Saturday 27 June 2009 - Kendal to Littleborough

Kendal - Kirkby Lonsdale - Settle - Gisburn - Burnley - Todmorden - Littleborough

As I attempted to plough my way through another full English breakfast, I reflected on its ubiquity and the generally limited choice in B&B establishments throughout Britain. Bacon, eggs, sausage etc is fine once in a while, but day after day its appeal begins to wane. Why can’t we have what we actually want, rather than what the tourist industry has decided we want? One of my favourite breakfasts is a Manx kipper placed under a hot grill until the backbone begins to buckle and burn, brushed with butter and lemon juice, generously sprinkled with freshly ground black pepper and served with buttered wholemeal bread. I have never seen this simple dish on any breakfast menu. Yes, I realise kippers stink the house out for days, but that’s not my problem, is it? Don’t tell me you can’t afford an extractor fan with all that money you’re raking in. Just shut up and grill me my kipper.
One of the most popular breakfasts worldwide is coffee and cigarettes, but again, a packet of fags is never seen nestling between the boxes of Cornflakes and Weetabix. What about catering for the guest of less temperate tastes - a bottle of Buckie or a few cans of Skol Super, maybe? Those of us who frequented free festivals in the 70s might well appreciate a nostalgic breakfast consisting of a chillum stoked with Nepalese Temple Stick, passed to the right by the landlady with a cry of “Boom Shankar”.
Perhaps fortunately, the options at Kendal included neither high-grade hashish nor electric soup, and so it was with clear heads that we tackled the long climb out of town on the A6, soon merging with the busy A591. This road, which becomes the A590 after about two miles, is a fairly unpleasant dual carriageway but for a long stretch we were helped by the fact that the outside lane was coned off specially for us. We were overjoyed at having our own private lane and rode merrily along, to the fury of passing motorists, for miles until we came upon a couple of men digging a little hole and the cones petered out.
Shortly after the junction with the M6, the road joins the A65, reduces to two lanes, and becomes narrow, hilly and twisting as it approaches the Yorkshire Dales. Half way up the first steep rise at Cow Brow, on a left hand bend, I was forced off the road by an incompetent caravanner who just managed to squeeze his car past me but didn’t take the caravan’s extra width into account. I half jumped off my bike and flattened myself against the hedge as his assemblage trundled past with inches to spare. I felt a little shaken, but once back in the saddle my nerves calmed as I began to take in the beauty of my surroundings. The traffic remained a nuisance with many large vehicles revving up behind me, with no room to pass, obliging me to stop repeatedly to let them past. Eventually I found Paul and John waiting at the turn-off to Kirkby Lonsdale, and we called at the village for coffee and cake. A large convoy of very expensive looking motorbikes passed through the village as we sat outside the café.
As we made progress along the now straighter and wider A65, past Cowan Bridge and Ingleton, the prospects became wilder as the stark grandeur of the Dales asserted itself and the Three Peaks loomed hazily to the north. At one point, at a junction with a minor road, a sign by the drystone wall caught my eye: “A65 Skipton 20“.
Skipton, the resting place of my paternal grandmother, is a place my father often spoke of. Growing up in Keighley, he spent much of his youth exploring the moors bordering his home town, and it was he more than anyone who instilled in me my own love of the wilds. He would often wander over to Skipton, and the sight of its name had a cathartic effect on me. Despite the terrible wrench of his passing over a year previously, I shed few tears at the time. Now however, as I pedalled beneath the glowering mass of Ingleborough, I broke down and began to cry. I was unable to continue, and wept bitterly as I leaned against a gatepost near the Little Chef at Newby. A few minutes later, having composed myself, I set off again and was happy. I was happy because the sun was shining, because I was enjoying the ride and because of the beauty of my surroundings. But most of all I was happy because I had at last cried for Dad.
Paul and John were waiting near the junction with the B6480 to Settle, and we followed it to climb the steep Buck Haw Brow, pushing our bikes part of the way, before dropping down into the hospitably-named town for lunch in the courtyard of the Golden Lion. A friendly couple made a generous donation to our cause when they learned about our ride.
We exited the town back on to the A65 alongside the River Ribble, with the Dales to the left and the vast expanse of Bowland to the right, to Long Preston. Here we took the A682, still by the river but with many ups and downs, through Nappa and Newsholme before dropping down to Gisburn and the staggered junction with the A59. After the junction, we left the Ribble Valley behind for an exhausting climb up on to the moorland through Little Middop and Greystone. It was a relief to pass the crest of the road and coast all the way down through Blacko, with the great bulk of Pendle Hill dominating the scene ahead, to Barrowford where we stopped for a coffee.
We were now in the outskirts of Burnley and the gritty reality of urban life became evident as we approached the town. John, upon being cut up at a junction, remonstrated with the offending motorist only to be told “I’ll have you, son of a BEETCH!” I was glad to turn off into the suburbs and escape via the A671 up a grinding hill out of town.
We then turned left on to the A646 and followed the steep sided Pennine valley, through Holme Chapel and Lydgate, to Todmorden with its impressive relics of a bygone industrial age, where we took the A6033 south. As I passed a pub in the centre of the town, three coarse-looking women sitting outside screeched and jeered at me as I rode past. Had I suffered a puncture at that point, I would have persevered with a flat tyre for at least another mile rather than risk a close encounter with the Todmorden harridans.
It had been a long, hilly day and I found the next six miles, across the moor through Walsden and Summit, very tiring until the road finally descended to Littleborough. We still had a mile or two on the B6225 to go as we were staying near Hollingworth Lake at the southern end of the town, and on the way a group of teenage lads greeted us with assorted animal noises as they passed us riding along the pavement in the opposite direction.
Having found our B&B near the far end of the road bordering the lake, we relaxed for a while before walking back along a path by the shore of the lake to the busy Wine Press pub for a pleasant meal. Hollingworth Lake is in a semi-rural setting bordering the moors, and the road along its shore has something of the air of a seaside promenade. As we walked back to our lodgings, in places tiptoeing through the dog turds on the pavement, John’s foot was ominously painful, presaging his difficulties to come.