Lands End to John O'Groats

A journey in more ways than one

Route

The CTC produce an End to End pack that, among other things, contains a number of routes depending on how fast you want to be and what type of accommodation you want to use.

My route was based on the B&B route from the CTC with necessary alterations to get me to my rest stop in Marple.

The route sheet that the CTC provide is pretty good. I’m sure most of the getting lost that I did was down to my poor map reading and not paying attention rather than a poor route description.

Mostly the route avoided main roads, it used a considerable number of unclassified roads & provided a good deal of very pleasant cycling in some lovely countryside.

Given that the CTC provide such comprehensive route information, I would think that in most cases, using that as a basis would be considerably easier than starting from scratch. It certainly worked for me.

Daily Routes (Maps are not the same scale). Click a thumb for the big image.
Day One
Day
One 		Day Two
Day
Two 		Day Three
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Three 		Day Four
Day
Four 		Day Five
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Five
Day Six
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Six 		Day Seven
Day
Seven 		Day Eight
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Eight 		Day Nine
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Nine 		Day Ten
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Ten 		Day Eleven
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Eleven 		Day Twelve
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Twelve 		Day Thirteen
Day
Thirteen
Maps (c) Microsoft Corporation

Maps

It’s a long way to go without getting lost at least a few times. I took several unintentional detours. Had I relied on just the route sheet I’d have been in all kinds of bother.

Big maps take up a lot of room, tiny maps don’t have enough information. A compromise needs to be reached.

I decided on a 4 miles to the inch road atlas, removed the pages I needed and kept them in plastic folders. It worked well, while I managed to go off route once or twice, I was always able to get back on track.

While I’m on the subject of navigation. I found that a compass mounted on the handlebars (or somewhere convenient) was extremely useful (“South, why am I heading South?” Stop to look at map, turn round!).

This page last updated on 17/08/2002