Land's End to John O'Groats on a Bike Friday Tandem

Route
Cycle Route

Introduction

In the summer of 2007 my wife, Lynn, and I cycled the length of Great Britain on our Bike Friday tandem. The "length of Great Britain" is traditionally defined as starting at Land's End in Cornwall and ending at John O'Groats in Scotland (or the reverse). These are separated by a straight line distance of about 875 miles, although our total distance covered was around 1070 miles, including some sight seeing detours. We allowed a leisurely 4 weeks to do the trip, but in the end completed it in 21 cycling days, plus a day of rest and sightseeing in Edinburgh. You can find photos from the trip here, or read the day-by-day account following.

Day-by-Day

SunMonTuesWedThurFriSat
June
14
Day 0		15
Day 1		16
Day 2
17
Day 3
18
Day 4
19
Day 5		20
Day 6		21
Day 7		22
Day 8		23
Day 9
24
Day 10
25
Day 11
26
Day 12		27
Day 13		28
Day 14		29
Day 15		30
Day 16
July
1
Day 17
2
Day 18
3
Day 19		4
Day 20		5
Day 21		6
Day 22
7
Day 23
Orkney
8
Day 24
Orkney		9
Day 25
Orkney		10
Day 26
Orkney		11
Day 27
Orkney

Route

Our route was a combination of the "Bed and Breakfast" route of the CTC organization and parts of the National Cycle Network, particularly in the South West of England and in Scotland, together with a few shortcuts since the NCN routes often involve long detours to avoid quite short distances on A-roads, or even potentially busy B roads. Almost all of the route was on minor back roads, or the special cycle paths of the NCN. The NCN off-road routes were particularly useful to get through the only two large cities on the route - Bristol and Edinburgh. Since the train services in Scotland do not allow tandems (bikes are OK), even on the special Wick to Inverness cycle van, how to get back from John O'Groats presented a quandary. In the end we decided to take the passenger ferry over to Orkney, and then take the overnight car ferry from Kirkwall to Aberdeen, and rent a car there. This worked out very well, and we spent the 5 extra days doing some cycling around Orkney.

The path we took, including the Orkney tour, is shown on this Google map (or this version with associated photos). This is the actual track downloaded from my GPS, processed with GPSBabel and GPS Visualizer.1 You can enlarge the map to see the details of the route. This GPX file of the track might be useful for plotting in other mapping programs.


Last modified 13 December, 2014