THE BIG RIDE
The first half of this riotous romp around the south-west of England takes us from North Devon to South Cornwall
PART ONE
I’M ON ONE of the UK’s major trunk toads; the A39 that runs across north Devon then south towards Land’s End. As a double-digit A-road, it should be crammed with HGVs and oldsters but there are no processions of caravans yet – the kids are still at school. So the road is clear – and as I see it stretching through the fast and flowing bends that cry out for me to keep the momentum up and simply swing the bike from side to side, I realise I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun.
Photographer James Archibald and I are tackling the South West 660, one of the most recent ‘formalised’ routes, running from Watchet in Somerset, out along the North Devon coastline and down the Atlantic Highway to Land’s End before turning east and following the south Cornish coast back into Devon and along the Jurassic Coast to end in Poole.
The organisers of the route suggest breaking it up into 50-mile slices so you can enjoy all the sites and points of interest along the way. But this is the Big Ride, not the Big Visit, so we’re all about the roads.
We start at Watchet harbour, which inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tale of a wedding guest who gets accosted by a drunken sailor; and the man responsible for killing the first albatross and damning his crew to bad luck. The statue of the mariner makes a memorable starting point for what will be our three-day ride. We roll out of Watchet along tree- and hedge-lined lanes, the Bristol Channel somewhere to our right but unseen.
We pass through Porlock and climb Porlock Hill, still ensconced by hedges and trees. A sign warns of a cattle grid and, as we pass ov
