Motorcycle Escapes from Birmingham and the Midlands

About this book

Out of ideas? Never out of roads.

If you ride a motorbike around Birmingham, you know how it goes. You love the machine, you love being out on it — but after a while the same old routes start to blur into one, and "where shall I go this weekend?" becomes the question that quietly keeps the bike in the garage.

Motorcycle Escapes from Birmingham and the Midlands is the answer to that question, 173 times over.

This is a guidebook of day-trip destinations you can ride to from the West Midlands, put together by a rider who got bored of the same three loops and went looking for better ones. Nowhere else in Britain has this range inside ninety minutes in every direction: the Industrial Revolution's own back yard pressed up against some of the emptiest riding in England. You can stand on the Iron Bridge and be up on the Long Mynd within the hour; spend a morning in a Stoke bottle kiln and the afternoon on a gritstone edge above Leek.

Spread across twenty-seven regions — the Black Country and the city's southern hills, Worcestershire and the Malverns, Herefordshire and the Wye, Shropshire out to Ludlow and the Marches, Cannock Chase and the Staffordshire moorlands, the Potteries, south Derbyshire and the Derwent mills, Charnwood and Bosworth, Warwickshire's castles and Arden lanes, and the north Cotswolds — it gives you somewhere worth riding to and, often, a genuinely good road to get there on.

Inside you'll find the set-pieces and the wonderfully obscure: Ludlow, Kenilworth, Warwick and Stokesay castles, Kilpeck's Norman carving and a black-and-white village market hall, Thor's Cave and the Roaches, Cromford Mill where the factory system was invented, the stepping stones at Dovedale, a cave-house village at Kinver Edge, a folly castle on Mow Cop, a hillclimb course still in use, the twelve-acre crater left when an underground wartime bomb dump went up, the National Motorcycle Museum and the Triumph factory — and the cafés and inns where you'll want to end the day.

What's inside

• 173 destinations grouped into 27 regional chapters — each a self-contained day out
• A colour locator map for every chapter, with numbered stops so you can string several together into a proper ride
• Practical details — parking, opening times, admission, and the rider-critical catches: gravel that eats a sidestand, cattle grids, toll bridges that want coins, and the days a place simply doesn't open
• A colour illustration for every landmark, and a different classic motorcycle opening every chapter
• Honest, no-nonsense write-ups — what the place is, why it's worth the ride, and what to expect when you arrive
• One local worry settled in a line: Birmingham's Clean Air Zone covers only the ring inside the A4540 Middleway, motorcycles are exempt outright, and nothing in this book sits inside it

Who it's for

Riders based in Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, Solihull, Worcester and anywhere along that ring who want fresh destinations without a fortnight of research. Weekend explorers, ride-out organisers, born-again bikers easing back into it, and anyone who's ever sat on a bike wondering which way to turn out of the drive. Whether you've got a spare afternoon or a whole Sunday, open the book, pick a region, plan a loop and ride.