Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain

by Steven Primrose-Smith

  And then, all of a sudden, through the grey-white powdery murk a patch of blue sky appeared in front of me and the white snow clouds overhead peeled back like a magic curtain. The falling snow was illuminated by bright sunlight, the straggling flakes from the cloud that had now passed overhead. The site was surreal, snow appearing to tumble from a blue sky. Three sleek, black stallions in a field beside the road, still wet from the last twenty minutes of mad precipitation, gleamed as though they'd gone a bit pervy and donned latex outfits for a bit of horseplay. The sun shone brightly for half an hour, the road ahead clear but the hillsides only metres above me covered in snow. Millions of tiny lambs appeared and disappeared as they played around the snowline. The frosted moorlands were beautiful, like no landscape I'd seen anywhere in the world.

  By now I'd reached Gwynedd, the Welshest of Welsh counties, where 64% of locals are able to speak the local language. It is home to Snowdonia National Park, placed 181st in the Lonely Planet's World Top 500 Highlights. It's misplaced. Granada's over-rated Alhambra, with the repetitive Arabic scrawl on its internal walls because human figures are banned by Islamic dogma, comes in at number nine. Snowdonia is worthy of a much higher position than that.

  My map of British stereotypes depicted Gwynedd as an area of both hillbillies and nervous sheep. You might think the sheep are nervous of the hillbillies, but apparently they've got bigger problems. In 2001, a mutilated ovine was found just outside Beddgelert, about ten miles west of my current location. But this wasn't the work of dogs or foxes. The animal had a large, oval-shaped hole through its left hip bone, cut with the precision of a surgeon. A bunch of over-excited amateur investigators got together, calling themselves the Animal Pathology Field Unit (APFU). They discovered another case in Wales where six ewes had their jaws ripped off and tongues severed with barely a drop of blood. Spooky, eh? There was only one obvious conclusion the APFU could draw. It was absolutely definitely the work of aliens. I mean, if you'd spent decades and billions of space dollars creating and navigating a vessel to discover inhabitable worlds somewhere in the infinite parsecs of the universe, wouldn't your first action once you arrived be to mess up some sheep? That's what I'd do.

  As I approached Ffestiniog from the west I could see the next ominous weather system moving southwards. I was on its path. I'd originally planned to have some lunch at Ffestiniog but it was three miles in the wrong direction and would have taken me into the storm. I turned south and, believing myself to have a superhuman power that I clearly don't, decided to try and outrun it.

  The weather was gaining on me but seemed to be moving off to my left. I figured I could take a break and followed a sign for a café into the village of Trawsfynydd, but when I asked an old woman where it was she told me it had long since closed down. It wasn't just English villages that were withering away. She recommended one at the Coed-y-Brenin Forest Park Visitors' Centre. I returned to the road, a few snowflakes dancing around my head.

  After twenty minutes I arrived at the visitors' centre, a beautiful, semicircular café made of wood and glass, its huge windows looking down on the wooded valley far below. The place was full of walkers and bikers, taking a break from their exploration of the surrounding forest. Inspirational quotes lined the wall, in English and Welsh. One by Thoreau said life isn't about keeping busy – after all, ants are busy – but it's what we do with our time that's important. Ordering something from their menu seemed like a good use of my time. I chose a wonderful venison burger with redcurrant jelly, the deer taken from these very woods, and then followed that with a great flapjack, real cycling food. That dodgy weather system passed overhead and released its load on the windows in the roof. It was the sort of weather that favoured people called Noah. I was glad I wasn't out in that. And then the snow returned, and then a big, bright blue sky.

  I finished my coffee. It seemed safe to return to the road, but the Weather Gods weren't going to let me off that easily. It immediately clouded over again and for the whole remaining six miles to Dolgellau it poured and poured, like God was chopping onions, or being forced to watch the entire back catalogue of Chuck Norris. Which seems unlikely, especially as the only person hard enough to force God to watch the entire back catalogue of Chuck Norris is Chuck Norris, and he isn't in heaven yet.

  I opened the door to the campsite's reception and dripped on its floor.

  “Camping!” I said with a big grin and outstretched arms as water trickled down my face and pooled at my feet.

  The woman behind the desk wrinkled her face.

  “Can't you stretch to a pod for one night?”

  I wish. We completed the formalities. She put on her raincoat and made for the exit.

  “You haven't been here before, have you?”

  “Yes, about three years ago,” I replied.

  She smiled and took off her jacket.

  “Good. Then I don't need to show you where everything is.”

  I opened the door to pouring rain but by the time I'd found my pitch and set up my tent it had stopped. The clouds cleared and for the rest of the evening the sun shone. I sat on a picnic bench slurping another Welsh beer, a lovely SA Gold from Brains brewery in Cardiff, staring at the distant peaks, until it got too cold and I climbed inside my tent and cooked something warming.

  Today had been about weather and its many varieties. Tomorrow, unfortunately, I'd get just one variety, the one Wales is most famous for.

  *

  I woke up to drizzle, the sort you know is going to hang around all day. I packed the tent away in the rain, the wetness adding to the weight of my luggage. Today I was going to find the Welsh branch of my family, some of whom I'd never met before, but before then I was going to get wet, very wet indeed.

  Just outside Dolgellau, as the town turned to countryside, there was a sign at the side of the road: “Please Take Your Litter Home”. Someone had decided to ignore this in grand if environmentally-selfish style. On the other side of the road's barrier was a mountain of rubbish bags topped by a bright pink Peppa Pig armchair.

  Over the next hour, the rain didn't stop, but became harder and harder. Between Dolgellau and Dinas Mawddwy there is a slope with a fourteen per cent gradient. With the weight of my bike, anything over about eleven per cent saw me pushing it uphill. But today the heavy rain had lubricated my brakes to the point of uselessness and so, annoyingly, I also had to push the bike down the hill, otherwise I would've just kept gathering speed until I broke the sound barrier and then crashed into a wall and died.

  To hide from the rain I rolled into the village of Dinas Mawddwy and headed for the very old Red Lion.

  “Oh dear me,” said Ange, the barmaid, as I entered the bar. She immediately went to the fireplace and set ablaze its pile of logs for me. While it gained momentum I leant against a radiator with a pint in my hand trying unsuccessfully to dry off.

  The pub had a lot of character. It was built in the 12th century and the main room has a 500-year-old, woodworm-eaten table.

  “The health department said we couldn't let people eat off it,” Ange said. “But we had it sealed and so it's alright now.” I looked at the deep grooves in the wood. “It's a pain to clean if someone spills something though.”

  In the 16th century this area had been famous for the Gwylliaid Cochion Mawddwy, a gang of red-haired bandits, a bunch of outlaws exiled from elsewhere. Ange explained how the Red Lion had dealt with them.

  “A while back the fireplace was ripped out and they discovered sickles embedded in the chimney. It stopped the bandits from getting in that way.”

  The fire started to roar and the room heated up. I was slowly drying off. A bloke entered the pub and sat at the bar. Behind him a delivery guy was rolling in barrels.

  “That was you I just saw on the road pushing your bike, was it?” the first man asked. “You were lucky. Only saw you at the last minute.”

  I'd been wearing a luminous yellow slip over my jacket but the day was exceedingly murky and the strong wind frequently twi
sted it around. Obviously it wasn't up to the job, especially when numpties were driving in a rainstorm at seventy miles an hour, as the bloke later admitted. The delivery guy overheard him and disappeared to his van before returning.

  “Here you go,” he said, dropping on to my table a fluorescent orange jacket, one that zipped up. “I've got loads. Better safe than sorry.” That was kind of him.

  I got talking to Speedy Gonzalez. For a long time he and his wife had lived on a barge. Maybe he had just got sick of moving so slowly.

  “We moved here a few years back and we love it. I love the peace.”

  I asked him what it was like living on a boat.

  “It was great,” he smiled. “But it wasn't all good. Sometimes idiots would untie the barge and it'd float away. More than once we came back from the supermarket to find the barge in the middle of the canal.”

  I told him I'd watched the fella negotiate that lock a few days ago. I didn't mention the psycho in the wheelchair.

  “I remember a while back a group of Australian girls were on a boating holiday. They didn't have a clue. They got drunk and left a series of fourteen locks wide open. It took me hours to sort that mess out.”

  I had another pint and a lovely ham and horseradish baguette. I was completely dry by now, the weather had calmed a bit and so I ventured out. I was only two minutes down the road when the clouds burst again, this time even harder than before. And then, although it wasn't actually possible, it pumped up the volume, and just when I thought the skies couldn't throw a greater capacity of water at me, it turned out I was very, very wrong. I couldn't have been any wetter if I'd fallen in a lake.

  I crossed into Powys, my fifteenth county, but I didn't actually care. What I wanted more than anything right now was a snorkel and some flippers.

  Powys is the largest county in Wales by some considerable margin. It's over twice the size of second place Gwynedd. It's also the least densely populated area of anywhere south of Scotland with only 67 people per square mile. That's similar to a rain forest-filled nation like Brazil, or the audience of anything starring Joe Pasquale.

  This county is the location of one of the few cases in British law when a chosen name has been deemed unfit for a new-born. The mother in question wanted to christen her daughter Cyanide, which she thought apparently to be a “lovely, pretty name”. It didn't help that she also wanted to call the baby's twin brother Preacher. Not only was she prevented from christening her kids as she wanted, they got taken off her and put into care, which seems a bit harsh. Maybe sparsely populated places have a knack of choosing wayward names. The authorities in New Zealand have clamped down three times, blocking the names Anal and Sex Fruit and, for twins, Fish and Chips.

  Eventually I reached Llangadfan and my aunt's café, Cwpan Pinc, the Welsh for Pink Cup. It's a family affair, run by my aunt Eirlys, uncle Malcolm and platinum-blonde Louise, their daughter-in-law. I was given a cup of steaming tea to warm my hands while I made puddles all over their floor.

  The café was a great little place that also had a mini-supermarket in one half and tonight it was the venue for a talk. Eirlys and Louise were supposed to be working here then but they really wanted to take me to the pub and so they got the youthful 78-year-old teetotaller Malcolm to stand in for them.

  In the pub, Wayne turned up, Louise's husband and my cousin. He preferred to be called Smudger. I'd met him just once before, when I was about six. He had a truly magnificent beard, a huge thing that made him look like he was eating a marmot.

  Louise was telling me a story.

  “I went to a Body Shop party and came home with a pig,” she said.

  “Eh? Was it just there, nestled amongst the papaya face creams and stuff?”

  “No. The pig wasn't there. A woman at the party was saying she had this piglet and it was the last in the litter, and the mother pig was going for the chop, and she said if no one took this piglet it was going along with its mother.”

  “So she guilted you into taking the pig?”

  “Smudge didn't want a pig but I took him to see her and we fell for her.”

  “And the mother was killed?”

  “Yes. Lovely sausages, to be fair. Anyway, we went on holiday and took the dogs and there's this disease that pigs can get. And the vet said that the stress of being left alone triggered it. We nearly lost her. So the vet said, what you need is another pig. So that's how we got Albert.”

  “Two pigs?”

  “Yes, but she hated Albert and tried to kill him. We had to separate them. And Albert had come from a big family and now he was pining.”

  “So he was stressed too?”

  “So we had to go and get Patrick.”

  Now, as well as their three dogs and three pigs, they've got chickens, a lamb and all sorts of other creatures too.

  Neither Malcolm and Eirlys, nor Louise and Smudger, use the Primrose part of our shared poncy surname. They are just plain old Smiths.

  “You should use it,” I said. “It's royal.”

  “Is it?” Eirlys asked.

  “Probably not. But that's the story.”

  The tale my dad tells is that one of the Earls of Rosebery, whose surname is Primrose, knocked up a maid. Her subsequent baby would have been a little awkward for a man of his standing and so, nice bloke that he was, he kicked her out and all she could take from him was his name. The boy was christened as a Primrose-Smith. Unfortunately, no one has a single shred of evidence to verify this claim or has any idea when it might have happened. It's probably cobblers.

  After the pub we went back to Louise and Smudger's house to meet the animals. Smudger gave me a glass of his home brew, which had an interesting treacly taste and was surprisingly good. I've made home brew. It never tasted like that. In fact, it didn't really taste of beer at all.

  It had been great to meet up with this branch of the family. I'd had a good laugh and, Malcolm aside, they appeared to possess the Primrose-Smith's dangerously enthusiastic appreciation of alcohol. After two and a half weeks of going to sleep as soon as night descended it came as a bit of a shock to crawl into bed at three in the morning.

  *

  The next morning I was back at the café, sitting across from Kevin – Smudger's brother – and tucking into a Big Ed, the café's mega-breakfast, named after one of Smudger's friends and the breakfast's biggest fan who'd died way too young in a road accident.

  As a leaving gift, Eirlys packed me a food parcel that included some lovely, thick ham sandwiches, three hard-boiled duck eggs, some more bacon and sausage – as if the breakfast hadn't been enough – two flapjacks and a cellophane-wrapped assortment of crisps. It also contained a card for my birthday in three weeks' time with strict instructions not to open it until then.

  We said our goodbyes and Kevin and I cycled off. He was going to cycle with me as far as Llandrindod Wells, the county town of Powys and one-time drink-driving capital of Britain.

  Kevin is a keen cyclist and has the lean physique of one who puts in the miles. Over the forty or so we did today, he developed a catchphrase: “I don't remember it being as steep as this.” He guided us away from the main roads and patched together a bucolic route I've have struggled to find on my own, mostly because I would have gone around the hills rather than over ever single one we could find.

  The last 23 miles on the A483 from Newtown, Kevin's home, had a wiggly beginning and so Kevin suggested a shortcut to bypass the bends. It wasn't long before he was back to his old theme.

  “This is a lot steeper than I remember.”

  Cheers, Kev.

  The route to Llandrindod Wells was gorgeous. The weather had finally sorted itself out and a weak sun shone in the sky. The road with lined with tall pines deep into the hills.

  “This could easily be Canada,” I said, taking in the scenery.

  We pulled up in town. Kevin would have to turn around and repeat these 23 miles but, in order to respect its dubious “capital” honour, we first stopped for a pint.

&n
bsp; It was in 2014 that Llandrindod Wells was named the drink-driving capital of Britain. Obviously, the deep shame meant the locals had to raise their game and do something about this. They put a plan into action that clearly worked. In 2015, after all their effort, they were no longer the worst offenders in the county. No, in that year they came second, pipped to the number one spot by Cheshire's Crewe. To be fair to the residents of Llandrindod Wells, I suspect the only reason the police catch so many drink-drivers is because it's the only crime committed around here. It's a very quiet place.

  Kevin turned around and headed home while I went to find a campsite in nearby Howey. It was another desperately cold night, wearing everything I had with me. What was going on with the weather? It was nearly May and winter didn't show any signs of relenting.

  I'd already seen some lovely parts of Wales but the prettiest road yet was just around the corner. That is, if I could get there without being attacked by White Walkers.

  Chapter 5: The Pass of Lost Existence

  Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Bridgend

  After a breakfast of coffee and hard-boiled duck eggs I set off into a beautiful if chilly morning. I was heading westwards towards Aberystwyth, Britain's most neurotic town, according to the Gloucestershire Echo. Just south of Rhayader I passed the site of the Landed festival. A young woman standing at the entrance was dressed in a large carpet. Since very little of my wardrobe is made of floor coverings I figured it probably wasn't my kind of event.

  I turned on to one of Britain's loneliest and loveliest roads. Coaches and HGVs are banned entirely from it and it seemed to be shunned by motorists too. It was just me, my bike and the wind. I climbed over the Cambrian Mountains through the Elan Valley. The contours narrowed and I had to push, but it didn't matter. The scenery compensated. A series of waterfalls lined the roadside, and then there came a collection of humps, hills of green, yellow and brown. At the top I stopped and surveyed the land. Apart from the road, dry stone walls and the odd wind turbine there was no sign of humanity. For eighteen miles the world was mine alone. The route took me into the county of Ceredigion, Wales's second least populated region, but with a headcount per square mile almost twice that of Powys. Wherever these heads were, they weren't here.