Norfolk Coast and Holt Roads

A 458 km loop

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Why this ride

Leave the city behind and spend the day on roads with texture. Out of London and back again: 458 km, roughly 8 h 20 in the saddle. The stops in between: Newmarket and Holt.

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. Newmarket fuel

   Newmarket has been the headquarters of British horse racing since Charles II made it his sporting retreat in the seventeenth century, and the town still lives and breathes thoroughbreds. Around three thousand horses are trained here, and the gallops on the open heath around the town are where they work in the mornings. If you ride through early, you will almost certainly meet strings of racehorses crossing the road on special horse walks, with traffic lights and signs warning drivers to slow down. Give them all the room and quiet they need; a startled racehorse is a very expensive problem.

   The town itself is compact and handsome, with a long high street and the National Horseracing Museum housed partly in Palace House, the remnant of Charles II's racing palace. The two racecourses, the Rowley Mile and the July Course, lie on the heath to the west. On race days the roads around town become congested, so it is worth checking the calendar if you want a quiet stop.

   East of town, the Devil's Dyke, a huge Anglo-Saxon earthwork, runs for several kilometres across the chalk, and you can walk along its top for wide views over the heath and the fen edge. It is one of the odder monuments in East Anglia, built to control movement across a narrow strip of dry land between the fens and the forests.

   For riders, Newmarket is mainly a fuel and coffee stop on the way north to Norfolk. The surrounding roads are a mix of fast A-roads like the A11 and A14 and quieter B-roads crossing the chalk heath and the edges of the fens. The landscape is flat to gently rolling, with big skies and wind that can be strong on the exposed heath. There are fuel stations, supermarkets and cafés in and around town. Once you head north-east into Breckland, with its pine shelterbelts and sandy heaths, the riding becomes more interesting, but watch out for speed cameras on the main roads and for slow-moving farm traffic on the minor ones.

3. Holt food

   Holt is a small Georgian market town a few miles inland from the north Norfolk coast. Most of it was rebuilt after a fire in 1708 destroyed much of the medieval town, which is why the high street is lined with handsome brick and flint houses of a fairly uniform age. It has an air of quiet prosperity, with independent shops, delis, bookshops and cafés, and it makes a very civilised lunch stop.

   The town is home to Gresham's School, founded in 1555 by Sir John Gresham, which counts the poet W. H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten among its former pupils. Just outside town, the North Norfolk Railway, a heritage steam line known as the Poppy Line, runs from Holt to Sheringham on the coast through heathland and past the sea. On summer days you might hear the whistle across the fields.

   The coast here is very different from the cliffs of the south. Between Holt and the sea lie salt marshes, shingle banks and small villages like Cley-next-the-Sea, with its famous windmill, and Blakeney, where boats leave to see the seals on Blakeney Point. Inland, the Glaven valley and the heathlands of Holt Country Park and Kelling Heath offer quiet woods and heather. Birdwatchers flock here, especially in spring and autumn, when migrating birds stop on the marshes.

   Riding around Holt is a pleasure if you like small roads. The A148 and A149 are the main routes, and the coast road can be busy in summer, but the lanes between the villages are narrow, often sunken between hedges or flint walls, with tight corners and blind crests. Gravel and mud from farm vehicles are common, so ride with a margin. Holt is small, so for fuel and bigger supermarkets you might need to head to Sheringham, about nine kilometres away, or to Fakenham. In early summer, when the poppies are out in the fields and the light is clear and long, this corner of Norfolk is lovely.

4. London finish

Where this sits

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