London to the Lakes on NCN6: Day 6 (Tour 3) – Salford, Bury, Blackburn, Preston, Garstang

I had set out to ride the National Cycle Network Route 6 – London to the Lakes route. Because, at that time in Spring 2025), I was having a course of vaccinations for travel I kept having to return home so I did not have time to do the whole route in 1 go. My first attempt reached Nottingham in 3 days. Then I rode from Nottingham to Manchester in 2 days (most of which I repeated in December 2025 to replace footage which I had lost). This time, beginning on May 1st, I was aiming to complete the route as final practice before going to Europe.

This was an enjoyable and interesting ride but it has been a hard video to make; there were no really spectacular sites¹ or events to focus on and the ride, although pleasant, was very bitty. It’s easier to produce a video when a ride has a clear theme but for this ride the theme was really just passing through old industrial and urban areas as pleasantly as possible. I’ve tried to show how that was done; the method involved seemingly innumerable short lengths of paths on railways, canals, nature reserves, parks and riversides, interspersed with some normal roads and town-centre cyclepaths. If the transitions in the video leave your head spinning then I have given an accurate representation of what the ride was like!

One issue with this ride is that Route 6 stops just after Blackburn and doesn’t reappear until the middle of Preston. It looks as though SUSTRANS may have intended to continue West along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal before turning North. Cycle.travel, however, suggests a route which goes Northwards after Blackburn and then joins the path beside the Ribble (NCN622) and this was the route I followed. My biggest reservation about this was a section of the A59 which is necessary for it’s crossing over the Ribble. This was possible thanks to a shared use sidewalk which is not on the NCN and not shown on the OS maps as a cycleway. It is however shown on cycle-maps derived from Open Streetmap., but I have issues trusting new-fangled things like OSM! However, it worked.

On tour 2 of this ride I had planned to use a campsite at Ramsbottom if I had not been ill. For this tour I had no idea how far I would get in the first day on a route with so many unpredictable sections. That’s why I left the job of finding a campsite until I reached Preston. There were several sites around but many take only caravans, others were far from the route and in the end there was only one site in range, and even that was a stretch. It proved to be a very pleasant site – mainly of long-stay caravans which were mostly empty when I was there. There was a cooking area with a kettle and lighting which made for an easy evening for me!

Thanks for watching the video and for reading these ramblings too!

Note 1: No spectacular sites! The people that built this route might take issue with that comment. What about the bridges? There are 6 or 7 spectacular railway viaducts and one aqueduct. There are historic canals and railway lines. In fact there are so many of them that they become ordinary on this route. And, of course, they seem less spectacular when you look down from them rather than up at them, and some of them are so substantial you don’t realize you’re up in the air at all.