Great rides: Cycle, rail & bus Lincs

“A cycling holiday. With your dad. Are you sure that’s a good idea?” my friend said over the phone.

“How old is your dad now?” “He’s 88,” I said. “And are you really going on folding bikes? It doesn’t sound very comfortable…” I mumbled something about how great Dad’s new folder was.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “Grantham,” I said, brightly. Which also didn’t help. Each time we say we are planning a cycling adventure, people say, “Are you sure? Why not use a car?” and so on. And Dad isn’t a lifelong cyclist.

He got a bike when he retired. He uses it for local errands and 10-mile spins for pleasure. But I was pretty sure we could do up to 15 miles each day.

That’s enough for a great cycling holiday. We’d tootle around with three or four planned stops each day, with time for impromptu breaks. To get out to the areas that we wanted to see, we would use trains and buses. Hence the folding bikes.

Tickets to ride

My plan was a four-day exploration of Lincolnshire. It’s one of “the least known and least appreciated” English counties according to writer Simon Jenkins, who says this region of the North-East between the Humber and the Wash offers “a rare opportunity of seeing unsung treasures in an uncluttered landscape”.

“Sounds brilliant,” said Dad. “Let’s go.” So then there was the question of where to stay. My friend had a point about Grantham. Even the Visit Lincolnshire website concedes that the town is “industrial”.

But you can get to Grantham by direct train from both Stockport (for Dad) and London (for me). Local rail services can take you out of town in four directions, and it’s also a hub for buses.

I arrived at Grantham station on a sunny morning in late summer, and chatted with staff while waiting for Dad to arrive. When I say I’m on a cycling trip with my dad, people often react by thinking about their own father, how he is or was, their relationship, often a great mix of feelings. Dads are important.

“Oh, here he is!” cried the lovely lady from the ticket office, when Dad stepped off his train with his bike. She gave him a little hug. He was taken aback, but took it in his stride and hugged her back. It was such a nice way to arrive. “Aw, have a lovely time!” she said, as we waved and pedalled away.

Our first ride was to Belton Estate, a National Trust property north of the town. We cruised along a path by the River Witham, following National Cycle Network route 15, passing bandstands, bowling greens and tennis courts.

The horse chestnuts by the river were just starting to turn. Late summer is a lovely season. My Brompton felt great and Dad was loving his new Btwin. At Harrowby Mill, we crossed over a bridge and stopped to watch the water.

Having reached Belton, we crunched along the drive through the deer park with the place to ourselves apart from a flock of sheep, which scattered as we approached. Belton House is a 17th-century mansion that was used as the stately home of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the 1990s’ TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

At the Stables Café, we got free coffees for having arrived by bike, and two huge flapjacks. Then we bowled back to town, with golden evening sunlight slanting through the weeping willows.

Awkward reverence

On day two, the goal was to explore the flat country out towards the Lincolnshire Fens. The weather was grey and windy so we put on our jackets. We wanted to begin today’s ride at Sleaford, a market town about 15 miles east of Grantham. So we caught the 9:32 train that runs along the branch line to the coast.

St Denys, Sleaford, was the first of a bunch of medieval Lincolnshire churches we planned to see. Cycling around visiting country churches is a lovely thing to do. Philip Larkin wrote a poem about it: Church Going. “I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence,” he wrote, about stepping inside a church.

Dad and I entered Sleaford’s parish church and tried to appreciate the window tracery, which we had read is what you’re supposed to do there. But we found the faces that the medieval masons had carved a lot more fun: pigs with big ears, a man in a floppy hat pulling a face, a woman in a wimple, smiling.

People say the faces must be portraits of local people that the mason knew. We enjoyed looking at them through binoculars, our bikes propped up on tombstones.

We left Sleaford and headed east. The roads were flat and unfenced. We had big views of yellow stubble under huge, grey skies.

The church at Ewerby, where we went next, has “more rude carving per metre” than any other in the area, so we took the chance to see a few medieval men baring their bottoms, then headed to the Finchatton Arms and wolfed down soup and sandwiches.

A few miles further on, at Heckington church, the last on our list, our favourite thing was a carving of a girl feeding her squirrel. From Heckington, we hopped on a train back to Grantham, glad to be in the warmth after a day out in the wind.

Roaming off road

Our fenlands day had felt autumnal. The following morning, the forecast was for sun and summer again. Our plan was to explore an area along the Lincolnshire Edge, an escarpment that runs through the centre of the county. There were no railway stations near the places we wanted to go, so we would use buses instead.

We joined a chatty group of people waiting for the number 1 from Grantham to Lincoln. “Are you going to visit Mrs Smith’s Cottage?” people asked (several times). “What about Heckington Windmill?”

When the bus arrived it was already half full but it was no problem to stow our folded bikes in the area for wheelchairs and prams. An hour later we were in Navenby, a small village of limestone houses 10 miles south of Lincoln. We visited the medieval church, which was suffused with light, making me think of an aquarium.

Then we cycled south across the high heathland, golden in the sun, along a narrow lane that had once been the Roman road between London and York. The old road was empty and silent. We squinted into the sunlight, the road straight as an arrow as far we could see.

On the Ordnance Survey map, a section of this old road was white, meaning ‘other road, drive or track’. I thought it would just be unpaved, perhaps gravel. But to my alarm, we found ourselves struggling along between high banks of nettles and meadowsweet, ducking under swinging briars, with our wheels in deep tractor tracks.

We had to walk. It was hot and tiring in the sun. I wondered what my friend would say…

The knights’ tale

We were heading to a place with the odd name of Temple Bruer. While researching the trip, I’d seen ‘Tower’ written in Gothic script on the map here, as well as a place called Temple Farm.

I’d looked it up and found that this remote spot had been one of the richest Knights Templar preceptories in England, with a large Templar church, a manor house, farm buildings and cottages.

The entire complex had melted into the soil – except for this one tower, which was still standing in a farmyard. I had rung Lincolnshire council to see if the tower was locked. No one knew. I asked Dad if he wanted to visit it.

“Apparently, if it is open, we might need a torch,” I’d said. “We definitely want to go there,” Dad had replied.

We at last emerged from the brambles and got back on our bikes, hugely relieved to see tarmac. Turning up Temple Farm Lane, we hesitated. “We can always apologise,” said Dad. So we rolled gently on.

Suddenly, in front of a range of farm buildings, there it was: a tall, square tower, with smoothly faced walls. We leant up the bikes, climbed stone steps to the door and tried the handle. It turned!

We shoved at the heavy wood, shoved again, and the door burst open. We tumbled into the tower. There were stone arches, benches and a worn, old tomb. It was dusty and echoed. There were mason’s marks and daisy-wheel symbols on the walls.

The tower was built in the 1200s. We fingered the worn arcades, under which the medieval soldier-monks and their sergeants and chaplains must have sat. Then we sat on the steps and drank tea from our flasks, listening to the sparrows in the hedges, before getting back on our bikes and zooming down to the plain.

In the afternoon, we stopped to look at a couple more medieval churches, then climbed up a huge hill back onto the Lincolnshire Edge. We pushed up the climb on foot. When we reached the top, we looked back the way we’d come. The road was dusty silver, the lowlands faraway and indistinct in the evening haze.

We picked up the number 1 bus in the village. It took us back to Grantham as the sun went down.

“So how was the trip? Was your dad all right?” my friend asked, a few days later. He had loved it, I said, and so had I.