Cycling through Lincolnshire

BY IAN CHANNING

My knowledge of Bourne extends to a brief bicycle visit one very wet morning in the early 1990s but I found it an attractive place to be and you may be interested to know what I was doing there. 

At the age of about 18, when I realised I was nuts about cycling, I set myself a goal that would take a lifetime to fulfil: to visit every town in England in the saddle. Twenty-four summers and well over 10,000 miles later, I am about halfway there, having covered most places south of the Humber-Mersey line. I "did" most of Lincolnshire fairly early on, between 1978 and 1982, as my mother comes from Boston and I sometimes passed through the county on my way to college in Hull. That was in the late seventies, when traffic was lighter and the fenland roads were so quiet you could travel for hours without meeting a car. With a tailwind, it was glorious, but there is no nastier place to be on a bike if you are facing a driving headwind. 

Going to college, I did some mighty rides across the entire one-mile span of the then brand-new Humber Bridge, down the length of Lincolnshire to my parents' place in South Buckinghamshire. Once, I covered the whole journey of around 200 miles in one 17-hour day, arriving home so knackered I had to crawl upstairs to bed. The north Lincolnshire towns of Barton, Brigg and Scunthorpe were pretty grim then, but Lincoln and Stamford were also en route. I was lucky enough to discover Stamford before the Middlemarch days. [Location sequences for the BBC Television dramatised version of George Eliot's book were filmed here in 1993]. 

And so I knocked off most of the fens and the north of the county. I finally got around to Bourne and its neighbourhood after I had moved to Japan to work as a translator in the 1990s, from where I return for about three weeks each year to carry on the cycling. I bagged Bourne where I stopped for coffee at the Burghley Arms, Sleaford, Alford, Skegness and Spilsby in a couple of circular runs. During one of these, I misread my map and was forced to cross a fen drain via a railway bridge as the road came to a halt at the bank, a very naughty thing to do, but not so dangerous as on this day there was a rail strike. I also cycled through Caistor, one of my favourite little Lincolnshire towns where even the road signs were those lovely old black and white cast iron fingerposts and the entire scene was evocative of England in the 1950s. 

Then to my disappointment, there was only one more Lincolnshire town left to explore, Market Rasen. I saved it until April 1999 and spent a freezing night there under the roof of a motherly widow with a very fat cat after cycling through a blizzard on the Wolds. 

Lincolnshire remains one of my favourite cycling areas. The lanes are empty, the views long and the gradients gentle, and this particular cyclist is far happier in that kind of terrain than struggling up and down the Pennines. Nowhere have I seen more imposing farmhouses. They sit at the end of their dead-straight, quarter-mile long driveways like manors, bringing dignity to the lowlands. If you want uplands, the Wolds are as remote and lonely as many moors and give you just as much of an on-top-of-the-world feeling, low as they are. And the towns know their place in the countryside. Most English market towns now dominate their surroundings with ring roads and huge peripheral developments but in Lincolnshire towns you can walk up the high street and, after fifteen minutes, be among the fields. Such quiet, unpretentious places they are, with haslet on display in the shop windows and faded enamelled metal signs advertising Spillers Feed, Tizer, Frys Chocolate and other commodities fixed to gable ends and high streets littered with sods of Lincolnshire earth and mashed sugar beets that have fallen off tractor treads. 

I like too the understated, old-fashioned Lincolnshire approach to things. It is nice to visit the villages of Tennyson and Newton and not find that a Tennyson or Newton Experience has been built next to the great men's former homes. The county, incidentally, should make more of Sir John Franklin [English explorer 1786-1847 from Spilsby, Lincolnshire, who discovered the Northwest Passage] whose adventures in the Arctic waters are as inspiring as Shackleton's and Scott's, and more exciting. I also like the way most of the people in most of the villages and towns are locally born, or so it seems. There are very few counties of which this can be said now. I suppose all this is just another way of saying Lincolnshire is underdeveloped and poorly connected, but I wish more of England were like it.