Cambridge Fen Edge and Ely

3 passes in 267 km, topping out at 2440 m

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Why this ride

A proper escape from London motorcycle escapes with roads worth waking up for. 267 km round from London - plan on about 4 h 52 of riding. It goes by way of Cambridge and Ely. The line favours views over speed.

Roadbook

1. London start

   London is the one place on the map where the best advice is to leave the bike at the edge. The centre around Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square is a maze of one-way streets, bus lanes, taxis and tourists, and parking is limited and expensive. The city also has a congestion charge and a low-emission zone, whose rules for motorcycles have changed over the years, so check the current conditions for your own machine before you ride in. For a start and finish, a quiet side street or a secure garage on the outskirts is a better plan.

   What you are stopping for here is history on a large scale. St Martin-in-the-Fields, a handsome eighteenth-century church with a tall steeple and a classical portico, stands at the north-east corner of Trafalgar Square, and its crypt hosts a café, a gallery and a brass-rubbing centre. It is famous for its lunchtime concerts and for its work with homeless people. Across the road, Nelson's Column rises over the square, with its bronze lions, and the National Gallery stretches along the north side.

   The city has some 7.5 million people, and it is never quite finished with itself. Roman Londinium was a muddy trading post on the Thames, and the medieval city grew into a great port, burning down in 1666 and rebuilding in brick and stone. Westminster, a short walk south, holds the Palace of Parliament and the Abbey, where English monarchs have been crowned for nearly a thousand years. The riding here is entirely about getting out: the A3, A4 and A40 lead to quiet lanes in Surrey, the Chilterns and Kent, and a very early start on a Sunday morning makes it easy.

   Fuel is available, but it is among the most expensive in the country, so top up on the outskirts. For a drink, a pub in the side streets off Whitehall, with its brass and etched glass, is as London as it gets. And when the light fades, the square is full of buskers, pigeons and people, and the lamps along the Mall glow.

2. Cambridge sight

   Cambridge is flat, and for a motorcyclist that is both its weakness and its secret. The city sits where the chalk of the Gog Magog hills runs out into the fens, and the River Cam wanders through its heart past the colleges, between lawns and willows, under little bridges where punts jostle on summer afternoons. King's College Chapel, begun in the fifteenth century and finished under the early Tudors, has a fan-vaulted ceiling that looks as if it were carved from lace, and its choir sings evensong most days of term. More than 158,000 people live here, so fuel, food and a bed are never in doubt.

   The city is a very hard place to ride in the middle. Cyclists rule the narrow streets, bus gates and one-way systems cut across the centre, and parking for anything with an engine is scarce and expensive. Do the sensible thing: park at the edge, perhaps near one of the big park-and-ride sites, and walk in. The old courts and lanes are best seen on foot anyway, and the Backs, the lawns behind the colleges along the river, are impossible to see from a saddle.

   Leave the city and the reward arrives. East and north, the land opens into the fens, a country drained from marsh by Dutch engineers in the seventeenth century, black-soiled and so level that the sky seems to take up three-quarters of the view. The roads here run dead straight along dykes and drains, and every so often take a sharp right angle for no reason except the line of an old ditch. Wind is the main hazard, and in winter, fog and frost. To the south-east the Gog Magog hills offer the only real climbing for miles, a gentle ridge of beech and chalk grassland.

   For a start or finish, Cambridge has a very good rhythm. A morning coffee in a bakery, a quiet departure while the students are still asleep, and an evening return along the river, when the college windows light up one by one and the bells begin. It is a city of long memories, and a few of them linger in the way the evening light falls on the old stone.

3. Ely food

   For centuries Ely was an island. The town stands on a low hill rising out of the Fens, the vast, flat wetland that once covered much of eastern England, and until the seventeenth century it could be reached only by causeways or by boat. Its name is thought to come from the eels that were caught in the surrounding waters and used to pay rents and taxes. After the Norman Conquest, the Saxon rebel Hereward the Wake held out here against William the Conqueror, using the marshes as a natural fortress.

   Rising above the town is the cathedral, known as the Ship of the Fens, because from a distance it seems to float above the flat land like a ship at sea. Many people rate it the loveliest cathedral in England, and its most remarkable feature is the octagon, a vast lantern of wood and glass built after the central tower collapsed in 1322, a feat of medieval engineering that still astonishes visitors. Oliver Cromwell lived in Ely for some years before he rose to power, and his house is now a museum.

   The Fens were drained in the seventeenth century by Dutch engineers, most famously Cornelius Vermuyden, who cut huge straight channels like the Old and New Bedford Rivers to carry the water to the sea. The result is some of the most fertile farmland in Britain, a landscape of black soil, enormous skies and straight roads stretching to the horizon. As the peat dried out, the land shrank, and many fields now lie below sea level.

   That shrinking has consequences for riders. Fen roads are often built on peat, and they ripple, buckle and sag in unexpected ways, with sudden dips and bumps, and many run alongside deep drainage ditches with no barriers. Take them slowly, especially at night or in fog. Ely has plenty of cafés, pubs and restaurants around the cathedral and along the river, and benches along the river catch the afternoon sun. Fuel and other services are available in town.

4. London finish

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