CycleTouring & Campaigning, April 2000

Let's face it, some people need a reason to ride; the views may well be breath-taking, the lanes peaceful and undulating; the tea shops cheap and welcoming; the smiling pedallers therein full of the joys of all things cycling. Whatever combination of cycling perfection you conjure it won't be enough for some.

Greensted Church, Essex; which century is the Crusader's grave?

These determined individualists won't put a leg over their machine without a specific reason. For them, and indeed for large numbers of those happy to ride for the hell of it, was invented the TEA.

The Touring Explorers Award was first inaugurated in the early eighties. The intention was to give riders a reason, or an excuse, to go to places that they might not otherwise have visited.

With the help of members from all over the country, six places of interest were selected in each county, not to mention several offshore islands, which could be visited at any time of the day or night. To prove that the place had been visited, an answer had to be found to a simple question.

Once all six answers had been found in a county, you were eligible for the appropriate County Certificate. You could then accumulate County Certificates until you were eligible for an Area Certificate. And so forth until the National Award was achieved - undoubtedly a tremendous and rewarding achievement.

Westmill, Herts; what is the third word of the inscription?

But for one reason or another the Award fell into decline and to all intents and purposes was forgotten until West Surrey DA member Geoff Clarke announced at the CTC's AGM that he'd completed the Award, received very little recognition and to paraphrase "did anyone give a fig about it anymore?"

A vote was cast and it was proposed to resuscitate the scheme, (albeit with a change of name) quite simply because it was too good to just throw away. Councillor Peter Jackson agreed to take on the project.

The British Cycle Quest is identical in most ways to the TEA. There are still six checkpoints per county, but of course many boundaries have changed and several counties have disappeared off the map. In BCQ there are 67 counties and offshore islands which means there are 402 places to be visited. Co-ordinator Peter Jackson managed to find local CTC members to check clues and find new ones where necessary. The process took 18 months, not only were some counties no longer in existence some clues had been destroyed and others, for example in churches, were under lock and key part of the day.

Great Amwell, Herts; what is the first line of the dedication?

The beauty of the scheme is its simplicity it is a challenge that anybody can tackle at any time. There is no time limit, no minimum number of miles you need to cycle to obtain an answer. All you need to do is remember that the BCQ is there and just go seek out a few locations whenever the mood takes you. Doubtless, someone sometime will take the challenge full on and visit every location within a year and we look forward to hearing about it. Doubtless also, members will aim to visit all the checkpoints in a county in a single ride (it's already been done for Surrey - the route guide will be available shortly from the Touring Dept. at HQ) and it is hoped that route sheets for many other counties will be sent to HQ for other members to make use of.

Ready for you to request from HQ now are county cards and a wall chart. There is a minimal charge for these items though an information pack is available free from HQ when you send an SAE (19p stamp), with full details, including information about how those of you with accumulated TEA answers can turn them into BCQ answers. Note: this is the same information as published on this website.

Geoff Clarke completed his TEA in 1996. Here he recounts his experiences. "In 1982 1 asked my 11 year old son Roger if he would like to have a few days cycling at Easter and if so where would he like to go. We had always had a beach cycling holiday at Ventnor so he immediately chose the other half of the Isle of Wight. At almost the same time the CTC announced the Tourist Explorers Award scheme and this struck me as just the extra interest needed to encourage him on his way. As it happened, although the scheme was far from ready, we obtained sheets for Surrey, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight and set off on a five day trip of memory (for me) and exploration (for him). The tour was a great success and we had barely returned home when Roger was asking whether we could go the following year and if so could we do the Mendips?

Geoff Clarke at John O'Groats

This was the start of a seven year series of rides together in southern England, each time with a separate set of TEA sheets. Mostly we went at Easter and we finished our Area Award in three years with a blistering week in Kent; two years later we battled over Exmoor in driving snow, an experience neither of us will forget. With the Regional Award achieved in 1988 and Roger's departure for university our joint riding finished. I had seen the TEA as a means to an end and Roger was now very definitely part of the cycling world. At the same time I knew that only ten of us had got the Regional Award and whilst I had never envisaged getting the National Award it seemed a pity to give up when so far advanced.

Starting again in 1990 , I tackled the other regions, with a long weekend or a full holiday each year, sometimes both, culminating in 1996 with four separate trips to Scotland (all new ground to me), one to Yorkshire and one to the Peaks, with the last question of all to be answered in the middle of Nottingham. There was a sense of achievement but also a sense of relief at being able from now on to cycle where I liked without the necessity to think TEA all the time.

So what of the questions themselves? Our very first tour had shown how good or bad they could be; we were very impressed with those in Surrey and Hampshire but one Isle of Wight question had been partially destroyed by vandals and another the answer could only be obtained when open. This pattern was to be repeated and after fourteen years some questions were quite unanswerable. Others, however, were superb and the two that stick in my timid were one at the Claerwen Dam in Mid Wales and one in Glen Lonan at the back of Oban. Both required a ride of several miles in glorious scenery and to me that is the essence of cycle exploration. The TEA, whatever the standard of questions, provided this on a grand scale, for planning a route to get from A to B frequently took me into areas I would not normally have thought of touring in.

The TEA certainly opened my eyes to other possibilities and though it may now be dead the British Cycle Quest (BCQ) will, I hope, give as much pleasure to other cyclists as its predecessor did to me".

Geoff Clarke

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