Barney journeys back to his Cornish roots to bring you this West Country classic ride.

WORDS & PHO4TOGRAPHY BARNEY MARSH

Long has my family boasted of ties to Cornwall, despite our predominantly Northern roots. My mother and grandmother were born there. My aunt lives there. My mother, sister and niece are named after villages there. We regularly used to holiday in the deepest, most inaccessible parts of the county. My childhood memories of Cornwall, then, are of massively steep hills, dropping down to dark, shadowy coves. Of pebbled beaches surrounded by massive, imposing rocky edifices. Of scraping bare feet on barnacles. Of watery ‘cola’, toweringly high hedges, and an almost visceral sense of claustrophobia. No wide open places here, no expansive views. I never remember feeling more inside a place, almost under it, as I did in Cornwall.

And when I grew older, and found a calling of sorts on two wheels, I never really considered the place worthy of visiting to ride. I’d fallen in love with the wide open, with majestic vistas, with mountains and sky, and above all, with space. And as cosy and comforting as my childhood experiences of Cornwall were, ‘space’ was not high on the things I felt the place possessed.

But, of course, there comes a time when preconceptions need to be challenged. There is a keen riding community in the far, far south west of our beleaguered isle, and they must perforce have some fun stuff to ride, mustn’t they? Well, it turns out, of course, that they do.

Bissoe hot right now.

And when I visited, boy was it warm. Cornwall is generally supposed to be warmer than other parts of the country, true, but the heat was almost more than my poor Yorkshireattenuated body could handle, especially having spent the previous night sleeping in the back of a van. At what felt like gas mark 7.

So I was a clammy, flaky mess when I rolled into Bissoe. Even more of a clammy, flaky mess than usual, anyway. Bissoe doesn’t boast much – a former tin mine and arsenic extraction facility and a couple of small businesses. One of these, though, is Bike Chain Bissoe, a café and bike hire place located on the Coast to Coast trail that joins Portreath on the north coast to Devoran on the south, using old mining trails. These old trails criss-cross the county, and do a grand job of getting people out into the middle of the countryside with nary a car to be seen. No, they’re not the most technical of trails, at all – but they provide marvellous conduits to the more fun bits and pieces. And it was here, loaded with maps, water and an allimportant stash of hot cross buns – that my ride began.