All the makings of a latent pontist

Aged 66, I figured that I was past the stage of being surprised at myself, being all too familiar with my particular idiosyncrasies, quirks and predelictions. However, as we headed home from Yorkshire, skirting Hull's western suburbs, l was suddenly struck  by a restless excitement, a burgeoning anticipation like a kid gets as Christmas approaches. It was not about the place itself; really it is not possible to get worked up over a place that is only one consonant away from being dull. No, the object of my desire that sent my heart aflutter for most people would seem equally mundane; today after a wait of forty years I would get to drive over the Humber suspension bridge. 

It was only when I tried to figure out why I was so excited that I realised that all my life I had suffered from a hitherto undiagnosed obsession - I love big bridges and have mysterious desire to seek them out. Sydney Harbour, Brooklyn, the Millau and the Rion Antirion viaducts,  Øresund Bron, Storebæltbroan, Lisbon's Ponts 25 de Abril and Vasco de Gama, Clifton suspension bridge, Porto's Ponte Arrabida, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge connecting Maryland to Delaware, the string of underwhelming low bridges that run for a hundred miles from Key Largo to Key West, Spaghetti Junction, Pont du Gard, Pont Tankerville - images of bridges, long, tall, ancient or modern, iconic or overlooked hide in plain sight, bloating the gigabytes of my unsorted photo folders. 

According to the Urban Dictionary there is a name for the bridge obsessed, I am a 'pontist' apparently. Oddly enough I have a sneaky suspicion about the origins of this particular predilection. From the viewpoint of our super connected world my childhood experiences like seem antidiluvian. I was eight before we owned a family car, around the same time we swapped an ancient gramophone from the 1930s for a 'Dansette' record player that could play singles and LPs. It was another five years before we acquired a TV. My world was confined almost entirely to the goings-on in a council estate on the edge of a remote market town in Northumberland. You might think that would result becoming small minded, in fact it had the opposite effect on me, I was an insatiably curious child, as soon as I could read the local library became my second home and I enjoyed newspapers more than comics. I was the stereotypical shy weird kid with curly hair and glasses, Windsor Garden's very own softy Walter!

We did not travel much at all, and when we did it was almost always northwards over the border. My father was a proud Scotsman, every time we drove past the the 'Welcome to Scotland' sign he would repeat the same lame joke, 'What's the only good thing to come out of England?' he would enquire. 'The road to Scotland' the kids in the back would dutifully chorus. 

I suppose because these trips were relatively rare it made them more memorable. At some point in the early 1960s I recall standing on the quay at South Queensferry staring up at the massive towers of the half built Forth Road Bridge. It was probably the first time I had seen such a massive man-made structure. In fact the construction of the bridge must have been a big thing generally. In Mr Cooper's middle juniors class we made a model of it in the craft class, constructed out of string, cardboard and balsa wood, all held together with multi-coloured mapping pins which gave it a surprisingly jolly appearance. Why this resulted in adulthood in a liking for big bridges is a mystery, particularly as I have an equally clear childhood memory of catching the Heart of Midlothian (sister engine of the Flying Scotsman) to Edinburgh, but I didn't become a trainspotter.

Sadly, I missed the opportunity to have lunch while gazing upon the object of my desire, by the time we spotted the sign to the Humber Bridge viewing area we had almost passed it. What I like about big bridges is for all their grandeur their purposeare essentially egalitarian. They don't have designs upon you, their purpose is purely functional - to get you across from one side to the other. This is in marked contrast to other iconic edifices; the awesomeness of cathedrals and temples are designed to impress a divine presence upon you, palaces are essentially oppressive, exuding the megalomania of some potentate or other. Give me the slender simple beauty of a big viaduct anytime!

Our plan for the rest of the day - a short cycle along part of the 'river railway' cycle track that runs between Lincoln and Boston along the banks of the Witham. The Searchforsites app listed the Riverside Inn at  Southrey as a place with a car park that allowed overnight stays. When we arrived we realised that the car park beside the pub was a public one for the trail.

 

Although there were no signs specifically prohibiting overnighting we felt slightly uncomfortable about it. Wild camping in the UK is not really accepted, at the moment the tabloids are full of stories about  irresponsible motorhomers despoiling west country beauty spots. It was still early afternoon, we decided to unload the bikes and pedal about for an hour or two, then head home.

We decided to go east towards Woodhall Spa. The landscape is unspectacular, but beautiful in its own way, a very English scene of ripening cornfields under a big blue sky dotted with white clouds. The track itself was well maintained, popular, but hardly busy. 

The locals were very friendly, willing to chat, or give a wave and a smile as they passed. We decided it was somewhere we should explore further, maybe staying at one of the campsites in Woodhall Spa next time.

The drive back was also unexpectedly pleasurable. Despite being close to home, Lincolnshire is not somewhere we know well, apart from Lincoln itself. In my mind's eye the rest of the county was one big fen punctuated by the chalk ridge of the wolds. We drove west towards Mansfield, skirting Newark and Sleaford on minor roads. Much is the landscape does appear flat, but actually consists of gently sloping escarpments that suddenly drop into small river valleys, with ancient settlements in them. It was like driving through a chapter of Hoskins' 'Making of the English Landscape'. It was peaceful and empty with a palpable sense of a connection between past and present. Hereabouts in the referendum 'Remain' polled its lowest. Of course many things contributed to this outcome, but it is tempting to think the way  sense of Englishness exudes from the landscape itself must have played a part.

We crossed into Notts, heading for the A38 beyond the Mansfield bypass. We passed giant Amazon warehouse and a signpost to a mining museum, back into England as it is, and familiar territory. Sometimes a short break can feel like a big trip in so much as it provides enough disruption to your usual humdrum existence to feel invigorating and sustaining. With long term travel seemingly a distant prospect we need to plan more quick trips, including a return to Lincolnshire.

Bronze age furs and not so ancient seas

Yesterday's short pedal back to the campsite down a single track road got us thinking that they might be a better option than the cycle trail. As well as being well surfaced and less puddly you also could see more. Though the trail wandered through some lovely countryside cuttings and high hedges screened the view. We consulted the map, Mappleton looked to be the nearest beach to the campsite. A narrow  lane from the nearby village of Great Hatfield would take us straight there, about four miles, a perfect distance for a gentle pedal.

The stretch of coastline south of Flamborough Head to Spurn Point is known as Holderness, guidebooks talk of its similarity to Holland, what struck us was a resemblance to Southwest Denmark. The barely undulating landscape of big cloud-shadowed cornfields dotted with cosy looking farms reminded us of cycling between Tönder and Ribe two years ago. Apart from the occasional farmer's Hilux we had the roads to ourselves. It was great.

As for Mappleton itself, the place is scarcely bigger than a hamlet, its most notable feature appeared to be a large SangYong dealership, quite why it was here stuck in the middle of nowhere is inexplicable. 

The beach lies beyond a line of low mud-brown cliffs, a short steep track led down past an alarming sign warning of unexploded ordnance.

The entire east coast was highly fortified during WW2, most of the remains have gone now. The Northumbrian beaches of my childhood however were full of hazards, crumbling concrete tank traps, buried rusting barbed wire and machine gun emplacements - my parents called them 'pill-boxes', because of their hexagonal shape I suppose. I doubt that there is much danger of being blown up now after 80 years.

I sat down on rock and stared at the sea. I love the sea, perhaps it's my favourite thing. Hereabouts is a good spot for mindless staring - a broad sweeping shoreline stretching past Hornsea towards Bridlington to the north, southwards to Spurn Head lighthouse. Far out to sea, barely discernible through the mist, a phalanx of giant wind turbines rotated slowly, it was mesmerising. Much has been written over recent months about the importance of mindfulness as a means of getting us through these strange times; maybe, but succumbing to mindlessness, the joy of doing bugger all, has its benefits too.

After a while I realised Gill was nowhere to be seen. Then I spotted her staring intently at a clay cliff face. I wandered across. "This is amazing," she asserted.

It was unusual I had to agree. The cliff face had the consistency of semi-set putty, mostly brownish, but with grey strata above, some of the surface was so soft you could leave a thumb print. Stones and pebbles of differing shapes and types were scattered amongst the clay, sticking out of the cliff's surface and peppering the small boulders piled up at its foot, bits of sandstone, limestone shards and spiky flint, a lump of coal.  "This has got to be glacial deposition," I ventured unconfidently. I'm not on home turf so far as geology is concerned, but years of listening to Gill figuring out the story of the lump rock in front of her must have rubbed off, it turned out I was correct.

We thought about having lunch at the Old Post Office Café beside the car park, but we'd had a late breakfast so sat down on a bench seat opposite and stared at our phones. The signal at the campsite is pathetic so we have been incommunicado for a couple of days. A waft of 4g enabled us to find more information about what we had just seen, a fairly detailed article by a local geological society about the development of the cliffs. The clay strata had been laid down in stages due to intermittent glacial periods over the last million years. However, what we see now is more recent in geological terms. The last ice age came to an end about 10,000 years ago. 

The map of western Europe would have looked very different, The Thames and Rhine shared a big estuary, The southern half of the North Sea was a low plain - Doggerland, joining Britain to the continent. The coastline of Holderness then was many miles further out, today's cliffs would have been low, undulating hills. Then a combination of rising sea level caused by the ice melt and the sea bed tilting and buckling as the weight of ice diminished and caused a gravitational 'bounce' created what we see today. 

Tidal forces continue the process, as the cliffs recede at almost two metres per year they reveal the lives of our ancestors. Mixed up in the clay, beaver pelts used as blankets in the Bronze age, hefty beams from Neolithic huts or medieval barns appear from time to time as well as unexploded mines from more recent history. There's a lot to see in this apparently empty landscape, we our not the only people whose lives have been shaped by climate change, Sea levels rose and inundated Doggerland, its inhabitants migrated. We are not exceptional. What a unexpectedly fabulous day we've had, how nowhere in particular can turn out to be intriguing; you don't have to go very far at all to travel.

Yorkshire and other foreign parts

We continue our quest to tick-off the country's disused railway cycle tracks, it gives us some purpose in deciding where to go next. We don't really have a 'bucket list' of must-see destinations here, not like  - I want to drive through the Balkans to Thessalaniki, or the next time we are in Sicily we must take a trip to Stromboli. It's difficult to get excited about a few days in Holderness or a trip through the Lincolnshire Wolds, lovely as no doubt they are in a quietly English way. It has been Google maps to the rescue, click on the cycling layer and every  bike track in the UK pops up as a black line, more accurate than the Sustrans map and much easier to use.

Which is why right now we are heading to a small campsite half way between Hull and Hornsea; the eastern section of the Trans Pennine cycleway ends here, 215 miles from its starting point in Southport. I find the pointlessness of the route deeply pleasing. Gill is less pleased about the prospect of spending a few days in Yorkshire. It's a place she regards askance, along with the rest of the North East of England and the entirety of the nation to the north of it, finding it all a tad unwelcoming with an uninspiring food culture where finding a  properly crafted machiatta is needlessly tricky. I am more intrepid, willing to risk such privations for the sake of wobbling along an abandoned railway track going nowhere in particular across the empty, disregarded landscape.

As we rounded Doncaster on the M1 a thought struck me about how our preconceptions about places are related to their presence in our imaginations. For example, it is possible to have a conversation about the pros and cons of Spain versus France as  holiday destinations not merely from experience but also because over time we have accrued facts, opinions and prejudices about them from stories in the media or chance conversations; both places have cultural presence in a way Lithuania or Slovakia doesn't. In these terms Yorkshire is somewhere else with  predetermined cultural heft. We have shared notions about a 'Yorkshireman' whereas speaking about a typical Wiltshire person would make no sense whatsoever, apart perhaps to the inhabitants of Salisbury.

Partly it's a size thing. Though in cricketing terms Yorkshire remains a county, geographically it is so big it has always been subdivided, historically into 'Ridings (North, East and West); today truly sliced up into one Riding (East), three counties (North, South and West) and ten urban unitary authorities. It is the only shire to be classed an English region.  If the SNP manages to unhitch Scotland from the UK and become a separate country then why not Yorkshire? In terms of area it is slightly bigger than Montenegro and a tad smaller than Kuwait, in terms of population, at 5.3 million, bigger than Scotland and roughly the same as Finland or the Congo. So I have decided to take matters into my own hands and for the duration of our trip declare unilateral independence on behalf of the people of Yorkshire.  Immediately our three day jaunt over the Pennines becomes a foray abroad. We now could approach the outskirts of Hull with the anticipation usually reserved for arriving in San Sebastian, Syracuse or Corinth. Indeed so momentous was the occasion I was moved to commemorate it in verse:

There once was a writer from Hull

who found life depressingly dull,

the world seems dark inthe poems of Larkin,

his glass more empty than full.

Ok, it's lame, what did you expect - a work of genius? We are talking about Hull. We more or less drove straight through the middle of the city and it did look depressingly dull, despite the attempt four years ago to elevate it to a European capital of culture. 

Maybe if you spent time in the place its charms would grow on you, The setting is spectacular, raising the question, is the Humber the shortest mighty river on the  planet?

However, post industrial cool was not what we were looking for, we can visit our kids in Hackney Wick or Birmingham if a craft beer experience in a converted glue factory calls. What we wanted was a Yorkshire version of Gill's 'field in France', peaceful, sunny and bucolic. Amazingly we managed to find it. 

Fifteen years ago the place we are staying was a run down pig farm. Then it was acquired by the present owners who are landscape gardeners. 

They've made the place rather idyllic with a pond the size of a small lake, its sunny banks covered in brightly coloured wild flowers. Big shrubberies and herbaceous borders hide the somewhat utilitarian looking old barns. 

The camping field is a side line really, the main business seems to be a hosting weddings in an idyllic location. We learned all of this within ten minutes of arriving. The owner was very welcoming and happy to chat. Their latest ventures seem aimed towards the hipster end of the market with two small yachts moored on the lake and a vintage caravan in the corner of the camping field 'repurposed' for glamping. The whole place is far away from the serried rows of statics you associate with East coast sites, Clapham Home Farm is more Guardian Travel than Butlins brochure, and though the countryside surrounding it is hardly spectacular, the broad horizons have a quiet magnificence, if that is not a contradiction in terms.

We booked here because of its proximity to the Transpennine Cycle Trail, equally however the quiet single track lanes that connect the  nearby villages to a B road running by the coast are great for sedate cycling. We only do sedate these days. Having grown up near the East coast neither of us have any illusions about the its resorts. With the exception of places like Bridlington and Whitby which are interesting places in their own right, most of the other seaside places have seen better days. Hornsea was no exception. Maybe the town's most interesting feature is the nearby mere. It's the only remaining example of a string of coastal lakes that stretched from south of Flamborough Head to the mouth of the Humber. All the others have fallen prey to coastal erosion, apparently the beaches of Holderness lose 1.8m per year to the sea and are retreating faster than anywhere else in Western Europe.

The only reason we visited Hornsea is that it happened to be the end point of the cycleway. The track itself was quite narrow and the section we cycled unmetalled. Due the the recent rain it was quite muddy in places with lots of puddles. Given that it is promoted as the eastern section of the Trans-pennine cycleway it is in a bit of a sorry state. No one seems to be maintaining it. Somehow we mislaid the route in the middle of a housing estate at the back of Tesco's. It was pure serendipity that we arrived on the outskirts of the town opposite the Number 10 Café. Gill had spied it out online yesterday evening  pronouncing the brunch menu -  'promising'. 

We were not disappointed. Traditional chippies are more typical of Hornsea, this place however would not have looked out of place in Stoke Newington with shabby chic decor, bare wooden tables and a soundtrack that resembled my daughter's indie playlist from the mid noughties.  

Gill judged her eggs Benedict 'cooked property' which she regards, like a perfect machiatta, as one of the yardsticks of someone who knows what they are doing in the kitchen. 

My brunch was a delicious mix of potato rosti, locally cured bacon and a poached egg sprinkled with poppy seeds, the toast came on a separate plate. To get chefy about it I guess it was a 'de-constructed' poached egg on toast. 

We declared it a 'memorable breakfast' up there with the classic breakfast in America we had in the Manhattan Diner on Upper West Side or the squished avo by Lake Taupo - all unexpected small delights.

From here on the our visit deteriorated quickly. Like the small resorts we visited in Cornwall last month, Hornsea was traffic choked. Gill opted to push her bike along the pavement to avoid the chaos, I decided to play chicken with the SUVs. All went well until I reached the main street when my electrics unexpectedly cut out and I wobbled slightly and slowed up. This prompted an irritated' peep' from the car immediately behind me. As the oncoming traffic edged past delivery trucks the driver behind  had no option but to follow me at bike speed. This clearly infuriated him, when the traffic cleared he deliberately squeezed past me with inches to spare; as he cut in close his travelling companion lowered the passenger side window and yelled, "Av you a fookin death wish or summat."  They sped off in a cloud of particulates. 

I caught up with Gill by the monument on the esplanade marking the end of the Trans-pennine cycleway. She was chatting to a couple who had locked their ebikes in town and walked to the seafront. They too were motorhomers. 

I recounted my recent experience. They mentioned that they had been spat at as they cycled through the town. I suppose it's unsurprising given the experience of recent months that many people are unhappy and mentally unwell. Reflecting on the behaviour of a minority of English football fans on Saturday it seems that not everyone becomes morose when stressed, irrational anger and aggression can be stress related too. It remains to be seen if  are facing a summer of low level social unrest.

Time to head back to the peace and quiet of our field in Yorkshire. On the return trip we managed to locate the bit of the trail we mislaid on the way here. It passed Hornsea's splendid old station, beautifully proportioned and immaculately maintained. You sensed that in its heyday the town was probably more well-to-do and stylish. 

Half way back up the trail we stopped to chat to a man who was cycling with three small dogs in a trailer. It turned out that he lived in a cottage next to the campsite. After we bewailed how muddy the track was he gave directions of how to get back using the tangle of single track roads. He was affable, gentlemanly to use an old fashioned term, such a contrast to the boorishness I had just witnessed. In truth most people are nice, sadly negative experiences tend to stay with us for longer, skewing our perception of people and places.