass they have to squeeze by just a couple of feet away.

In wanting to head north out of Avebury I was in a fix: The only road north was an especially crowded "A" road, heavy with truck traffic. I could have done it, but for the whole ten miles to the adjacent Swindon urban area I would have been tailed by my own convoy of backed-up traffic trying to pass.

I ended up on ten miles of dirt, much of which would have been tough even on an unloaded mountain bike, which stretches I had to get off and walk. This was one of the many public footpaths across rural land in England, this one called "The Ridgeway", which apparently extends some considerable distance.

Nice views of the Wessex Downs from up there though....

Beautiful countryside.

Yep, and I ain't even into the Pennines yet.

Anyways....

My target heading north was Bosworth Battlefield, where on August 22nd, 1485 the whole course of English history turned on a dime. The last major battle of the War of the Roses and the swan song of the Middle Ages. Richard III was the last English king to die in battle, and in that battle led the last charge of mounted knights in England. He led that charge in a do-or-die effort to personally take out Henry Tudor, and came within a hair's breadth of doing so, slaying both Henry's standard bearer and the largest of his bodyguards.



On Richard's right flank his ally the Duke Norfolk had been attacked by the main Tudor force. On Richard's left flank his ally the Earl of Northumberland would not commit his forces when Richard so ordered, probably because Richard's OTHER ostensible ally William Stanley was further left again and Northumberland feared that Stanley might change sides and attack HIM.

At that point, just as the tide of battle was turning against Richard, Richard saw Henry Tudor and his retinue far across the field.

But in charging headlong across the battlefield along with just his own retinue of knights, Richard passed across the front of the Stanleys. Seeing Richard so isolated, William Stanley launched his whole force, surrounding Richard with overwhelming numbers and cutting him down.

In the press of battle Richard's armored steed became mired in a bog. Far from calling for a horse as Shakespeare had him do, the most credible accounts have Richard refusing the offer of a horse, announcing his preference for dying in battle while still a king, and then wading into "the thickest press of his foes".

In that estimation Richard was exactly right, in that era the losers could face peculiarly brutal fates beyond mere execution. One prior contender taken alive was simply starved to death in a dark castle dungeon, and after Richard's demise an unfortunate young relative and potential contender to the throne was taken into custody and held in solitary confinement to the point of permanent idiocy before being quietly, and probably mercifully, executed.



Whoops, gotta run, pics later.

Birdwatcher

The Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Center, excellent, as you'd expect a British Museum to be.



The two principals; Henry Tudor, soon to become Henry VII, and Richard III, who would be dead that same morning. Richard wore a crown into battle....







Richard was 32, Henry was 27, Richard was of the House of York, Henry was of part-Welsh ancestry and somewhat distantly related to the House of Lancaster. Both had been sent into exile in Europe as children for their own safety. Henry would spend most of his life in France, subject to periodic extradition attempts by the Yorkists.

Richard had been recalled from Holland at age nine when his Yorkist older brother Edward became king. His combat career began at age seventeen and for the next eleven years until his brother's death he was constantly engaged in both punitive expeditions against and negotiations with both nobles and commoners in England, Wales and Scotland. Even his enemies agreed that Richard was a brawler, a true warrior king. It was no accident that he attempted to take matters literally into his own hands at Bosworth.

OTOH some historians have described Henry Tudor as "bookish" rather than a warrior, he WAS undoubtedly an uncommonly bright guy who would subsequently hold on to power for the next twenty-four years, beginning with the adroit move of making Richard's own niece his queen, thereby allying the warring Houses. Upon his death the crown would pass on to his son Henry VIII, and ultimately to his granddaughter Elizabeth I.

Armor had been steadily improving over the Centuries,and by the 15th accomplished much at a penalty of surprisingly little weight. IIRC the best armor of the period came from Germany and Italy.



Good armor was very expensive, and a status symbol, only a small minority were armored this well at Bosworth. Still, looking at them one does wonder why they were packing swords rather than the various war picks and hammers of that era specifically designed for use against armor.

Birdwatcher

I can't imagine having that armor on and actually trying to do something in it. Much less something as physical as a prolonged battle.



Very informative thread, Mike!

How do you rate this last trip compared to others you have been on?

Classic feudalism....



...but by the Battle of Bosworth changes were underway. The Black Death had wiped out nearly half the population a generation or two earlier, paradoxically improving the lot of the survivors. In the aftermath of the plague labor was in demand, putting the common man in a better position to negotiate.

In terms of combat this meant that many of the levies also drew pay, and a noble had to look after the welfare of his forces or face widespread desertion. Around 2,000 of Henry's 5,000-man army were in fact not levies at all but mercenaries, professional warriors from France, "the roughest men in Normandy". Although outnumbered by Richard's 10,000 man army the presence of this hard core would prove decisive. When Richard made the attack that almost succeeded, Henry, who took no personal part in the fighting, was able to find refuge amid these mercenaries.

Significant that the levy applied to men "between the ages of 16 and 60". Judging by skeletal battlefield remains the common man of that era was surprisingly robust, not too far off what one would expect in modern times.

Swords, daggers and bows never went out of style, this being the era of the longbow, but the primary infantry weapon was at that time a pole arm; a halberd or bill about five or six feet long. These could be used to stab like spears or swung like an axe, and their spikes or hooks could be used to catch the armor of an opponent and cause them to fall.

Probably an English guy armed with a bill, the jacket or brigandeen contained sewn-in metal plates.



A guy in a video vignette portraying a farmer called up as an archer in Richard's levies, here wearing a helmet passed down by his father and, being a good archer, stating he was getting paid a shilling a day which "wasn't bad".





The museum portrays him as being cut down later during the rout of Richard's forces. His jacket is likely padded with wool or horsehair which would offer some protection.

A man-at-arms, sort of a middle rank in the feudal levies, who was expected to muster his own company from among the lower classes. This guy is carrying a halberd as well as a sword and buckler (small shield}.



Surprising to me was the presence of mobile artillery at that early date, firing lead cannonballs.



Birdwatcher

The problem with armor was most likely overheating rather than weight. Good armor was remarkably lightweight but one wore a protective layer of heavy clothing under it. Judging from the head wounds on his remains, Richard most likely removed his helmet after dismounting from his mired horse, possibly because he was overheating after having just taken out two opposing knights in combat.

Overall though, IIRC the dynamics of medieval battles are still uncertain. Even today highly trained athletes can't flail around with hand-held weapons for extended periods of time like they do in the movies. Plus staged modern-day melees involving trained swordsmen would have been so lethal with real weapons that most everybody involved would have died or gotten maimed inside of the first two minutes.

The gist seems to be that actual combats were swift and deadly, over in seconds, just like successful gunfights today, and presumably one avoided fighting fair whenever possible.



The Isle of Man with my son followed by forty days on a bicycle?

Hey, in a league by itself

A map of the battlefield looking southwest...



Henry Tudor's 5,000 man army arrived at the top of this map, Richard's 10,000 man force deployed on high ground to the right of and below the map. The 6,000 men under the Stanleys were deployed on high ground around Stoke Golding and Dadlington. The canal that crosses the battlefield wasn't there in 1485.

The field is not complicated to understand, IIRC most Medieval battlefields are that way. Feudal levies were not trained in cohesive maneuvers, for the most part they were formed up in some sort of logical arrangement at the start and then attacked, or stood to receive an attack. There weren't much material there for a Stonewall Jackson or Bobby Lee to work with.

Henry's force maneuvered around the wetland marked as Richard's death site towards the right hand side of the top of the map. Norfolk moved forward from the right to engage but was routed and scattered. Perhaps the feudal levies were no match for the hardened Norman mercenaries.

Nowadays, due to tree cover, its hard to make out much. This is the view taken looking across the battlefield from the "You Are Here" marker.



But back then that same spot looked more like this; intensively cultivated.



At that point, looking across that open battlefield from his higher vantage point, Richard saw Henry Tudor and his entourage from more than a mile away move from behind his army towards the Stanley forces amassed around Stoke Golding. Plainly the fix was in, and when Stanley threw his 6,000 men into the mix on Henry's side it would be all over.

That's when Richard launched his charge of mounted knights, the last such charge in English history, down the slope and through the battle. Richard's entourage collided with that of Henry on the slopes below Stoke Golding, Richard in the lead.

Homing right in on his target, Richard broke his lance killing Sir William Brandon who was holding Henry's standard. Richard himself slight of build, then collided with the burly 6 foot 8 inch jousting champion Sir John Cheyne, striking the man on the helmet with the broken lance and knocking him from his horse. Meanwhile Henry was running, fleeing back to the cover of his own infantry. It had been a close thing, accounts suggest Richard came "within a sword's length" of taking out Henry.

Stanley launched his forces into the melee, the press of fighting men being driven west towards the low ground where Richard's horse became mired in the marsh. That is the area where he went down fighting.

Here it is on the ground, dry land now but a bog back then, looking southwest from the intersection of Fenn and Mill Lanes.



...and from that same spot looking back northeast towards the high ground from where Richard launched his charge....



After the battle, legend has it that Richard's crown was found hanging from a hawthorn bush on the battlefield. Wherever the crown was found, an impromptu coronation celebration by the elated victors was held up on the hill at Stoke Golding under an oak tree.

Two pictures I missed. I seen the high ground where Richard was close by when I was over at that end of the field, but at the time it was raining and I was pushing the bike, I knew I really should go up there to take a look but didn't, not appreciating the significance of it at that moment in time.

The other photo I missed was in Stoke Golding. Apparently the oak tree where legend has it Henry received his crown is still standing.

And durn it, had I actually stopped in Salisbury Cathedral earlier in the trip and seen the Magna Carta, turns out Sir John Cheyne, the huge knight unhorsed by Richard, is buried there too.

Birdwatcher

I would really love to see the Brit Isles as would my wife. Thanks for the visit via proxy Mike.

You're very welcome T.

I think the thing to do, if you can stand to camp, is join the UK Camping and Caravanning Club for around $100/year. They have a couple of thousand camp sites all over the UK, usually for around $20/night or less. Trains over there go everywhere but they have gotten stupid expensive, but car rentals are about the same price as here.

Anyways, back 531 years....

Richard's corpse was stripped and thrown over a horse "with his privates shamefully exposed" and it was taken twelve miles east to the town of Leicester, from whence Richard had departed that morning. There it was hung out on public display lest their be any doubts as to his death.

After a few days the corpse began to stink, so it was interred in a hastily dug grave in chapel nave of the nearby Greyfriars Priory. A priory was in effect a small monastery wherein public access to the chapel was limited. In this way Richard was afforded a technically Christian burial, placating future dissent, but at the same time the grave could not become a focal point for neither desecration nor worship, a clever solution that to me has Henry Tudor written all over it.



Shakespeare thoroughly maligned Richard III, also giving him a hunchback and a withered arm. Perhaps he genuinely believed it was so, having been raised in the Tudor era and, more to the point, presenting the play during the reign of Henry Tudor's granddaughter Elizabeth I. In reality Richard's curvature of the spine may not have been quite so severe as his recovered skeleton suggests, the corpse having been hastily interred in a half-upright slouching position in an undersized grave.



The most henious crime one can lay at Richard's feet is his near-certain responsibility for the murder of his two young nephews in the Tower of London, a crime motivated in part by the grasping ambitions of their mother, one of the notorious Woodville clan.
I dunno that killing your late brother's kids to cement one's own hereditary claims was especially henious by feudal standards, but perhaps having it done in a venue like the Tower was, and certainly provided fodder to his enemies.

Richard's own heir had died in infancy, and his wife succumbed to tuberculosis. Richard weren't a hunchback, but one shoulder was visibly higher than the other, and the fact there was a total eclipse the day his wife died may well have been regarded as bad juju in those superstitious times.

His brief two year reign was in some ways exemplary, IIRC one of his decrees guaranteeing the right of the common man to speak at legal proceedings, another incremental step towards the freedoms we ourselves take for granted today.

OTOH while Richard probably murdered his two young nephews, Henry certainly married their nineteen year-old sister and made her his Queen. If it weren't a love match at the start, surely there was worse matches for her than Henry who was so reasonable everywhere else. IIRC she bore him five children.

Henry Tudor was a money and management guy rather than a warrior. He was smart enough to forgive most of his erstwhile Yorkist enemies and leave them in place. He also avoided ruinous foreign wars. One more battle against Yorkist rebels came two years later, but it was a brief affair, easily won. He also passed laws limiting the ability of the nobles to maintain their own standing armies. Prob'ly the real secret to his twenty-four year reign is that he brought stability and prosperity to the realm, and during the subsequent Tudor Century England developed a sense of itself as a nation.

Ten years after Richard's death, his reign secure and perhaps out of a sense of guilt, Henry provided an alabaster grave marker over Richard's grave. Whatever his actions in life, Richard had been an anointed King of England, a thing which still carries weight there to this day.

Thirty-three years later Henry's son Henry VIII had Greyfriars torn down during his dissolution of the church. Exposed to the elements, the soft alabaster would have quickly eroded but enough remained one hundred years later that an English gentleman whose house had been built upon the site could proudly show the remnants of it to visitors to his garden.

Another two hundred years again, in the Nineteenth Century, a school was built upon the site, at which time IIRC Richard's skeleton may have lost its feet to an outhouse excavation. In time the old school became a government building, and the site of the old house garden the now-famous parking lot.

IIRC it took some doing for some archaeologists to get permission to dig the site in what was regarded as at best a distant long shot, but when they did start digging much to theirs and everyone else's surprise they found Richard's remains with the first trench.

This time around he was buried right; first returned to the battlefield in a coffin and then given an honor guard to a second internment at Leicester Cathedral.









Birdwatcher

After I had seen Bosworth Field the last target was checked off the list. In 36 days and 1,200 miles on a bicycle I had seen the Lake District, Hadrian's Wall, Glasgow, Loch Lomond, Argyll, the Kintyre Peninsula, Ulster, the Cliffs of Moher, Killarney, Skibbereen, Cobh, Brittany, Mont. St. Michel, Normandy, the Bayeux Tapestry, Omaha Beach, St.Mere Eglise, Cherbourg, Poole, Avebury and Bosworth Field. Plus all the scenery in between.

All that was left now was about another 200 miles back to where I started, Blackpool, to hang out with my Brit cousins, their kids, and their grandchildren.

Wherever possible on this trip I had avoided urban areas. They are just too slow to navigate, the lodging is expensive, and if I ran into a pack of urban thugs, exposed and slow as I was on a bicycle, I could lose all my stuff. I will allow that last worry was prob'ly in part a result of my own urban childhood over there in the '60's.

Still, Bosworth lies sorta in the middle of England proper, and between me and Blackpool on the most direct route lay the Manchester metropolitan area, further west again, Liverpool. If I went north up the more level and flat east side of England I would have to get through or around Sheffield. So instead I aimed up the rural middle, planning a route through the scenic Peak District National Park, tho I knew the many hills would slow my progress. I was going to cross the Peak District south to north, thread my way north and west through the Pennines, and then turn west north of Manchester and Preston to get to Blackpool.

To get to the south end of the Peak District I had to get forty miles from Bosworth north and west to Ashbourne. I set out mid-afternoon.

Pretty fast progress by my standards, I was on the outskirts of Ashbourne by evening despite a slow and surreal three mile segment en route steered by my phone app along footpaths through weedy fields, and up abandoned driveways choked with brambles, past no trespassing signs and suprised unemployed louts smoking cigarettes, and then sliding the bike under a locked gate in Burton-on-Trent.

Back in the sticks again not far south of Ashbourne I had my closest call of the trip.

I was rolling downhill on a country lane barely wide enough for a single car, said lane hemmed in on each side by tall hedges.Ahead was a blind curve going right, all curves on that stretch being blind on account of the narrowness of the pavement and the tall hedges. Coming down that same lane somewhere behind me I could hear a big truck approaching at an unwise rate of speed.

I swept around the corner and there was a car, right there, coming the other way. Fortunately there was a wide spot on my side just then, on my left on the outside of the turn, right after the curve, giving access to two fields on the left.

One of them instant reaction deals; the lady in the car hit the brakes, I bailed off the pavement, and looking to escape the vicinity of the imminent head-on 'tween car and truck, bounced up a short grassy bank, across some rough grass and ended up right up on the two gates to the fields.

The milk tanker truck, for such it was, driven by a young Polish guy as it turned out, came around the turn going too fast, seen the car, hit the brakes and bounced up that same grassy bank, across that same rough grass, and ended up right next to me up on the gates, close to pinning me against them. I'm guessing the milk tank was empty, hence his high rate of speed to begin with and his subsequent rapid deceleration.

The British lady driving the car was all shocked and angry at the truck driver and said he almost killed me, from her angle it looked like he HAD killed me. The young Polish driver was shaken and apologetic. For me it was one of them almost-doesn't-count-except-in-horseshoes deals, over too quick to get worked up about. I expect it woulda looked scary on Youtube, but when all was said and done no harm no foul. After a little we all continued on our respective ways.

Thinking back on this just now I realize that, had he been hauling a load, or a bigger one than he was and had pulled that same evasive maneuver, he woulda swept wider, taken me out from behind and then crushed both gates. But..... didn't happen.

A short while later I came across this pub, the Shire Horse. Since I was only about a mile or so from the campground I was aiming for I stopped in for a pint.



Apart from working farms, the English countryside has gotten very gentrified, even modest old houses going for the better part of a million pounds. Nowhere is very far from a major metropolitan area with their associated moneyed professionals and successful entrepreneurs.

Many things have changed in England since my youth, but one thing that ain't is a sort of widespread snobbery and class consciousness among many moneyed professionals and successful entrepreneurs.

It was very much an urban moneyed crowd in the pub, not all of course were upper class twits but several seemed to be.

The flip side of that among this crowd is a remarkable innate restraint against complaining and a pained but passive tolerance of unwashed eccentrics passing through. One guy thought it would be funny if I camped under a horse chestnut tree across the road from the pub on a small patch of grassy public right-of-way, I could see the humor in that so I obliged. Plus the pub also had good food and free wifi.

Met some friendly people, had some good conversation, but later that night while crashed out in my tent I head a passing lady to her husband "Oh, I don't think THAT is good at all!, why did they let him camp there!".

Actually, I expect I coulda camped out right on that lady's front lawn and she woulda been too polite to kick me off

...and, out of consideration for the Pub owner, I was gone at first light, left the place cleaner than I found it.

Birdwatcher

Main drag, Asbourne in the morning. One thing about this trip, there ain't any diners in the places I went. My favorite thing was to buy a newspaper and have a proper sit-down greasy breakfast. Lots of times "breakfast" places wouldn't open until 8, 9 or even 10.



The other thing is, Ashbourne might have housed regular poor Working Class folks at one time, but lots of country places in England have gone gentrified, city money. Fer example, I had passed through the Cotswolds Hills coming north, which rustic inhabitants Monty Python used to make fun of. Ain't no hicks left there today, not that I saw, just upscale. OTOH, when ya got that sort of clientele, they have these sort of objects of natural beauty in their antique stores (this being an actual antique store on the main drag in Ashbourne)....







I'll say one thing about Ashbourne, they don't mess around when it comes to hike and bike trails, this one follows an old rail bed up into the Peaks District...



Of course, in England the term "Peak District" is relative, we ain't talking the Rocky Mts here. Still, it was nice to get lofted up to hilltop elevations on a quiet and gentle grade and not to have to rub shoulders with traffic for a bit. A view from that same trail, ten miles down the line:

did you get my text yesterday?

I just sent a reply.

Hey tks for the heads up

The Peak District National Park is maybe 50 miles south to north, but it took me a day and a half to cross. Partly the terrain, and partly because I quit early on the first day in when I came across a youth hostel at Castleton. Whatever happened I weren't but a few days away from being done, and it gave me a chance to catch up on laundry and download pics.





These are the series of reservoirs in the Upper Derwent Valley, in 1943 Lancaster Bombers were roaring up this shot, training for the Dam Busters mission.



The Peak District marks the southern end of the Pennines, an ancient Carboniferous-era anticline extending up the center of England. Once you leave the park on the Northern end you are still in the Pennines. Might be the only difference is outside the park they can do stuff like this....



What I was doing after I got north of the park was crossing north over a series of steep-sided valleys running west to east. The going was slow. Everyone understands getting off to walk uphill,but there were places I got off to walk down uber-steep stretches, otherwise I was having to squeeze so hard on the brakes I feared the cables would pull loose.

Last morning, tho I didn't expect so at the time. I was 65 miles from Blackpool by my route and on account of the steep-sided valleys had only made 40 miles the day before. I didn't know exactly when I would escape the Pennines.

Looking back, this seems now like my last morning of what had been 40 days of total freedom. I could easily live rootless on a bicycle like this (provided I had an outside income of course ). This was adjacent to the M65 (??) maybe four miles west of Huddersfield. The adjacent interstate notwithstanding, it was a beautiful night. Slept with the tent open but ya gotta have some sort of cover else in that climate you'll wake up drenched with dew.



That last day would also bring some of the prettiest scenery of the whole trip. This is just north of the interstate. I was in the region of Yorkshire called the West Riding.



This is looking north, my general direction of travel, in the background crossing from west to east you can see the Calder River Valley and the location of the town of Sowerby Bridge, travelling west along this valley would be my ticket out of the endless hills of the Pennine Chain.



The Calder River at Sowerby Bridge.



And a note on breakfast.

Stopping to load up on grease and hot tea while reading the newspaper in the morning was my big indulgence on this trip. Only place this couldn't be done was in France where they eat bread in the morning. Most times this would run me about $15. The most I had paid had been nearly $30 in an upscale touristy place with no other alternatives maybe three days earlier.

At Sowerby Bridge, last morning, I came across the best deal of the trip, maybe $9 total, open at 7am as well The Sowerby Bridge Market, so popular with working folk that getting a photo was difficult.



Nirvana in the morning....