The road from Northwich to Chester is today probably very much as it was 100 years ago when Carl Stearns Clancy and his motorcycle partner Walter Randell Storey rode it on their Hendersons. In his dispatch to his magazine in New York, he wrote about the "trim patchwork of fields . . . all harmonized to make us feel we had discovered Mother Goose at last".
Of the many things the English do well, continuity is perhaps the most telling. They don’t like too much change.
The land around Chester is fertile and has fed its inhabitants for millennia. Today, zipping along there is abundant evidence of cattle and sheep living in neat, well tended fields.
Everywhere Clancy looked in Chester itself was worth a photograph, he thought. His photo of St Werburgh Street is one of the few clearly reproduced in Dr Gregory Frazier's book, Motorcycle Adventurer . It is today as it was when Clancy saw it in 1912.
We're standing there – Geoff Hill, Gary Walker and me – on the exact spot from where Clancy took his photo and marvelling at how the scene is almost precisely the same 100 years on, when Oliver Stirling pauses on his way to work, a hurried coffee in one hand.
"You're not going around the block then, are you?" he says, eyeing our heavily laden BMW Adventures. "Aye no," Geoff says, "only around the world."And then he explains about Clancy. . .
But before he can finish, Oliver is there: Ah Clancy, yes, read about him, first bloke around the world!
My God! We have met someone who has heard of Clancy!
We park our bikes outside a café a little farther up Eastgate Street and they draw passers by. Tony Charnock is in a desperate hurry but can't quite tear himself away. There's plenty of good roads in Mongolia, he says. Oh yes, plenty! "I've a house there. Off there now. . ."
Woah, back up there a mo, Tony. A house in Mongolia? Yes, Ulan Bator, he says; off there now, he says, catching a flight (in what seems like about 10 minutes time).
Tony, aged 55, is an expert in metals, a skill that has taken him to all sorts of frontier places. He married in Mongolia and enthuses about the Mongol Rally, an annual affair of madness in which participants must drive a car from Britain to Mongolia for charity, leaving the car behind when you’re done.
The rally is clearly Tony’s type of thing. Eventually he scurries off up the street.
“You wouldn’t get that if we were driving a Toyota Corolla,” quips Geoff.
Great big fluffy flakes of snow start to tumble down and Chester looks like a Christmas card. All’s well in the world; English eccentrics are thriving and town and country can still look very well betimes.
