KYQ4: Lytham and Ribble

Lytham Promenade

Ribble Gravel Bike

I decided to visit my sister and brother, the first time I had been to my home town(city) this year. I intended to visit the Ribble Bike emporium that had started life in Preston but had moved to Clitheroe where a well-equipped shop had all the bikes on display and facilities to measure you for a new bike. I also had a yearning to visit Lytham where I had spent many a day as a toddler when my parents cycled there on the family tandem with me strapped into a rear metal caged seat.

The first evening, I spent time with my brother-in-law at the local cricket club while my sister was at a Pilates class. The beer was from a microbrewery in St Helens and called Howzat. Not out; it was an excellent pale ale, and we stayed for a second innings.

The next morning I drove to Clitheroe, a douce town in the Ribble Valley that is the HQ of the Ribble Valley Council. It boasts a healthy town centre, fine sandstone buildings and a well-healed population. The Bike shop was a couple of miles away in a new commercial centre next to furniture showrooms, fast food outlets and Screwfix. I spent half an hour drooling over the complete range of bikes before an assistant became available to measure me for a bike and help me consider the options.

Was it to be a CGR bike (Cross, Gravel, Road) or a Gravel bike? An aluminium, steel, titanium or carbon frame and what groupset? Did I want an electric bike? It used to be a lot easier to choose a bike in the 1960s - a Dawes, Claud Butler, Holdsworth or Mercian frame ideally with 10 Campag gears, Mavic wheels, Werinmann brakes, Stronglight chainset, Christophe toe clips and a Brookes saddle. All for £21 for a Dawes and up to £30 for a Holdsworth. The price range at Ribble Bikes was from £1099 to £7000 and Ribble is supposedly among the best value bikes.

Whilst looking at the bikes and waiting for the assistant I chatted to another customer who lived in Derbyshire but was Scottish. He was green with envy when he heard that I had lived near Aberfoyle for 36 years, he referred to it as Gravelfoyle, one of the best places in the UK for trail riding. He convinced me to get a Gravel Bike and encouraged me to spend as much as I could afford because Ribble bikes were excellent value. He had brought his friend to the shop who was being measured for his bike as we spoke. I still have to decide which Gravel bike, both carbon and titanium are lighter and more expensive, steel had been my first choice but I am currently thinking of aluminium with a better groupset. I would have liked to choose the colour but that cost an extra £350. That would have bought 12 Holdsworths back in the day.

On leaving the Bike Shop, I decided to visit my brother who had just returned from a ten-week tour of northern Europe from France to Denmark, up the Norwegian Coast to the Arctic Circle and back via Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, Holland, Belgium and France. I drove from Clitheroe by the less travelled roads to the Ribble and Hodder valleys, taking in places that had been the backdrop to my early years. I had gone trout fishing on the River Hodder, walked along the frozen River Ribble in the deep-frozen winter of 1962, cycled around the Trough of Bowland, written a university geology dissertation on the area, and raced half marathons and 10k races during my running days. It was a trip down memory country lanes. I crossed the river Loud where I had camped for the first time with my dad as an 8-year-old and where my parents had their Ruby Wedding celebrations in the hotel. I spent the afternoon with my brother and invited everyone for an evening meal at Great Eccleston. It was close to the market garden where my father cycled 15 miles to work every day after leaving school before he joined the army and spent the war years in Africa, Greece and Italy with the Eighth Army.

The following day I persuaded my sister and her husband to make a trip to Lytham, the salubrious residential town facing Southport on the other side of the mud flats of the Ribble estuary. As a youngster, I had spent many summer days here when my parents would cycle out on the tandem and where I would play in the paddling pools, admire the windmill, and discover ice cream. It was a fine but breezy day, the tide was out and the mud flats were no more appealing than yesteryear, nor had Southport got any nearer.

Blackpool is only 5 miles away but is socially and economically more distant. It has declined from the UK's top holiday resort with a wealthy rapacious business community to a tumbleweed seaside town with the highest level of deprivation in England. A sad reminder of the days when the pleasure beach, donkeys on the sand, saucy postcards and sticks of rock made a holiday. Only the trams, the tower and the annual Strictly pilgrimage maintain any sense of pride today.

Unlike Lytham, where the well-maintained and busy 5-mile promenade along the shore to Fairhaven and St Anne's was alive with dogs and their elderly owners. The centre of Lytham was buzzing with baby boomers bursting the capacity of busy cafes. My sister was welcomed by an Italian cafe owner with the brio that Italians are famous for and we had an excellent late lunch.

Returning to Preston, I became perplexed by the numerous new housing developments and a road network that baffled me and Google Satnav. The logical morphology of a twentieth-century town has been exploded by thousands of new houses and the school catchments have about as much logic as most social media posts. I began to think it was time to return to the simple geography of the part of Scotland where I am fortunate enough to live.