Why we’re swapping Cols for the Cotswolds

Cyclists who might normally head for the Alps or Provence are opting for adventures closer to home. Chris Leadbeater pedals way out west

It is just after breakfast on a Monday and Devizes is a picture of wintry gloom. My watch says 8.45am, the diary page reads August, but there is little evidence of the sun in the grey sky above a Wiltshire town where the medieval era seems to linger.

Not that there is much commotion or commerce in the giant main square that has been its focal point for almost a millennium – partly because market day isn’t until Thursday; mainly, maybe, because it is the school holidays, and half the residents are elsewhere. Either way, the only eyes watching us as we wheel out our bikes belong to a pair of policemen, sipping coffee in a patrol car, and four pigeons pecking the tarmac. The wind fills up the space, and we all pull our waterproof jackets more tightly around our chests. “I bet it isn’t like this in Biarritz,” comes a grumble from the back of the group, giving voice to a rough approximation of all our unspoken thoughts. Yes, my friend, I bet it isn’t.

Welcome to the late summer of 2021 – a season of ongoing restrictions and travel turmoil in which many of the tourists who would ordinarily crisscross Europe drop anchor at home. (Including some cyclists who, ever in love with the joy of the road, might normally be slogging doggedly up the Col du Tourmalet – or trundling through the lavender of Provence.)

Instead, in the case of the group I have just joined, we are warming up on the edge of the North Wessex Downs, wondering if the Cotswolds that await us further down the track will provide the same challenges and scatterings of beauty as the lumpier and lovelier parts of the French realm.

In this, at least, we have an ally. In nonviral times, Exodus Travels sells in-thesaddle breaks to the likes of Burgundy, the Loire and the lower slopes of Mont Ventoux. Although each option has been available this year, the Surreybased adventure specialist has also bowed to circumstances, and added a raft of escorted UK trips to its brochure for the first time – like this arc across Wiltshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire, which will keep us moving for the next five days. If 2021 is the year of the stay-at-home holiday, those who like to “relax” in lycra can also go to the ball.

In truth – although we spool through the usual list of jokes about the dismal inconsistency of the British summer – we are aware that this is a wholly promising idea. Devizes alone could sustain a day of sight-seeing – the former coaching inns laid around the marketplace a legacy of its 18th-century status as a stagecoach stop on the route from London to Bristol; its castle a relic of the Norman Conquest in its foundations (though largely Victorian in its rebuilt walls and towers, after Oliver Cromwell rebuked it for its loyalty to the Royalist cause in the Civil War – besieging it in 1645, then dismantling it in 1648).

But we are heading west already, to another grand slice of history. Neither Victorian nor medieval, but tucked into the smoke and fire of the Industrial Revolution, the Kennet and Avon canal will be our host for the day. As its name states, it links two key rivers of the English south-west, sewing them into an 87-mile line of water between Bristol and the Thames at Reading. It does this most significantly via 57 miles of sweat and toil – much of it dug out between 1794 and 1810, to the design of the Scottish engineer John Rennie.

The blueprint required 105 locks. Twenty-nine of them – the Caen Hill Locks – are immediately in our path. It is a relief to observe them while freewheeling the gradient, watching two barges huffing in the opposite direction, every yard gained an exercise in patience and persistence. A third waits at the bottom; a fourth is approaching at a gentle pace – proof that is not just cycle trails that are full of domestic tourists this year. There are frowns on the faces of inexperienced captains suddenly presented with Rennie’s staircase

– and gentle amusement from the passengers cradling cups of tea at the back.

It is a picture that will be repeated over and over, the canal awash with boats as we clip along past Seend and Seend Cleeve, Semington and Hilperton. There is a short intrusion from the modern world in the latter, the B3106 snarling with cars next to the canal, but tranquillity reasserts itself just beyond, where Widbrook Wood throws forth a corridor of oaks that would not disgrace the approach to a French chateau.

It is an idyllic moment, sunlight forcing a way between the trunks – but it cannot last. The rain arrives suddenly, and with enough ferocity to have Noah counting in twos, transforming a towpath that has been merely rutted into a sea of puddles. We half pedal, half paddle onwards, negotiating the clusters of walkers huddled under bridges, as far as Bradford-on-Avon, where we surrender to the conditions, seeking shelter and lunch at the Lock Inn. “This is why we should have gone to Portugal,” says the mother of three small, soggy children at the next table, staring at the downpour and her partner in despair.

It is impossible not to empathise – though when the deluge disappears as quickly as it arrived, everything feels born anew. Two miles on, the canal escalates its flirtation with the Avon, crossing the river via the Avoncliff Aqueduct, before flicking back over the currents on the Dundas Aqueduct at Monkton Combe. Both bridges were Rennie constructions, and we spend a few minutes admiring his skill – noting that the second marks a point where we cross from Wiltshire into Somerset – before continuing on to Bath, and the promise of a night’s sleep.

If the city of Georgian splendour and Roman ghosts is a fine context for rest, it is also the beginning of something harder and sharper (a consequence of our departing the canalside for the highway). No one would compare Bannerdown Hill to Alpe d’Huez, but it is quite the opponent so early in the day, rising 505ft in its 1½ miles of unflinching ascent.

However, what it demands in energy and aching muscles, it repays in location, launching us north into the Cotswolds. There will be further testing hills in the hours to come, yet each is garnished with fields of wheat, or villages of honied stone where telephone boxes enjoy retirement as help-yourself depositories of second-hand books, and the scent of mown grass floats on the air. They slip by as we dance along the Somerset-Wiltshire border, St Catherine, Castle Combe, Alderton – the latter with a pond like a fragment of a fairytale about mother geese or ugly ducklings. Then Westonbirt pulls the canopy over us like a blanket, sign-posting the National Arboretum at every fork in the road – and dispatches us over the top into Gloucestershire.

In these miles, the planning behind the route becomes obvious. Back at Nettleton, we have rolled under the M4, but every turn keeps us on country lanes and back roads where our most regular motorised companion is the tractor over the hedgerow. We stay in this pastoral setting all the way to the outskirts of Stroud, where the Bear of Rodborough extends the theme – a cattlegrid on its driveway to keep the cows grazing on the adjacent Minchinhampton Common out of its car park.

I dive into the restorative carbohydrates of the shepherd’s pie in the main restaurant, and wake next day, refreshed, to birdsong in the trees of Bear Hill behind my room. I am glad of the recuperation, because the day will serve up more of the same – further byways and hamlets on a 35-mile loop east then west, out towards Chedworth and Coln St Aldwyns.

The weather is behaving now, and when we stop for coffee at the trout farm in Bibury, the scene could not look more different from Bradford-onAvon two days before. Here, the children dashing around the cafe are dry and happy, and the midday brightness makes the village resemble an escapee from a postcard. Which, of course, it is – its name etched in the Domesday Book (as “Becheberie”), the River Coln flowing through with polite purpose en route to the Thames, the cottages of Arlington Row so iconic that they appear inside the British passport.

In no way does it resemble Biarritz, but at this stage of a semi-stalled summer – and with a few more miles

to go – this really does not matter.

Pretty as a picture: the River Avon Glide through Gloucestershire… the village of Guiting Power in the Cotswolds