My best ever British holiday: ‘I’ve travelled further, at greater expense, and had nothing like as much fun’

Five travel writers share their favourite holidays at home, from gravel biking in Scotland and a steam train ride in Yorkshire to rowing all the way from Oxford to London One of my best UK holidays was the week I spent in June 2013 rowing from Oxford to London with two friends, James and Tom. We hired the boat from a company called Thames Skiff Hire that mainly caters to people recreating the fictional adventure of the characters in Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat . Our boat – Ewen – was a 26ft, 130-year-old mahogany skiff. It came with two pairs of oars, a rudder, a cooking stove, a boat hook, and iron hoops that supported a green canvas roof over the hull. After an hour’s briefing at a slipway by Donnington Bridge, we were off, piloting the boat 80 or so miles downstream to London. That June was blustery and wet. The first day was deceptively fine, but on the second, we got soaked on the stretch of water between Abingdon and Day’s Lock, and came close to packing it in. Even with the current helping us, the miles ahead seemed like folly. It’s not generally remembered that Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat ends in disappointment and recrimination as the companions abandon their sodden skiff at The Swan in Pangbourne. But we kept going. And, over the subsequent days, the weather improved, we got better at rowing and it turned into an extraordinary and memorable adventure. Looking back, the trip appears to have been packed with incident. We visited lovely riverside pubs, brewed tea on uninhabited midstream islands, and popped into a meditation centre run by an ascetic Hindu sect.

We passed Medmenham Abbey, the headquarters of Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club ; Monkey Island, where the doomed romance in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier unfolds; and we moored for lunch one day at the luxurious faux-gothic hotel Oakley Court , immortalised as Frank-N-Furter’s castle in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Logistically, the trip was never entirely straightforward. Although the Thames skiff was designed to be slept in, it was not big enough for three and the rules around wild camping made things more complicated. I also remember feeling a certain anxiety when mooring the boat to go to the pub. We had been instructed to hammer iron spikes into the riverbank and fasten the skiff to them. But it always seemed weird to walk away from this precious antique and assume it would be there when we got back. Paradoxically, the minor hardships of the trip probably made it more relaxing than a holiday whose explicit goal is relaxation. The overall pace was slow and reflective. And even within commuting distance of our own beds, it always felt as if we were very far from the daily grind. There were stretches of extraordinary tranquillity, deep silences, wonderful birdlife; I still remember the flash of a kingfisher in the willows outside Abingdon. Other river-users took kindly to us and our venerable skiff. One evening, we were invited for drinks onboard a beautiful narrowboat whose owner we met as we were queueing at a lock. Our final destination was Walton-on-Thames, but by the time we reached it, we were enjoying ourselves so much we pushed on to Hampton Court before turning the boat round and heading back upriver to return the skiff.

It’s a trip I’ve always meant to repeat. I’ve travelled much further, at much greater expense and had nothing like as much fun. Marcel Theroux View image in fullscreen Gravel biking in the Trossachs “ Gravelfoyle, ” my cycle-mad partner, Gary, replied instantly when asked where he’d like to go for his birthday. Gravelfoyle is the nickname of the village of Aberfoyle – gateway to the Trossachs, about 50 miles north-west of Edinburgh, and even closer to Glasgow – which claims to have “the UK’s finest gravel riding” and the waymarked trails to prove it. Growing up in Edinburgh, I spent many happy summers camping in the Cairngorms and roving around Perthshire. This instilled a habit of going north rather than west, so I didn’t know Scotland’s first national park, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs , as well. Off we set, bikes strapped to the car, passing Falkirk’s Kelpies, whose steel heads reared up alongside the M9, imposing Stirling Castle and the Mordor-esque Wallace Monument in the distance. The drive was only 75 minutes, but we stopped en route at The Smiddy farm shop in Blair Drummond (close to the safari park my brother and I went to as kids) to pick up cheese and chorizo scotch eggs, “the best thing we sell”, according to the butcher. I’d booked a snug-looking glamping pod on the Cardross Estate near Port of Menteith, not far from Aberfoyle. Tucked away down a single-track road flanked by farmland, where kites soar overhead, it’s a slick operation, from the easy self-check-in to the trolleys for wheeling stuff from the car park. Inside the curved, wooden pod was a sofa, pull-down double bed, shower and fridge, with picture windows framing fields speckled with cattle and crops rolling towards Ben Lomond.

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