30. Cycling’s contrasts – from fast roads and huge roundabouts …

Breakfast is at 8. I share the farmhouse dining table with a guy who’s just come off nightshift at Rugeley power station. He’s ready for bed. Having cooked our breakfast, hostess Helen prepares to drive her daughter to school. I’m off to Manchester.

It’s a cold morning, with a stiff northerly wind. I’ll be riding into it all day. The B5013 takes me over Blithfield reservoir and on towards Uttoxeter, which I skirt around. On its northern edge I spot a cycle track running next to the road. I ignore it for a while, happy where I am. But – and maybe it’s because I know the track is there – the overtaking traffic starts to feel a bit too fast and close for comfort. I’m feeling squeezed.

So the next chance I get, I hop onto the track. My shoulders relax, my breathing eases. I can sit up, look round, see where I’m going.

There’s a roundabout up ahead. I’ll be turning right, north up the B5030. The carriageway’s dividing into two approach lanes. I need to get back onto the carriageway so I can move into position in the outside lane. But there’s no way off the track. Between me and the road is a monster kerb. Its message is clear – ‘don’t mess with me, I’ll eat your wheels’. I’m stuck.

I have one of those ‘can’t quite believe it, but I’m in the process of discovering it to be true’ moments which any regular British cyclist will no doubt recognise. The cycle track is taking me right up to the roundabout, and promptly ending. It’s throwing me back onto the road, at a right angle, immediately before the roundabout.

The road planners and engineers responsible for this ‘facility’ should be forced to ride it. Viewed from a bicycle, they’re guilty of professional misconduct (the problem is that, sat in office chairs, they can get away with it). A sane world would prosecute them; I’d happily send them down. Yet cyclists across Britain confront this kind of planned and callous disregard for their safety all the time. Each shocking experience eclipses the last, but they assemble and breed at the back of our minds, where – for me at least – they form into a blur of simmering resentment.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats and politicians wonder why people are so reluctant to get on bikes, and set aside a tiny fraction of transport budgets, to provide a few more such farce-ilities.

How to take a stand? An irate letter? Today I opt for weary resignation and a mental note, ‘approach designated cycling infrastructure with extreme caution, if at all’. Little do I know that later on I’ll meet a man who has taken a brave stand against the outrageous contempt for cyclists which continues to be designed and built into our road systems.

I check behind, see a gap, and push hard, accelerating as fast as I can to get into position and onto the roundabout at a speed sufficient to give me a fighting chance of getting round in one piece.

I survive, to find myself on a long, flat straight road with cars and trucks hurtling past at 70 miles an hour. I don’t feel especially threatened, but it’s no fun. According to my map this road goes to a small place called Rocester, but otherwise nowhere in particular, so where’s everyone going? I put my head down and dig into the fierce wind, battling to maintain 15mph, to get this stretch over and done.

The B5031 veers north west towards Denstone, Alton Towers and Cheadle, and suddenly the traffic’s gone. A fleeting moment of relief and relaxation, before I settle into a more leisurely mood. I’m going north east, into the Derbyshire dales. The country road rolls through green hills. This area became Britain’s first national park, the Peak District, in 1951. Outstandingly beautiful and close to the urban industrial sprawls of the English midlands and north, the area warranted protection in the interests of rural leisure and recreation. I follow the river Dove upstream, riding through Ellastone and Mayfield, and into the market town of Ashbourne.

On this Friday morning, a market town in need of a prefix, ‘blighted’. Certainly neither ‘quaint’ nor ‘genteel’, though those adjectives might be restored with a reduction in the size of the vehicles allowed on its roads and a spot of enlightened traffic management.

I weave my way through nose-to-tail traffic, at a standstill in the town’s centre. A quarry lorry too big for these streets, too big for a civilised society, struggles to make a sharp turn. Its temporary inertia quickly turns the town into a traffic jam. Watching this paralysed behemoth, I feel like I’m witnessing the sacrifice of Ashbourne, its residents and visitors, to the power of business and its outdated mantra of economic competitiveness. It’s horrible.

The town fails to capture my tourist cash. I want no part in its smelly emasculation, and escape along signs to the Tissington Trail.

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