Wiltshire neurodiverse students on John O'Groats to Lands End cycle
A group of neurodiverse students are taking on a 1,000 mile (1,609km) cycle challenge from John O'Groats to Lands End. The 12 students, aged between 14 and 16, are from Appleford School in Shrewton, Wiltshire. They live with dyslexia, ADHD, autism or other difficulties and want to complete the challenge to prove they can achieve "extraordinary things".They will be leaving John O'Groats in Scotland on 19 June and aim to cycle between 70 (112km) and 80 miles (128km) a day back down to their final destination in Cornwall.Mark Ball, the school's head of outdoor education, said: "I think something on this sort of scale will remain with these students for a long time, if not for life."
Mr Ball said many of the students faced "significant education struggles" before they began learning at Appleford. However, he added many of them "thrive" outside, with some students having completed previous long distance physical challenges.
Student Freya suggested the challenge to Mr Ball following a cycle from Devizes to Westminster. She said she "loves" a challenge and was most looking forward to getting a suntan on the journey next month. Jess, who is also taking part, said she had not cycled since she was a child. "Since this has started, we go out as a school most weekends... I cycle to school now which is about 20 miles (32km)," she said. "We're going to cycle, stop at a hostel and then carry on in the morning on repeat for 14 days," Jess added.
Mr Ball credited the "fantastic" students for their hard work so far. "Their enthusiasm and determination is second to none," he said. "To be able to have the support of the school, to organise something like this and to give the students the opportunity, I'm very, very grateful for that."
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Check out this recent BBC Travel story: Scotland's most remote railway adventure.) Most picturesque: St Ives Bay Line The most picturesque of all was probably just the short journey from St Erth in Cornwall to St Ives, which is a kind of [an] old fishing village that all these artists went to live in. You go along this clifftop with a beach down below and all the waves crashing on the shore. You must sit on the right going in and on the left going out if you want to get the perfect view. Most fun: Craven Arms to Llanelli on Transport for Wales Going through the middle of Wales, it's called the Transport for Wales train line. You'd be [starting] in a place called Craven Arms and [going] as far as a place called Llanelli. This journey took about three hours, but it was on a Saturday evening, and people had brought their beer or wine and their snacks. I kind of sat, and I watched as people began singing some Welsh songs. [It became] a singalong! More like this:• The return of Mexico's famous Tequila Express train• The Baltic Express: Central Europe's new hop-on hop-off train• How the bullet train transformed Japan It wasn't like people were getting drunk; it was just kind of jolly. It was only one carriage for this train, so there was a small little party going on as the darkness fell, with the green hills around us on a very remote line. It was a very happy experience. Best for history buffs: New Romney to Dungeness on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway There are lots of these heritage lines; they're kind of like the old steam trains. You have in Britain 170 [of them], which is unbelievable, heritage lines covering around 600 miles. These are special little lines that might only just be open at the weekend. One of them went from a place called Hythe in Kent to Dungeness, which is where there's a former nuclear power station. It's tiny, and they have what are called 'narrow gauges'. So it's not the big, wide train, like a normal train. It's narrow … a 1-ft or 2-ft-wide track. It was created by an eccentric aristocrat who had a lot of money and decided to build a little toy train just for himself. It was like a little baby train. So, that was maybe a historic train line that I wouldn't have discovered if not for the book. Best for rail enthusiasts: North Yorkshire Moors Railway There was one place called the North Yorkshire Moors Railway that is up in the north-east, near the Stockton and Darlington, where I began the whole journey. In the 1960s, when motorways came along [in the UK], it began to basically make railways not so important. There was a massive cutback in railways in Britain. There were as many as 23,000 miles of train tracks, and now there are only 10,000 miles of train routes. But on one of these routes on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, rail enthusiasts reopened it in the 1970s. 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