To the edge of France: Perriers-sur-Argelles to Dieppe

March 23, 2015

IT's a nice place, Dieppe. Many port cities are a mess, wrecked by bombing, rebuilt in brutal concrete and subsequently sacrificed to trucks and to cars of tired tourists and their bickering children.

Not so, Dieppe. The port is to one side of town and the harbour merits a second coffee and half an hour of reading the paper. And up on the hill is a sailors' chapel, a place to pray for those who went down to sea in ships but never returned.

I could have done with someone praying for me last night. I slept fully dressed, to the extent of putting arm-warmers over my feet. And in the morning I found why it had been so cold: the tent was crisp with frozen dew and the field was white with frost.

I took my time getting started. It was cold enough that the gas wasn't sure it wanted to come out of the bottle for anything as trivial as making coffee. And by the time I'd packed and begun wheeling my bike from my night spot, a farmer in a big blue tractor was heading up the field in the opposite direction.

I've never yet had anyone query what I was doing in his field at such an improbable hour but this time, I feared, would be my first. Instead, he just stared at me in that expressionless rural French way and grunted on by with his spraying arms spread like a ship's wash and I carried on down to the road in the bright, crisp sunshine you get only on cold mornings.

I can only assume that this invites you to a bike route so steep that you'll need a ladder

It's not so often you see this sign in France, either

I bowled along, no evident damage from a difficult night, through charming villages where women in cardigans and aprons hurried home with baguettes under their arm. St-Saens - "famous for its cabbage" - came and went and small woods followed in succession.

A local club ride emerged from a rural road to my left and swept by with waves and encouragement. I tagged on behind, necessarily more breathless than the rest, and found the energy to ask for the Paris-London bike path.

To tell you the truth, it was only last winter that I knew there was one. Then, at the weekend of cycle-travellers' tales that we go to in Paris each January, a family recounted how it had cycled and roller-skated along the path from the centre of Paris to the shadow of Big Ben in London.

I didn't spend long on the Paris-London bikeway, but long enough to admire its smooth quality

My hope was that it would take me all the way to the port and the ferry to Newhaven. And that may one day be the plan but for the moment this magnificently smooth path ends on the outskirts, stutters into new life as an unsurfaced track where anglers sit and stare morosely into water that refuses to yield fish, and then gives up for good on the approach to the usual supermarkets that always make you feel the world is a wonderful place.

Great name for a bar: "Better here than across the road"

There were two other cyclists at the port, riding in shorts and with improbably little luggage. They were scouting out a route for a club in Britain for later in the year. They didn't seem as happy as they might have hoped.

"I've had a hard day today," the man said, his face drawn, his legs English-white with a bandage round one knee. And that was about all the conversation for which he had the energy. But then I suppose we've all had days like that...

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