My book Chocolate and Chicory: York and beyond, by bicycle includes more information on the local landscape and local history, with mapped routes - including 'Racing trains, to Moorlands' - a journey through this area. Read more >
I love this cycle path by the riverside to Rawcliffe. Though you go under the York outer ring road, with its heavy constant traffic, it still feels quite rural once you get to this area and encounter cows. These sometimes wander onto the cycle path itself, but usually hang about on the grass.
After the cows, there are cottages at Rawcliffe Landing, where you turn left and keep with the river, following a tarmac path through trees, past a cycle route marker, across an iron bridge over a stream, in a groovy, curvy section.
We meet the road by this metal sculpture, and turning left again, follow the narrow road to Overton.
Just after Overton a bridge over the railway gives a fine view of passing trains on the East Coast Main Line. A sign by the track indicates that Edinburgh is 200 miles away. I'm hoping I can manage a fraction of that enormous-sounding distance - a tenth of it perhaps.
I didn't take photos for much of the journey, as it's rather harder to do this when you're on a bike than it is when you're walking. I knew I had many miles to cover, and at this stage was anxious to get to Alne. Or somewhere near Alne. Or at least to Newton-on-Ouse/Beningbrough Hall. I'd managed this the previous summer, but inbetween had seen cycling inactivity as a result of a broken wrist, and general inactivity due to laziness.
Route 65, after it leaves Overton, continues on narrow quiet roads, at one stage getting close to the A19 on the right, and many times skirting the railway line, crossing it several times on railway bridges that take some effort to get up for those of us who aren't super-fit cyclists. Indeed on the return journey I dreaded them - but at the moment, it's early afternoon on a sunny day, and I'm happily heading for Alne.
The route takes us to the gates of Beningbrough Hall, and indeed you can cycle through the grounds, or continue to take the marked road alongside, through Newton-on-Ouse. A previous summer, on a bike I borrowed (thank you, Rachel), when I managed the ride from York to Newton-on-Ouse and back, after a gap of 20 years of not cycling, I felt like I'd climbed Everest.
Now, on my recently-bought second-hand bike, I'm wanting to get past the previously-travelled places.
So here we are, past Newton-on-Ouse, still on route 65, having stopped for a drink of water and to take a photo, because I looked to my right and saw the spire of the church over the fields.
Still on roads, until the designated cycle route takes us onto a section of rougher track, all narrow and wild and lovely - it may not be lovely in the depths of winter on a wet day - but it's lovely now, with what would be mud all dry and easily manageable, and no one much around. Far off, to the north somewhere, over blurry blue distance, the white horse on the hills at Kilburn.
This is the kind of thing I was hoping to get to today, quiet land, farmland, earth and trees and big sky. It's obviously not away from civilization, as the handsome iron waymarker indicates the route, reassuringly. I've seen these before - there's one nearer home, on the riverside bit approaching Overton, but it's darker in colour, and less visible amongst the trees. Same design though. Just in case I thought I was lost, this beautiful green creation points the way. It says it's 55 miles to the Tees barrage. I don't think I'll be going that far today. But it indicates I've probably gone 13 miles or so already, from York, so that's satisfying.
Then roads again, as we meet Youlton, and continue on towards Alne. Places I pass have eggs and raspberries for sale, on tables outside. I still don't feel tired, and with the distance from York increasing I feel like my lungs are filling with more air than they did back there.
There's a crossroads, and then there's Alne. Rather surprised that I've made it, I pass the church I came all this way to see, as there are people just outside of it, and I'm feeling a bit overheated and feel a need to sit down on a bench and perhaps wipe the flies off my face before anyone sees me. Alne's village centre offers a handy bench, a bit further along, where I stop and find, as I suspected, that I'm covered in small flies, which appear to have drowned in the vast amounts of sun-screening lotion I covered my arms with. Thank goodness for those wet-wipe thingies. And my OS Explorer map, which suggests I can return home via a loop going north and then east, past Raskelf and through Tholthorpe (it was around a 40-mile journey in the end, going the longer way home).
But first, here is Alne church, a lovely mix of stone and brick, and the stone is of different colours, and all look good against the mature green trees and churchyard around it. Just inside the gate, watering cans ready by an outdoor tap, and as I approached, a lady just leaving. Congregations may be dwindling, but village churches are still the heart and soul of the place, generally looked after and valued. And whether you're religious or not (and I'm not), they convey so much.