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I cycled to all the villages in alphabetical order
Aug. 25th, 2023 01:08 am
[personal profile] diziet
This last weekend I completed a bike rides project I started during
the first Covid lockdown in 2020:
I've cycled to every settlement (and radio observatory) within 20km
of my house, in alphabetical order.
Stir crazy
In early 2020, during the first lockdown, I was going a bit stir
crazy. Clare said "you're going very strange, you have to go out and
get some exercise". After a bit of discussion, we came up with this
plan: I'd visit all the local villages, in alphabetical order.
Choosing the radius
I decided that I would pick a round number of kilometers, as the crow
flies, from my house. 20km seemed about right. 25km would have
included Ely, which would have been nice, but it would have added a
great many places, all of them quite distant.
Software
I wrote a short Rust program to process OSM data into a list of
places to visit, and their distances and bearings.
You can download a tarball of the alphabetical villages scanner. (I
haven't published the git history because it has my house's GPS
coordinates in it, and because I committed the output files from
which that location can be derived.)
The Rides
I set off on my first ride, to Aldreth, on Sunday the 31st of May
2020. The final ride collected Yelling, on Saturday the 19th of
August 2023.
I did quite a few rides in June and July 2020 - more than one a week.
(I'd read the lockdown rules, and although some of the government
messaging said you should stay near your house, that wasn't in the
legislation. Of course I didn't go into any buildings or anything.)
I'm not much of a morning person, so I often set off after lunch. For
the longer rides I would usually pack a picnic. Almost all of the
rides I did just by myself. There were a handful where I had friends
along:
Dry Drayton, which I collected with Clare, at night. I held my bike
up so the light shone at the village sign, so we could take a photo
of it.
Madingley, Melbourn and Meldreth, which was quite an expedition with
my friend Ben. We went out as far as Royston and nearby Barley (both
outside my radius and not on my list) mostly just so that my project
would have visited Hertfordshire.
The Hemingfords, where I had my friend Matthew along, and we had a
very nice pub lunch.
Girton and Wilburton, where I visited friends. Indeed, I stopped off
in Wilburton on one or two other occasions.
And, of course, Yelling, for which there were four of us, again with
a nice lunch (in Eltisley).
I had relatively little mechanical trouble. My worst ride for this
was Exning: I got three punctures that day. Luckily the last one was
close to home.
I often would stop to take lots of photos en-route. My mum in
particular appreciated all the pretty pictures.
Rules
I decided on these rules:
I would cycle to each destination, in order, and it would count as
collected if I rode both there and back. I allowed collecting
multiple villages in the same outing, provided I did them in the
right order. (And obviously I was allowed to pass through places out
of order, without counting them.)
I tried to get a picture of the village sign, where there was one.
Failing that, I got a picture of something in the village with the
village's name on it. I think the only one I didn't manage this for
was Westley Bottom; I had to make do with the word "Westley" on some
railway level crossing equipment. In Barway I had to make do with a
planning application, stuck to a pole.
I tried not to enter and leave a village by the same road, if
possible.
Edge cases
I had to make some decisions:
I decided that I would consider the project complete if I visited
everywhere whose centre was within my radius. But the centre of a
settlement is rather hard to define. I needed a hard criterion for my
OpenStreetMap data mining: a place counted if there was any node, way
or relation, with the relevant place tag, any part of which was
within my ambit. That included some places that probably oughtn't to
have counted, but, fine.
I also decided that I wouldn't visit suburbs of Cambridge, separately
from Cambridge itself. I don't consider them separate settlements, at
least, not if they're conurbated with Cambridge. So that excluded
Trumpington, for example. But I decided that Girton and Fen Ditton
were (just) separable. Although the place where I consider Girton and
Cambridge to nearly touch, is administratively well inside Girton, I
chose to look at land use (on the ground, and in OSM data), rather
than administrative boundaries.
But I did visit both Histon and Impington, and all each of the
Shelfords and Stapleford, as separate entries in my list. Mostly
because otherwise I'd have to decide whether to skip (say) Impington,
or Histon. Whereas skipping suburbs of Cambridge in favour of
Cambridge itself was an easy decision, and it also got rid of a bunch
of what would have been quite short, boring, urban expeditions.
I sorted all the Greats and Littles under G and L, rather than (say)
"Shelford, Great", which seemed like it would be cheating because
then I would be able to do "Shelford, Great" and "Shelford, Little"
in one go.
Northstowe turned from mostly a building site into something that was
arguably a settlement, during my project. It wasn't included in the
output of my original data mining. Of course it's conurbated with
Oakington - but happily, Northstowe inserts right before Oakington in
the alphabetical list, so I decided to add it, visiting both the old
and new in the same day.
There are a bunch of other minor edge cases. Some villages have an
outlying hamlet. Mostly I included these. There are some individual
farms, which I generally didn't count.
Some stats
I visited 150 villages plus the Lords Bridge radio observatory. The
project took 3 years and 3 months to complete.
There were 96 rides, totalling about 4900km. So my mean distance was
around 51km. The median distance per ride was a little higher, at
around 52 km, and the median duration (including stoppages) was about
2h40. The total duration, if you add them all up, including
stoppages, was about 275h, giving a mean speed including photo stops,
lunches and all, of 18kph.
The longest ride was 89.8km, collecting Scotland Farm, Shepreth, and
Six Mile Bottom, so riding across the Cam valley. The shortest ride
was 7.9km, collecting Cambridge (obviously); and I think that's the
only one I did on my Brompton. The rest were all on my trusty Thorn
Audax.
My fastest ride (ranking by distance divided by time spent in motion)
was to collect Haddenham, where I covered 46.3km in 1h39, giving an
average speed in motion of 28.0kph.
The most I collected in one day was 5 places: West Wickham, West
Wratting, Westley Bottom, Westley Waterless, and Weston Colville.
That was the day of the Wests. (There's only one East: East Hatley.)
Map
Here is a pretty picture of all of my tracklogs:
[alphabetical-villages-tracklogs]
Edited 2023-08-25 01:32 BST to correct a slip.
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(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-25 05:21 pm (UTC)
jack: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jack
Oh cool! Congratulations on getting through, thank you for describing
it!
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(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-25 09:24 pm (UTC)
lnr: (Default)
From: [personal profile] lnr
<3 Fab to see you finish them!
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