A1 Dales
by Guy Procter

The back wheel of my bike twirls inanely in the 70mph motorway breeze. With the dim enthusiasm of a puppy on a treadmill it tries to keep up as we weave our way from lane to lane. The silence is broken now and again, roughly every 17 seconds, by an urgent grilling from the driver. "Are the bikes still on the back?" "Well how many did we start out with?" "Seriously, are the bikes still on?" "I can't see any - but then I'm not looking out of the right window". "Does that sound like chafing to you?"... And so it goes on.

When you're getting away for a long weekend, there are a lot of wires to get under. Things generally get worse before they get better. The penitential process of abandoning daily life for me, and a good many others, is the A1. 'A1': a misnomer if ever there was one, for a 600-mile funnel for nine-to-five frustrations. At least it focuses your mind on what you're trying to get away from. I-Spy peters out in a desultory series of gloveboxes, bonnets and windfarms ("well I saw one back there"). Eddie Stobart lorries vie for the lead part in Speed 6, in which a 40-tonne tri-axle saves the world by not exceeding 55mph or leaving the middle lane.

A high-fibre visit to the Yorkshire Dales is as good for body and mind as anything I know. Luckily, you're just a few hours, a note from your boss saying you can have Friday off, and a visit to the Little Thief away from a brilliant biking weekend. For satisfaction, there's nothing like cobbling together your own long ride away from busy roads. In the Yorkshire Dales it's reach-into-the-Scalextric-box easy. The National Park's had a long distance walking route for years. So it's ironic that, despite being perfectly suited to mountain bikes, a long riding route hasn't materialised. Until now.

Necessity might be the mother of invention, but the father's a local fella by the name of Jeremy Ashcroft. As well as illustrating all On Your Bike's maps, he's the author of two best-selling mountain bike route guides, and a Dales resident. He came up with and rode this homemade Dales Way for his stag do a few years ago.

The Dales slip between the cleavage of the Lake District and the North Yorkshire Moors. The hills, though fewer than the Lakes, have a common aspect, almost an attitude, which gives them a stronger presence than might be the case. The big three peaks typify this look. Whernside, Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent share a long fuselage-like back with a face comprising a primeval scowling brow and slopes below as steep and smooth as a snowplough. These three lie, Sphinx-like, on a great plain where roads hide in natural ha-has to give the impression of an apparently unvisited wilderness.

The Three Peaks form the central chapter of this 50-mile ride from Bolton Abbey, near Skipton, to Kendal. The whole route is easily doable in three days, but even if you've only a day to spare there's fantastic riding to be had -- and this stretch is a peach.

On foot, the epic walk between the Three Peaks is rightly considered a major achievement. But bikes give you longer legs, and what in clod-hopping boots was a feat of endurance becomes a perfectly proportioned ride. Malham is a great place to start this Dales day. The village is the southern boundary of the limestone bedrock which is so characteristic of the National Park. Unlike gritstone, which forms much of the Pennines, limestone is porous and drains easily, leaving an astro-turf which refuses to clog tires or drain your energy.

It's a bit of a pull up onto Kirkby Fell but each tug on the pedals is a contribution to a massive downhill lump-sum that matures on the horizon. Cresting the first major rise is a real pleasure, partly because it prefaces a great freewheel and partly because this wilderness biking lark is easier than you may think. Unlike in the Lakes, here the hills don't crowd you, and you don't need to take a few steps back to absorb the big picture. After the head down pedal pumping of the climb, stopping to take it in felt like scoffing a packed lunch I'd dutifully carried all morning.

Down through the railway town of Settle and on the road to Wharf it's a good time to pull alongside and pass the time of day, make plans to come back and take that bridleway you passed a while back or try and remember the theme tune to CHiPS. Really into our stride now, we relished the disintegration of the track from smooth tarmac to grass-tongued Land Rover track and finally to stone-studded bridleway.

As our confidence grew, we started to enjoy the downhill bits as more than just as a rest for red-hot thighs. At the next turn of the corner Emma, OYB's staff writer, passed me on the right, catching my handlebar and sending me into a near-terminal wobble. Clearly a challenge. The competitive temptation always rises at some point in a ride, and my view is the only way to get rid of it is to give in to it. Righting myself and squinting at the fast disappearing miscreant, I clicked into the top of a stack of low gears and stood on the pedals to get some real propulsion.

Past the next corner and the track seemed to be getting into it too, dipping like an awkward horse trying to throw me over its shoulder. Steeper now, the path was studded with loose grapefruit-size stones which couldn't decide whether to skitter out of the way at the kiss of a front wheel, or dig their heels in and thump the forks up towards your chest.

Ahead I could see Emma had gone into a two-wheel wobble (as it is technically known) and had stopped pedalling in order to calm her steed. Hah! An ideal opportunity to release a slick of gung-ho and sail past, stirring the pedals like mad. Past a certain degree of steepness, each strum of hamstrings propels you at a logarithmically increasing rate towards the valley bottom, and as the world blurred and I snatched the lead, I gave myself to gravity in a cheap exchange for glory.

This turned out to be a low-wattage bright idea. I raised my head from what I childishly thought of as a 'racing crouch' and squinted at the streaky blur of the trail ahead. Something dark and liquid seemed to cross the track, exactly halving the braking distance I would, in cooler moments, have considered necessary.

Seconds to go before bike and rider met river, a foot-wide stone clapper bridge pinged into focus. I thought of Top Gun and that cheesy but inescapable line about your ego writing cheques your body can't cash. But thanks to a lucky glance from an embedded stone my path bent bridgewards and I was able to rumble over to safety rather than meet the resistance of the foot-deep flow either side. The ride up and over Crummack Dale repeats the hill-climbing investment-dividend process, this time spreading your coasting over four fantastic kilometres, tyre tread alternately drumming on dry turf and fizzing on gravel.

This is a land where man-made things tend to complement the natural. The Ribblehead viaduct is about the largest thing I can imagine pulling off this trick of our ancestors. Approaching it on the grey stony track the maintenance Transits use ("How's it looking today Steve?" "Bloody massive, innit?" "Steve, you've been coming here every month for the last ten years. Get over it. Now how's it looking?") the viaduct's size fluctuates, lacking anything to give it scale except the slab sides of Whernside itself. Coasting down towards it, the bricks grow one last time to the size of boulders and you realise how big it really is. Leaning against an arch-side as a train goes across, way, way overhead, a few crumbs of pale mortar rain down, trailing dusty tails. Speaking as a home owner, it's immensely reassuring to see this tiny sign of structural frailty in something which is patently going to last well into the Apocalypse.

Jeremy had warned us that the next section, a bra-strap of a path over the shoulder of Whernside, was pretty steep. Fortified with tea from the Ribblehead tea van, we had the strength to call it a day. You, if you have enough cash for a Twix, might feel differently. Dunking the bikes in the cold stream back by the road, the day's dirt rinsed away easily. We stretched out on the bank enjoying another polystyrene of tea -- not finished until you've bitten a chunk out of the rim -- and made plans for a night of frothy-moustache ales, fiercely glowing faces and hugely exaggerated tails of riding skills.

Cars rushed by in ones and twos, smearing chart hits or bending the voices of newsreaders down the road. For ourselves, we'd bought a slice of inaction, and a deep, level feeling that a bike can put you in perfect harmony with the Dales.

Here at Ribble Head you're at the centre of a spider's web of bridleways, a fact brought home to us by another biker who happened to be passing. Looking at his map and the 3B pencil mark smudged across the contours in a totally different direction to our route, we realised something. We hadn't been riding 'the' Dales Way, merely 'a' Dales Way, and there were as many out there as we had gears, weekends or Twix money.

As we loaded up the bikes onto the rack in the lay-by, the tea van man clattered shut for the day. We both headed out onto the road at the same time, he in one direction, we the other. Emma offered a cheeky wave, he opted not to lose control of his van in return. Who knows where he was bound -- Mewith, Bentham or some other Dales village big on veterinary services and pre-war cardigans -- but we were heading for the Great North Road. A1 as in brilliant, top choice, the best.