I followed the UK’s CTC standard YHA route which was a little over 1000 miles in total. The route took me from Land’s End to Golant (Sunday night), Exeter (Monday), Street (Tuesday), Welsh Bicknor (Wednesday), Clun (Thursday) up to Chester (Friday). Then on to Slaidburn (Saturday), Carlisle (Sunday), New Lanark (Monday) and Stirling (Tuesday) – I’d never been north of Stirling in the UK. Then it got a bit less populated with Glencoe (Wednesday), Loch Ness (Thursday), Carbisdale Castle (Friday), Tongue (Saturday) and John O’Groats (to Wick) (Sunday).
Finally, I got the train back from Wick on Monday 9th August.
GPS maps for the route are on gmap-pedometer, though on the bike I mainly used paper maps (pages from a UK car route planner onto which I’d hand-drawn the route) and the notes provided by the CTC, with GPS on my iPhone as a backup. This worked really well in practice and I only really got lost (in a fairly minor way) once or twice.
Here are the details:
- Land’s End to Golant (day 1 – Sunday 25th – 62 miles)
- Golant to Exeter (day 2 – Monday 26th – 75 miles)
- Exeter to Street (day 3 – Tuesday 27th – 57 miles)
- Street to Welsh Bicknor (day 4 – Wednesday 28th – 76 miles)
- Welsh Bicknor to Clun (day 5 – Thursday 29th – 56 miles)
- Clun to Chester (day 6 – Friday 30th – 66 miles)
- Chester to Slaidburn (day 7 – Saturday 31st – 84 miles)
- Slaidburn to Carlisle (day 8 – Sunday 1st – 82 miles)
- Carlisle to New Lanark (day 9 – Monday 2nd – 78 miles)
- New Lanark to Stirling (day 10 – Tuesday 3rd – 47 miles)
- Stirling to Clencoe (day 11 – Wednesday 4th – 80 miles)
- Glencoe to Loch Ness (day 12 – Thursday 5th – 67 miles)
- Loch Ness to Carbisdale Castle (day 13 – Friday 6th – 54 miles)
- Carbisdale Castle to Tongue (day 14 – Saturday 7th – 47 miles)
- Tongue to John O’Groats (and Wick) (day 15 – Sunday 8th – 81 miles)
Overall, I found the CTC YHA route pretty good. There were times when I swore (sometimes out loud) about the number of hills that seemed to have been selected over flatter routes and there were two places where I chose a slightly more direct A road route over the proper minor road route (either to make up time or because I felt it was going to be flatter) – however, this was very rare.
