Just round the corner from the handsome bust of the long-dead town mayor, Col John Pine-Coffin, is Bideford's old railway station. It has seen better days. Some ancient rolling stock, squatting on rusty rails above the Torridge estuary, was converted into a tearoom a few years back, and June Berry, a volunteer who runs it largely for the benefit of cyclists, was ruminating over a bacon sarnie. "We're open every day during the season. Except when it rains. She leaks, you see, so we have to shut up shop. There's only so much Mr Vowler, our chief engineer, can do. Unless he gets some more money."
Rain was on its way, so I took a pull of tea and looked across Long Bridge, the 24-arch structure that connects the occasionally soggy tearoom, on the east bank, with the rest of town. The Tarka Trail Tearoom is one of many charming stop-offs on the delightful north-south Devon cycle route; it seems a shame that some of the estimated £50bn a year being spent Europe-wide by cycle tourists can't be liberated to shore up this splendid billet. If only old John Pine-Coffin (family motto: tempestate floresco – "in storms we flourish") were still alive …
My ride had started in France at the western seaport of Nantes a week before and the plan was to cycle the Nantes-Brest canal as part of a coast-to-coast-to-coast journey that would link the Atlantic, the English Channel and the Bristol Channel before ending in Cornwall. I've always been a great fan of Brittany and the west of England so I was delighted to discover that serious Euro-funding was going into Cycle West, a project to promote routes between the two. Plans were unveiled last month for three big itineraries and I was to be the first to test one of them, the "Velodyssey" route between south-east Brittany and south-west England.
Few cities can have as elegant an introduction as Nantes: the Erdre and the Loire, lined with chateaux of extraordinary opulence, roll out their green, aqueous carpets into the centre, towards the Château des Ducs de Bretagne, that mighty monument to pre-revolution France. I left Nantes via the Erdre to get to the Nantes-Brest canal, and was soon trundling at a satisfactory pace along a wide and blissfully traffic-free pathway. I am very much a leisure cyclist, inclined to stop off and mooch around rather than doggedly press on, unlike those suicidal Tour de France guys, who had embarked that very morning from a nearby town in Brittany.
I was travelling last minute, hoping to wing it by credit card rather than booking hotels in advance, as I had little idea how far I would wish to cycle, or what interesting places would beckon. By teatime on the first day, after passing Blain, Guenrouet and Redon, all was going a little too well. I had clocked up effortless miles, was building up a big appetite and was now thinking about an apéritif and supper, when suddenly the path petered out into a field, near the hamlet of Ile-aux-Pies. I'd missed the crossing to the left bank of the Oust (the canal is interconnected by stretches of river) and found myself going up and up, following misleading signs for another route.
After an hour of fruitless climbing and circling I was back on track but discovered I was knackered, having broken all my own rules about taking it easy. The legs were beginning to rebel, the bike and its unfeasibly large panniers had turned to lead, and the arms and thighs were the colour of boiled lobster (where was the damned sun block and après-soleil when you needed it? At home, of course).
Eighty miles were now registering on the GPS device. This was hardly the dawdle I had in mind. No matter – the town of Malestroit was nearby. I'd phone and get a comfortable room and finish the day in style. I'd lunched in Malestroit on a previous trip and fell in love with the narrow gothic and renaissance buildings, the gargoyles and terrifying visages carved into medieval woodwork. But I'd misread the map; not only was Malestroit 20km away, but there was no room at the Cap Horn, and furthermore, I was assured by reception, there was no other accommodation in town.
I should have brought my tent! The local phone book did throw up a chambre d'hôte nearby, with one spare room and, if I got a move on, a place for communal dinner. I crossed the river and headed up to St-Martin-sur-Oust. On the edge of the village and hidden behind high walls in its own vast grounds was something unlike any other B&B I'd ever seen: the Château de Castellan. Dinner was being served by Marie, the aristocratic landlady, and I was ushered straight into the dining room covered in dust, sweat and wearing Lycra. "There's no time to change. We don't mind," she said.
I stopped for coffee the following morning in Malestroit, which was, according to the Office de Tourisme, full of chambres d'hôtes and gîtes, but I wouldn't have missed the chateau for all the world. The medieval square was full of cyclists heading south, the sun was out and the wind had dropped.
Onwards to Josselin for lunch. This is probably the most scenic place along the route, where the chateau rises straight out of the Oust to three towering peaks. Before Cardinal Richelieu got his hands on the place, and razed six of the nine towers, it must have been one of the most remarkable castles in France. "I have thrown a fine ball among your skittles, monsieur," he gloated to the Rohan family, after they had been deemed a little too powerful.
The canal and rivers are green and brown, overhung by dense foliage and lined by hedgerows and vast acres of oaks. Banks of reeds grow for mile upon mile and hours go by without the interruption of cars, though pleasure craft drift lazily past, in and out of the many locks which take you gently upwards towards the Forêt de Quénécan and the Montagnes Noires.
The most delightful stretch is just before the Lac de Guerlédan near the village of Gouarec, where you briefly leave the river Blavet. The Velodyssey route follows the Nantes-Brest canal until Carhaix-Plouguer, where it links up with the old north-south rail line to Morlaix and the ferry at Roscoff, a 50-mile ride in the dappled shade of yet more traffic-free greenway, or voie verte. None of this quite prepares you for what is to come once you have disembarked at Plymouth. The 8.30am ferry from Roscoff (which runs until the end of October) gets you in at lunchtime, and you take a delightful and gentle ascent of the Plym Valley Path, along the estuary and then the old rail line. But soon the track deposits you on some fairly steep lanes and I climbed, according to the GPS, more than 750m before getting to Lydford, my overnight stop on the edge of Dartmoor, some 25 miles north of Plymouth.
The Devon Coast to Coast route, set up many years ago but constantly being improved as new tracks and sections of old line are commissioned, is 102 miles from beginning to end, adding to the 240 or so miles you clock up in Brittany. Sections of it, such as the Granite Way, over the top of Dartmoor and down to Okehampton, and the Tarka Trail, which takes you up the Torridge to Bideford, Barnstaple and Ilfracombe, are as stunningly beautiful as anything the other side of the Channel.
Cycle West will also be incorporating Cornwall and the Camel Trail into the itinerary as a possible finish point, which will link via Bude and Bodmin to Padstow. My own trip ended at a rather special B&B on Bodmin Moor – Cabilla Manor, run by explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison and his wife Louella. As chance would have it, they did the same route as me on horseback in 1984, and wrote a book about it: White Horses Over France.
When the vast peleton of Tour de France 2011 sweeps down the Champs Elysées tomorrow after three weeks of unremitting hell, I shall cast a casual eye over the TV screen as I flick idly through my guidebooks. As the garlanded victor ludorum of the 98th race takes the podium, I shall be making notes in the margin of the 2011 Michelin Guide Rouge: places to visit on the Not The Tour de France, the second étape of which will start very shortly.
