Goodwood Arundel Bury Hill Loop

A 886 km loop

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Why this ride

A rider’s loop: clean exit, memorable middle, calm return. A 886 km loop that starts and ends near London, about 16 h 07 of riding. It goes by way of Arundel, Wheatley, Whittington and Bury.

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. Arundel sight

   Come over the downs from the north and Arundel appears all at once: a castle of grey towers and battlements on a ridge above the River Arun, a French Gothic cathedral beside it, and a steep little town tumbling down the slope to the bridge. It looks almost too much like a film set, and it has served as one more than once.

   The castle has been the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk for most of the last five centuries. It was founded soon after the Norman Conquest, battered in the Civil War and largely rebuilt by the Victorians, which explains its slightly storybook perfection. The cathedral, built for the Catholic dukes in the late nineteenth century, is dedicated to Our Lady and St Philip Howard, an Elizabethan earl who died in the Tower for his faith. Below the town the Arun is tidal, brown and fast, and the wetland reserve on its banks fills with ducks, geese and waders in winter.

   For riders the name that matters is Bury Hill. The A29 north of Arundel climbs the South Downs in a run of fast, open bends with views over the Arun valley, and on fine weekends the café at the top roundabout becomes an impromptu motorcycle show. Goodwood, a few miles west, adds the Festival of Speed and the Revival to the area's calendar, when every road nearby fills with machinery of every era and the traffic police are on full alert.

   The A27 that skirts the town is notoriously congested, especially in summer, so plan to arrive early or late. Parking a bike in the narrow streets is usually manageable near the river.

   Fuel is easiest towards Littlehampton or on the main roads. In town, the tea rooms and pubs on the High Street do a steady trade in walkers and bikers alike; take a table by the window and watch the castle change colour as the light goes.

3. Wheatley fuel

   Wheatley sits on a hill just east of Oxford, where the A40 crosses the M40, and for most riders it is a quick pit stop: fuel, a sandwich, back on the road. The old village, though, deserves a minute. Its stone cottages climb a steep main street, and at the top stands a small octagonal stone lock-up, built in the nineteenth century to hold drunks and petty criminals overnight, a reminder of rougher days on the coaching road to London.

   To the west, Shotover Hill rises between Wheatley and Oxford, a ridge of heath, woodland and sandy paths with views over the city's spires. It was once a royal forest, and highwaymen preyed on travellers on the old road across it. Today it is a country park, popular with walkers and dog owners.

   The M40 heads east from here towards the Chilterns, and as it crosses the great chalk cutting at Stokenchurch, watch the sky. Red kites, reintroduced to the Chilterns in the 1990s after being wiped out in England, now wheel over the motorway in dozens, their forked tails twisting as they ride the wind. They are one of the great conservation successes in Britain, and they have become the emblem of the region.

   The riding around Wheatley is a mix of fast A-roads and lanes through the Oxfordshire countryside. The lanes towards Thame and the Chilterns are narrow, winding and lined with hedges, with occasional steep climbs and blind bends. Watch for tractors, cyclists and horses.

   Oxford, a few miles west, is a nightmare to ride into, with traffic restrictions, bus gates and one-way streets. Park on the edge of the city and walk if you want to see it. Back in Wheatley, the fuel station by the motorway junction is quick, and the village pubs serve decent food.

4. Whittington town

   Three spires rise from the flat land south of the Trent, and they belong to Lichfield Cathedral, the only medieval cathedral in England to have kept all three. Whittington is a village a few miles east of it, with a church, a green, old pubs and a barracks that has housed soldiers since the 1880s. The Staffordshire Regiment's museum is there, with a reconstructed First World War trench that schoolchildren walk through in awed silence.

   Lichfield itself is a handsome cathedral city, and it produced Samuel Johnson, the writer of the first great English dictionary, who was born in a house on the market square that is now a museum. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and a remarkable scientist and poet in his own right, lived next to the cathedral close. The city is compact and easy to walk.

   A few miles north, the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas is a vast, moving garden of memorials to the armed forces and the civilian services, with tens of thousands of trees planted in remembrance. It is free to enter and worth a quiet hour.

   The canals meet near Whittington, where the Coventry Canal joins the Birmingham and Fazeley, and the towpaths make a peaceful walk among narrowboats and herons. Tamworth, to the south-east, has a Norman castle on a mound above the river, once a seat of the Mercian kings.

   The riding is gentle Midlands fare, with A-roads, roundabouts and lanes through farmland. The A38 and A5 can be busy. Whittington itself has a pub or two; Lichfield, ten minutes away, covers fuel and food and has a market square ringed with cafés.

5. Bury food

   Bury market is one of the most famous in the north of England, and its fame rests largely on a sausage. Black pudding, made from pig's blood, oatmeal and fat, has been sold here for generations, and the stalls in the market hall still serve it hot, sliced and with mustard, to queues of locals and visitors. It is the obvious food stop, and anyone who wrinkles their nose should try it before deciding.

   Bury is a mill town at the edge of the Pennines, north of Manchester, built on cotton and wool. Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister who founded the modern police force and repealed the Corn Laws, was born nearby, and his statue stands in the town centre. On the hill above Ramsbottom, a few miles north, a stone tower built in his memory looks over the Irwell valley.

   The East Lancashire Railway, a heritage line, runs steam and diesel trains from Bury up the Irwell valley to Rawtenstall, through old mill villages and green hills. On summer weekends, the smoke and whistles bring the valley back to life.

   Riding north from Bury, the roads climb onto the moors of Rossendale and the West Pennines, with wide, empty landscapes, stone walls and reservoirs. The A56 and the roads over to Haslingden and Darwen are popular with bikers, with fast bends and big views. The weather can turn quickly, and the moors are often wet, windy and cold even in summer.

   The market does not trade every day, so check before you plan lunch around it. If blood sausage is a step too far, the town also claims the simnel cake, a rich fruit cake with a marzipan layer once baked for Mothering Sunday. Either way, you will not leave hungry, and fuel stations ring the town centre.

6. Etwall fuel

   Etwall is a quiet village in the south of Derbyshire, between Derby and the River Dove, with a church, almshouses and old brick houses. It sits on the edge of a district full of history, and a short ride in any direction brings something worth stopping for.

   Repton, a few miles south, was the capital of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, and its church has a crypt where Mercian kings were buried. In the winter of 873, a Viking army camped here, and archaeologists have found their defences and graves. The village is now known for its public school, founded in the sixteenth century.

   Swarkestone Bridge, to the east, is a long medieval causeway across the Trent floodplain, and it marks the southernmost point reached by Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite army in 1745, before it turned back to Scotland and defeat. A plaque records the moment.

   Closer to Etwall, the Toyota factory at Burnaston builds cars on the site of an old airfield, and its huge sheds are visible from the A50. The A38 and A50 meet nearby, making this a convenient place to refuel on the way north.

   Ignore the dual carriageways if you have time. The lanes west towards the Dove and Tutbury, where a ruined castle on a sandstone bluff once held Mary Queen of Scots, are quiet and gently bending, with red-brick farms and long views across the river meadows. Fill up before you leave the trunk roads, since the villages are small; Derby is the fallback if the local pumps disappoint.

7. Hardingstone town

   Edward I, grieving for his queen, Eleanor of Castile, erected a stone cross at every place where her funeral procession stopped on its way from Lincoln to London in 1290. Twelve were built; three survive, and one of them stands by the roadside at Hardingstone, on the southern edge of Northampton. It is a slender Gothic monument of weathered stone, with statues of the queen looking out over the traffic, and it is more than seven centuries old.

   Behind it, Delapré Abbey, a former nunnery turned country house, stands in a park. The Battle of Northampton, one of the bloodier clashes of the Wars of the Roses, was fought on the meadows nearby in 1460, and Henry VI was captured there. The abbey has been restored and is open to visitors, with gardens and a café.

   Northampton is the capital of English shoemaking, and the industry still survives, with famous brands making boots and shoes by hand in the town. A museum displays thousands of shoes, from medieval leather to modern fashion.

   Hardingstone itself is a village swallowed by the town, with old stone houses and a church. The M1 is close, at junction 15, and the A45 runs past. The riding around here is mostly about getting through the Northampton traffic and out into the countryside, where the lanes towards the Nene valley and the villages to the south are pleasant and quiet.

   Fuel is quick to find on the ring roads. As for souvenirs, a pair of Northampton-made boots costs real money, but riders who own a pair tend to say the same thing: they outlast the bike.

8. London finish

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