‘It’s all uphill from here, lads,’ a taxi driver at Oxenholme Lake District railway station said when he spied me and my chum Colin clipping in to our road bikes in the car park.
A quip? More a statement of fact. The Lake District, after all, is distinctly lumpy.
Though ‘very uphill’ would have been more accurate for us, as we had arrived via an Avanti Pendolino from London Euston to conquer one of the most outrageous lumps of all