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Tour de Yorkshire cycle route | cycle.travel

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Tour de Yorkshire trundling route | cycle.travel cycle◦travel Route GuidesRoutes ▼MunicipalityGuidesCities ▼ Map My Avenue Verte France Avenue Verte UK BayTrundlingWay C2C Celtic Trail Coast & Castles Cornish Way Cotswold LineTrundlingacross the Beacons Devon C2C Hadrian's Cycleway Kennet & Avon Lon Cambria London to Brighton Lon Las Cymru Lon Teifi Oxford to Cambridge Pennine Cycleway Radnor Ring Thames Valley Tour de Yorkshire Way of the Roses West Country Way • Bikes on trains •Waterwaycycling • Full list Birmingham Bristol Cambridge London Oxford Swindon Worcester York • Full list • Add your municipality Tour de Yorkshire Guide Routebook Gallery Stay Ride reports Forum ...ride the Tour on minor roads Route facts 66 696 71 688 67 Length: 131 miles Difficulty: Challenging GPX file: Download The Tour de France is the toughest sporting event in the world – but you don’t have to be an peerage cyclist to wits the exhilaration of its Yorkshire route.In 2014, the Tour famously visited Yorkshire for two days. But we wouldn’t recommend you follow its route unquestioningly. Much of the undertow followed rented A-roads, sealed specially for the occasion. Wide unbearable for high-speed racing and for the train of vehicles that follows the cyclists, they make for miserable riding at other times of year.But Stage 1, through the Yorkshire Dales, moreover followed peaceful, narrow lanes through this delightful part of England. By piecing these together with a few linking roads, you can enjoy all the rencontre of the Tour – without the traffic.And that’s exactly what we’ve washed-up here. We’ve taken the highlights of Stage 1, modified the route a little, ridden and mapped it. We think it’s a terrific route – and you can tell your friends you’ve climbed the same hills that Chris Froome and (before he fell off) Mark Cavendish tackled.How nonflexible is it?We’ll be honest: these are serious hills. But they’re no harder than popular velocipede routes like the C2C, and though steep, they’re few in number. Climbing Buttertubs or Whipperdale Bank will tax you, but they’re worth it for the scenic descent and long valley trip on the other side.If you’ve just bought your first bike, this probably isn’t the route to spin your tyres on. (Though we’d love you to prove us wrong.) For anyone who’s happy to trundling 30 miles in a day, and is prepared to tackle the odd hill, it’s eminently doable.What sort of bike?The route from Skipton through the Yorkshire Dales to Ripon is all on-road, so a road velocipede will be fine. From Leeds to Skipton, and from Ripon to Harrogate, we suggest you use waterway towpaths and old railway paths as an volitional to the A-roads followed by the Tour cyclists. Though these will mostly be ok for road bikes, the towpath is a bit narrower and bumpier as you get towards Skipton, so those with skinny tyres might want to detour onto the roads instead.A hybrid will cope with the full route, and you’ll fathom the ‘granny gear’ if you have one. A mountain velocipede would cope with the surface, but you might find the hills a stretch!How many days?Tour de France cyclists covered 120 miles in Stage 1 of the Tour. Our route is slightly longer, at 130 miles. Fit cyclists could do it all in two days, but we’d suggest taking three or four days, giving you a endangerment to enjoy the Dales at leisure. After all, there are some lovely pubs withal the way.If you don’t have time to do the full route, we’d suggest concentrating on the Dales from Grassington to Leyburn. This is the most scenic part of the Tour’s three-day visit, and a delightful ride in its own right.How rented are the roads?In the Dales, most of the roads are narrow and fairly quiet, expressly outside holiday season. We’ve therefore been worldly-wise to follow the route closely, with a few tweaks to stave A-roads. Between Aysgarth and Hawes, for example, we follow the lovely quiet road on the north side of the Ure valley, rather than the busier A-road on the south side. That said, some traffic is unavoidable without going miles out of the way: from Skipton up to Grassington, for example, the B-road can be rented with holiday traffic. The good news is that the promise of the Tour has drawn hundreds of two-wheeled adventurers to these roads. As a result, local drivers know to squint out for bikes. As long as you’re suitably lit up at night, you should be fine.Outside the Dales, the official Tour route followed major A-roads which are unpleasant to trundling at any time. We’ve therefore taken a little increasingly originative licence here, pursuit the Leeds & LiverpoolWaterwaytowpath and country lanes from Leeds to Skipton, and local trundling routes between Leyburn and Harrogate. Needless to say, the Tour peloton won’t be cycling lanugo the waterway towpath in July, though we’d like to see them try.How do I get there?Leeds and Harrogate both have uncontrived train services from London (run by East Coast - you can typesetting velocipede spaces online) and a wide range of local trains. You can moreover skip the first leg withal the waterway towpath, and go straight to the Dales by taking a train to Skipton – again, there are a few uncontrived services from King’s Cross.Is it signposted?The official route, as followed by the Tour de France cyclists, is signposted with permanent brown signs – though not with the fastidiousness of a NationalTrundlingNetwork route. But since this will lead you onto very rented roads, we’d recommend it only for the hardened road-warrior.Our volitional route isn’t signposted, but armed with a print-out from cycle.travel’s journey-planner, you shouldn’t find it difficult to follow. We’ve highlighted the key directions in bold, and moreover suggested a few possible detours in italics.Why ‘Tour de Yorkshire’?It’s the name we gave this route when we devised it. Since then, ASO (organisers of the Tour de France) have spoken their own professional cycling event with the same name. It’s not the most original of names, so we can’t vituperation them. (But we had it first.) Stage-by-stage guide and map » Click through to our detailed maps, stage-by-stage guide, walk-up and campsite listings. cycle◦travel Made in the Cotswolds, England. Published by Éditions Système D Ltd. Terms of use & cookies · About us · Advertise · Feedback · Contact us