Note: most of the images illustrating this post are photos of projections of the 35mm slides that I took during the tour. Their quality is variable, to put it kindly...

Time flies. It hardly seems like 30 years since I set off on my first proper cycle tour. In recent years, I’ve cycled the length of Great Britain, Ireland and Portugal, and am embarking on another end to end, across France, later this month. But it started with a 325 mile tour of the West Country in June 1990, with my university friend Richard Attewell.

Looking back, I’m struck by how different cycle touring was 30 years ago, just as the internet was poised to change our lives. (There was much talk of the ‘information superhighway’ in 1995, but I didn’t get online until the following year.) We didn’t own or carry mobile phones, and used phone boxes to arrange somewhere to stay once we decided how far we’d get. We navigated using paper Ordnance Survey maps attached to my handlebars using a brilliant map holder designed and sold by Chris Juden from the CTC (now known as Cycling UK). We weren’t complete touring novices: we’d enjoyed a weekend ride around the Isle of Wight two years earlier, and I’d cycled from Wiltshire to my parents’ house in Cardiff the year before.

I plotted that adventure during the bleak winter evenings of January 1995, with those Ordnance Survey maps spread across the floor of my home in Ashton Keynes, Wiltshire, which was our departure point in June, as seen above.