Land's End to John o'Groats - Peter Seaman and Martin Cockersole Aug 2000
This was my third cycling trip from Land's End to John o'Groats. As it was planned by Martin it all went smoothly unlike my first end to end trip. We arrived at John o'Groats at the end of our cycling trip from Land's End as planned on 15th August, having had a great time. We did not get a single puncture or breakdown between us, neither to our bikes nor our bodies. The route was 1022 miles through some of the most quiet and scenic parts of England and Scotland that exist.
Such a route means hills, and we were severely stretched on the 30% climb at Millock on Cornwall. On the other hand (and for me highlights of the trip) we encountered several long downhill runs such as those to High Bentham in Yorkshire or Dunning near Perth, where our speed on occasions exceeded 40 mph.
The Devil's Elbow in Scotland was another long climb, on which we met a couple on a tandem recumbent, who had cycled to John o’Groats from Lancashire and were now heading for Land’s End. Leaving John o’Groats a gentleman aged 76 was on his way by foot to Land’s End for the third time.
The winds were generally favorable and there were only a few days of rain. Usually when it rained we were having lunch in a cafe, and when we left the sun came out! The accommodation was all pre-booked and we had excellent meals in pubs and restaurants. Pretty well everything went to plan, mainly because I did not plan it this time but Martin did!
An electronic tracking system on my bike was connected both to the mobile phone network and the GPS navigation satellites. This system allowed any of our friends relatives and sponsors to find out our location, heading and speed at any time by sending a small text message to the phone number of the unit. The automatic response they received was another text message such as "Bike is 4.3 miles SW of Slaidburn, 14 mph heading North. Busy Towns then Ups and Downs".
Altogether 31 people tracked us, and 489 messages were sent out reporting our position to our friends and colleagues. Because of the hilly terrain, especially in Cornwall, we often spent three times as much time going up hill as we did going down. The effect of this was that whenever the tracker went "beep beep" (indicating someone was polling us) we were more likely to be struggling up hill at 6 or 7 mph than a more respectable speed on the level or downhill. Such poor performance would not have impressed any half-serious cyclists who may have been monitoring us, and caused me some concern. Martin however had the opposite requirement: he did not want his wife Daphne to catch us going at speeds of 30mph or so because she was rather worried we might have an accident!
The Northern part of Scotland was very remote - our last stop was at Altnaharra in the middle of nowhere, with a population of 31! The nearest house was the Craig Inn, about 8 miles to the South. But the people there were quite normal, and (if you listened carefully) even spoke English.
One cannot make a 1000 mile bicycle trip such as this without a few amusing incidents. At Bettyhill on the final day we met a lady in a cafe where the following conversation took place
Lady: "So you are cycling. Have you come from far?"
Martin: "No, not really. Only from Land’s End"
One of the causes for which I was raising funds was Greenpeace. A bit beyond Bettyhill Martin took great pleasure photographing me in front of the Dounreay atomic reactor, having just partaken of tea and coffee provided free in their visitor centre. I did however ensure that my right thumb was pointing downwards at the time.
Altogether I raised £685 and the money has been split as follows : NSPCC £220 St Elizabeth’s Hospice, Ipswich £220; Greenpeace £110 and Sustrans £135. Martin himself has raised about £2,500 for Cancer Research Compaign, Venture Scouts Kenya project and the British Heart Foundation. Many thanks from myself and Martin to all our sponsors!
The trip was originally planned for early June 2000. But for reasons explained on Martin's pages neither of us made it on that occasion. Visit Martin's website for that story and more information:- www.aaje09.ukgateway.net
I have now completed the "End to end" three times: 1992 120 miles/day in 9 days; 1994 100 miles/day in 10 days, and this year 75 miles a day in 14 days. On the first two occasions we travelled with lightweight racing bikes but this time we were self-supporting with panniers.
I would do it again. Please contact me if you are interested in joining me.
To see the full detail of the route, in text form, as created by the tracking system, download the following file. It can be viewed offline by any text editor such as Windows NotePad and shows the position every half mile both in text form and in lat/long, together with date and time to the nearest second, the bike speed and direction. As well as the half-mile positions, the file also includes entries where the speed increased from below 4 mph to above 4mph, and vice versa, which means that almost all stops and turns are included. Many thanks to St John Perry for downloading the files to his home PC at various times during the trip.
NOTE: To download the file, move the mouse over the link, click the right mouse button then Click 'Save Target As..." The file is best viewed with a non-proportional font, such as Courier.
With the appropriate software and maps, you can superimpose any part of this route on Ordnance Survey road maps. For example, this shows the part of the route near Slaidburn.
The software you would need to see the complete route on maps is Personal navigator and Fleet Tracker available from ISYS systems Ltd, and AVLTrack, available from me.
We have a collection of over 100 photographs, here for example is the 30% hill at Millock showing Martin and the view over WideMouth Bay:-
...and here is me eating lunch in the Quantock Hills
Beware - some of these files are large and will take a minute or two to display. These maps only show a few sections of the route - a complete set of maps of this scale would be many megabytes.
Files listed as under 100k should download in under a minute.
Peter Seaman
Email: PeterSeaman at BTInternet dot com http://www.Stable-Software.co.uk/personal
