Message from the Mayflower steppes

A right old knees up

It was a full 35-odd miles on the road today towards my hometown of Plymouth (where the marketing slogan 'City of Discovery' is mostly about the discovering the surprisingly varied assortment of hills - gradient, camber, it has the lot) and my knees now feel as if someone has stamped on them.

It was another lovely day for biking along country roads and past farms, and I managed to eat an entire meal simply from the insects that flew helpfully into my mouth, but we had to briefly go onto the busy A38 towards Plymouth which was intimidating - busy and fast and completely unaccommodating to cyclists.

I was told that I'd picked the hilliest route through the whole of Cornwall, which is mainly because I'm dictated by where our interviewees are. I did, however, manage to add on a few extra miles by leading us along several 'scenic routes' (also known as the wrong way) which unfortunately led us down (and up) a few more hills than we really needed to do. I've already abandoned the careful plans I made earlier to mindlessly following the GPS on my iPhone, so I don't know how anything could possibly go wrong, but anyone who has foolishly let me navigate before knows how infamously bad I am at navigation. Thankfully Matt is amazingly forgiving (he also doesn't know quite how often I make these mistakes). Still, it's all building up cycling muscle for the Devon hills, right?

The good news is that I've got a home-cooked meal and decent bed to look forward to tonight and that one county - Cornwall - is now done and dusted. After this is over I'm going to live in a bungalow. In Holland.

Pot holes and revelations

I woke up today dreading the long cycle to Plymouth but the day turned out much better than I'd anticipated (mind you, I am still writing this through a haze of exhaustion on a tiny iphone keypad so please forgive any glaring typos).

We got up fairly early to meet my contact at the Eden Project. We left our extraordinarily heavy panniers locked up at hostel and I deeply regret all the unnecessary things I'd brought with me (I have an empty black pot with me. Why? What on earth did I think I would put in it? Did I think I would trade it for a spare inner tube in a moment of dire emergency? My own thought processes baffle me on this point) and have every intention of abandoning a load of it at the first opportunity.

The cycle down to Eden was grey and difficult, bruised and aching, and we realised how deep the potholes were that we'd narrowly missed in the dark on the way in yesterday. But just as we cycled into the Bodelva valley the skies brightened and the domes twinkled in the sunshine. The domes are meant to look vaguely organic, a part of the landscape like insect eggs or honeycomb and the whole project itself is always a hive of activity. Today we spoke to a couple of gardeners about their springtime tasks and how they personally know spring is coming.

Getting back from Eden the thought of another 30 miles on the road was too painful to bear, so we decided to stay another night at Golant, go for a stroll for food in the gorgeous sunshine (I'm built for walking, not cycling, that's for sure) and generally rest the aching muscles for an afternoon. Spotted a pig that looked like it had been given a makeover by Peggy Mitchell and a gaggle of bluetits arguing in a tree.

I also managed to catch up with the news, which isn't so great as I'm now anxious for news of my friend in Toyko..

I'll post a video diary tomorrow from Plymouth once I've managed to get the blog to show them properly and will sort out any remaining feed problems. Lots of photos coming soon!

Blinking lights and revolutions

I woke up yesterday with the words 'horse sushi' in my head, which seemed to pervade my thoughts throughout the day. After a hilly start towards St Ives it has continued to be hilly. You're going to hear me talking a lot about hills so if you're of a nervous or nauseous disposition look away now.

The day started badly when Matt woke up with a painful neck. Some painkillers, anti-inflammatory cream, and a few hours of recuperation later, he felt OK enough to get back on the bike. We cycled down to St Ives harbour which was bustling with Sunday afternoon visitors soaking in the unseasonable warmth. The ice cream vendors were starting to trade well again and men were out painting their rowing and sailboats (a sure sign that spring is on it's way that people are starting to mend the damage and neglect of winter).

In the harbour we met Richard, a man who hand-makes willow lobster pots the traditional way. He claims to be one of the last people in the country to have this skill, if not the last, and here in the harbour his tough physical work is watched by curious tourists. One or two may buy a pot for decoration but at this time of year he mainly makes money by selling his homegrown daffodils (various breeds, whatever takes your fancy). He told me about visiting the Orkneys and watching the daffodils spring up in early May so it looks like we're pretty much on target on terms I'd following spring (mind you, he was last there in the 1970s...).

He's not the only one. All along the country lanes people are selling daffs by the bucket, even though you could pick a bunch yourself from the plants growing by the side of the road. There's a pride about the Cornish daffodils, which also appear to be the basis of the local economy at this time of the year. People tell me theirs have been out for a few weeks already and that we've missed them at their best: "They're all ageing now." We pass fields of workers picking daffodils, whole swathes left in the ground because their stems are deemed not quite long enough. Those will be ploughed back into the ground ready for next year's crop.

The country lanes we chose to go down yesterday were beautiful in the sunshine but the hills were relentless. No sooner have you got to the top of one than you can see the peak of the next and the steep climb to get up it. Even the simple ecstatic joy of speeding down a hill is tainted with the knowledge that a down will be followed
 by another up. Many times we simply had to get out and walk, catching our shins repeatedly on the pedals and bouncing off the panniers. Pushing my bike up one of these hills a babbling brook nearby seemed to be mocking me, giggling to the birds at my inability to perform a basic task. But then, what does a brook know about climbing hills?

At one point I saw what I'm certain was a swift, and earlier today the surprising scent of wild garlic put me off my stroke (isn't it far too early for both these species?)

The evening was spent in a pleasant family-run hostel in Falmouth, in an area where every house is a guest house of some variety. Because the holiday season hasn't started rates are low and we seem to be getting dorm rooms to ourselves.

Today was another difficult day but manageable. Unfortunately one of our planned interviewees, a commercial daffodil farmer, couldn't meet us because he's in the US, but that's the nature of this documentary and our last-minute planning. Instead we made our way across the water on the lovely St Mawes ferry to the Lost Gardens of Heligan, to speak to one of the gardeners about how the place prepares for spring. People were very accommodating and it made for a great interview, once we'd sorted our technical issues such as a low camera battery and spare tapes.

We then carried on toward St Austell and onto the friendly hostel in Golant, a large rambling house like the set of Cluedo accessible only by a mile-long track. After a hearty dinner I now need to make some decisions about our future route, and particularly how far we can realistically go tomorrow without our knees caving in.

A journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single sand martin

Well it has begun. After months of preparation and literally hours of strenuous training we started the journey north. 

The fates seemed to have been on our side in the days running up to the start - ordered equipment arrived just in time, bikes were allowed onto trains (despite the warnings of singularly unhelpful First Great Western staff) and parents went out of their way to drive and provide a sustaining supply of sandwiches. 

To cut a long story short (and to begin a much longer, but hopefully more interesting, one) we arrived at Land's End this afternoon just as the rain began to spatter. We took our photos in front of the famous sign (turning down the £10  fee of the official photographer - a man who literally takes his work home with him to avoid people stealing it), signed into the hotel End-to-End book (we're the third group to have started from Land's End this year) took some preliminary footage and set off. (There was more faffing than this would suggest, involving a cream tea, but that doesn't make for good blogging.) Land's End is not the most salubrious place at the best of times, but the rundown amusement arcade and hasty cash-in of a Doctor Who exhibit look even tackier completely empty and in the drizzle. 

Despite this, we set off later than planned and the pressure to get to St Ives before dark was on. The first section along the coast was lovely, the drizzle giving the sea and moorside a sad quality as if it didn't want to let go of winter just yet, just yet. But there were splashes of daffodils all along the road banks and gorse flowers were bursting through, so spring has definitely started to spring here. 

Then there were the hills. We'd been warned about these and I'd vainly assumed they couldn't be all that bad. They were - and these weren't even the bad ones. I admit we were defeated by quite a few and had to drag our unwilling bikes up them, telling each other repeatedly that at the end of this trip hills such as this will seem easy. Maybe they will, but they didn't feel easy today. 

After 17 miles we arrived just before dusk in St Ives, checked into the backpackers hostel and had a well deserved pub dinner. Off to bed now and hopefully plenty of springtime stories to begin regailing tomorrow.

Sightings update

Over the last month, dozens of sightings of frogspawn have been coming into Nature's Calendar from across the UK, with a dense mass in the South-West region. Frogs take around a week to develop in the egg before they hatch, so we must be due an explosion of tadpole sightings very soon (people who record frogspawn tend to come back to record the tadpoles as well). There have been a couple already in Cornwall, so on that front we're ready to go.

All we're waiting for now is a sighting of sand martins in the South-West. The first sighting has just been recorded in Canterbury, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that more will come in soon. Otherwise I'm tempted to travel down to Cornwall and hunt one down myself (with a camera, of course).

Hasn't spring started?

The beady-eyed among you may have noticed that we only recently announced which animals and plants we were looking out for as our markers of the start of spring. The reason for this is simply that we've encountered our first, very general, problem with living seasonally - that it makes life bloody difficult.

The species we originally chose as our marker of the start of spring - hawthorn coming into leaf - starting appearing way back in early February and we weren't at all ready to start the journey. It was a particularly early sighting for hawthorn but, even so, it made us reconsider our choices and forced us to plan more flexibly.

Some of the issues we've encountered are specific to our project, the most problematic of which was that I had to find a new team member to cycle with after my previous partner dropped out for family reasons. Thankfully, Matt appeared at the last minute, with all the experience and skills we needed, and was as stubbornly enthusiastic about the project as we were.

Then there have been technical and equipment problems such as stolen bikes, missing and obsolete microphones and the nightmare of getting affordable insurance. A large production company would have absorbed these costs, but our pocket-sized budget has simply not allowed it.

Thankfully we chose a variety of animals and plants to follow, which now includes sand martins and frog tadpoles. After the recent explosion in frogspawn, the first sightings of tadpoles have started to come in - there have already been two in the south-west (25th February in Launceston and 1st March in Truro). Of sand martins we have heard nothing yet but we expect sightings to start coming in very soon. So we're nearly there, we're watching the skies, the fields and the water and keeping an eye out for the sightings on Nature's Calendar.

To everyone who has asked whether spring has already started because the Met Office or Springwatch say it has, I say: 'Probably but maybe not'. Either way, it's so cold this week that I unashamedly admit I'm glad not to be on the road.