CYCLING LONDON TO PARIS
THE CLASSIC DOVER/CALAIS ROUTE AND THE AVENUE VERTE
by Mike Wells
JUNIPER HOUSE, MURLEY MOSS,
OXENHOLME ROAD, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA9 7RL
About the Author
Mike Wells is an author of both walking and cycling guides. He has been walking long-distance footpaths for 25 years, after a holiday in New Zealand gave him the long-distance walking bug. Within a few years, he had walked the major British trails, enjoying their range of terrain from straightforward downland tracks through to upland paths and challenging mountain routes. He then ventured into France, walking sections of the Grande Randonnée network (including the GR5 through the Alps from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean), and Italy to explore the Dolomites Alta Via routes. Further afield, he has walked in Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway and Patagonia.
Mike has also been a keen cyclist for over 20 years. After completing various UK Sustrans routes, such as Lôn Las Cymru in Wales and the C2C route across northern England, he then moved on to cycling long-distance routes in continental Europe and beyond. These include cycling both the Camino and Ruta de la Plata to Santiago de la Compostela, a traverse of Cuba from end to end, a circumnavigation of Iceland and a trip across Lapland to the North Cape. He has written a series of cycling guides for Cicerone following the great rivers of Europe.
Other Cicerone guides by the author
The Adlerweg
The Rhine Cycle Route
The Moselle Cycle Route
The Danube Cycleway Volume 1
The Danube Cycleway Volume 2
The River Rhone Cycle Route
The Loire Cycle Route
© Mike Wells 2018
First edition 2018
ISBN: 978 1 85284 914 6
Printed in China on behalf of Latitude Press Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All photographs are by the author unless otherwise stated.
© Crown copyright 2018 OS PU100012932.
Contains OpenStreetMap.org data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. NASA relief data courtesy of ESRI.
Updates to this Guide
While every effort is made by our authors to ensure the accuracy of guidebooks as they go to print, changes can occur during the lifetime of an edition. Any updates that we know of for this guide will be on the Cicerone website (www.cicerone.co.uk/914/updates), so please check before planning your trip. We also advise that you check information about such things as transport, accommodation and shops locally. Even rights of way can be altered over time.
The route maps in this guide are derived from publicly available data, databases and crowd-sourced data. As such they have not been through the detailed checking procedures that would generally be applied to a published map from an official mapping agency, although naturally we have reviewed them closely in the light of local knowledge as part of the preparation of this guide.
We are always grateful for information about any discrepancies between a guidebook and the facts on the ground, sent by email to [email protected] or by post to Cicerone, Juniper House, Murley Moss, Oxenholme Road, Kendal, LA9 7RL, United Kingdom.
Register your book: To sign up to receive free updates, special offers and GPX files where available, register your book at www.cicerone.co.uk.
Front cover: Two iconic landmarks; the London Eye, start point of Avenue Verte (Ave Verte Stage 1) and the Eiffel Tower, finish point of the classic route (classic route Stage 11)
CONTENTS
CLASSIC ROUTE (VIA DOVER–CALAIS)
Stage 1 Tower of London to Rochester
Stage 2 Rochester to Ashford
Stage 3 Ashford to Dover
Stage 4 Calais to Desvres
Stage 5 Desvres to Hesdin
Stage 6 Hesdin to Abbeville
Stage 7 Abbeville to Amiens
Stage 8 Amiens to Beauvais
Stage 9 Beauvais to Chantilly
Stage 10 Chantilly to St Denis market
Stage 11 St Denis market to Eiffel Tower
AVENUE VERTE (VIA NEWHAVEN–DIEPPE)
Stage 1 London Eye to Redhill