Ride this in one day – the route

A ride into the middle of Birmingham? Really? Yeah – choose precisely the right route and it really can work. Honest.

Dorset to Birmingham and back isn’t a day ride I’d normally do just for the experience, but this time I had an excuse. My musical nephew was playing a solo percussion concert at Birmingham Conservatoire, right in the city centre; just the handy excuse I needed.

Ask a sat-nav, and it would probably have sent me straight up the M5, but I wanted to follow my own route across country, though I did take the TomTom, which would come in handy to find an address in the middle of the big city.

It wasn’t a great ride up. The A350 over the western edge of Salisbury Plain is always lovely, but we hit reality and heavy traffic on the Warminster bypass – slow and tedious with lots of roundabouts and HGVs all the way to Chippenham. The A429 is usually quieter north of the M4, but I was stuck behind a lorry for miles. You know how it is when the overtaking opportunities are never quite enough – either the visibility’s not there or oncoming traffic is. North of Cirencester, the Fosse Way is usually fun, but all the traffic was out today, sticking us in 45-55mph convoys.

Even pretty Stow-on-the-Wold was besieged by traffic and roadworks, but we finally reached the A424, set free at last. This is a lovely road, nicely twisty before heading over the roof of the Cotswolds through avenues of trees. We joined the A44, which hairpins its way down Fish Hill – this steep descent is almost alpine (well, for at least half a mile) and my Road Book of England (circa 1900) describes its surface as, “rough on the dangerous descent to Broadwey. Thence fine surface to Evesham”. Today, it’s fine all the way down.

Nephew’s concert was a tad short but great fun and included four percussion pieces. It was time to head home, and this time I was determined to find some quieter roads. There is no quiet way out of Brum during rush hour, and the A34 was a succession of 20mph high streets. Back over the M42, and the A34 was downgraded as the 3400, not exactly knee down territory but all very pleasant through the half timbering of Henley in Arden, and even with a 50-limit it’s twisty enough to be interesting.

We rejoined Fosse Way, busy again, but left it just past Stow on the A424 south, one of my favourite routes through the Cotswolds, crossing the A40 onto the A361. This one is slower than the 424, but equally entertaining, twisting through woods to Lechlade and the Thames and then through the broad valley to Highworth and finally Swindon.

Swindon’s bypass was soon behind us; we crossed the M4 and turned right onto the A4361 (signed Wroughton). We’d left the Cotswolds behind, now into the chalk country of barrows and stone circles, and the road twisted through the landscape to Avebury, scraping though the famous stone circle before crossing the A4 and transforming into a fast and open road down to Devizes, regaining its 361 tag.

From here I took the most direct route back to Dorset, which probably isn’t the quickest but certainly the most fun. The first few miles south out of Devizes were slow, but the A360 finally opened out on the edges of Salisbury Plain. We turned right onto a military road (open to the public, but keep an eye out for tanks) then took a mix of back roads, B-roads and the A36 plus a few miles of the dualled A303 before diving off at Wincanton and taking the last miles south on the twisty B3145.

Birmingham and back in a day, taking in some avant garde percussion and Brum’s industrial heritage – can’t be bad.