Land’s End to John O’Groats

July – August 1990

I rode this tour in 1990 with a friend, accompanied by my wife who drove the support van with my two young sons.

The idea came about during a discussion in a pub after choir practice (“thirsting after righteousness”). I happened to mention that one day I wanted to ride the “end-to-end” and Mick immediately said, “You’re on!”.

We timed our adventure to coincide with school holidays and I persuaded my company to lend us a Renault van on the basis that we would be raising money towards the maintenance of our church organ.

The plan was to drive down to Penzance on the first Saturday and then ride three four-day sections with a rest day between each, and drive back on the last Sunday, making 16 days in all.

I plotted the route using Ordnance Survey quarter-inch maps (that showed principal campsites) and measured the distance between each town or village on the route. Putting all the short distances into a spreadsheet on my BBC Micro computer allowed me to show a daily split at around 70 miles, from which I hunted for campsites as close as possible to each daily limit.

The printout from the spreadsheet gave a detailed route plan on which we marked lunch stops and the name and precise location of each campsite. We all had a copy, which is about as technical as it got, being pre-sat-nav and pre-mobile-phone.

The Plan

Day	Campsite	Miles
Start – Sat 21 Jul	Penzance
Day 1 – Sun 22 Jul	Launceston	71
Day 2 – Mon 23 Jul	Taunton	80
Day 3 – Tue 24 Jul	Monmouth	77
Day 4 – Wed 25 Jul	Shrewsbury	73
Day 5 – Thu 26 Jul	Rest Day
Day 6 – Fri 27 Jul	Ormskirk	74
Day 7 – Sat 28 Jul	Kendal	71
Day 8 – Sun 29 Jul	Hawick	93
Day 9 – Mon 30 Jul	Edinburgh	50
Day 10 – Tue 31 Jul	Rest Day
Day 11 – Wed 1 Aug	Pitlochry	80
Day 12 – Thu 2 Aug	Aviemore	57
Day 13 – Fri 3 Aug	Dornoch	83
Day 14 – Sat 4 Aug	Huna	79
Total		888

The whole route, 888 miles

To download the GPX file for the day, Right-Click the download icon and then select Save Link As…