Life on the back roads

Not to be outdone by the BBC vogue for sending the more articulate of comedians and comedy actors on the documentary trail (Michael Palin, Victoria Wood, Billy Connolly, Griff Rhys Jones), ITV has sent Robbie Coltrane off on yet another celebrity road-doc series - B-Road Britain (Wednesday 9pm).

We can all do this. I'm not talking about TV documentaries - although those too are no longer beyond the powers of ordinary mortals - but travelling the bye-ways. In the early 80s, before we had children, Gill and I decided we wanted to see England so we put together a tour with one underpinning rule: no motorways.

Try it. If you can discipline yourself to avoid the shortest, quickest route, the journey becomes the experience and it's amazing the places you find. Yes, you can make plans, but if there is no urgency to get anywhere fast, you can break those plans too. In fact, that's part of the fun.

In those days we used the Egon Ronay Good Pub Guide to help us choose overnight stops but now it's probably easier to use this web-based guide. We had used the same principle on touring holidays in France, guided by Arthur Eperon's book, Traveller's France and the guides produced by Richard Binns.

I think it was Eperon's publication of Traveller's Britain that influenced our English tour. In this case, the holiday was confined to places south of our home at that time, near Huddersfield.

I'm interested in the distant past so the trip included a lot of stone circles and burial mounds plus chalk drawings such as the Cerne Abbas Giant.

I've been wondering if I was fresh to these shores what some of the "must sees" (outside London)I might include in a round England trip today. Here is a list of 10:

1. Stonehenge
2. Portsmouth Dockyard and HMS Victory
3. Ironbridge
4. Lake District (favourite spots: Grasmere with Wordsworth's house and the Langdales plus a walk up Helvellyn)
5. The Cotswolds
6. Whitby
7. Hadrian's Wall
8. York
9. Lyme Regis
10.Canterbury