You may be a doggedly competitive amateur clinically averse to thinking twice before risking your life on a 60+ km/h downhill finish in a sprint for 12th place in some local charity race, or you may just ride your backside off for hours on end in the John O’Groats to Land’s End challenge, oblivious of time limits, instead drawing pure relish from every saddle sore you’re likely to develop in the attempt. Or you may simply enjoy a Sunday loop with your pals from the local club, topped off with a refreshing afterbrew at your favourite pub whose emblem your steadfast bunch proudly wear emblazoned on your cycling jerseys. Much as the aforementioned types of road afficionados differ in their respective articles of faith, there is one point on which all of them concede: the true soul of road cycling is found, and forged, high up there in the mountains: be it the Alps, the Pyrenees, or the Peak District. It is there that cycling’s paramount equation of pleasure increasing proportionately to the increase in suffering gets materialised.

If you instinctively feel like you know what I’m trying to get at here, it’s because you know it for yourself. You’re serious about cycling. And so am I. And then you could legitimately ask me what the point of my coming to Norwich was, entrenching myself deep there in a flat country. Don’t they offer literary residencies in, say, Switzerland? Yeah, well, they do, but those are located in the comparatively flatter parts of the country popularly imagined as a mecca for climbers. That would simply be a shame!

Norfolk, on the other hand, happens to be an interesting example of a region routinely imagined to be uniformly flat, which on closer inspection turns out to be hardly uniform at all. Also, from geomorphological point of view, the soils and the terrain of East Anglia are a more complex story than meets the eye, as I was told by Bob, a local geologist, with passion for nature conservation, who frequently volunteers at Mousehold Heath, itself a distinctly unflat green area of Norwich.

‘Oh yes, the Norfolk Broads’, I said, letting him know that I did my homework.

‘Uhm, yeah, but no. What I mean is the glacial moraine, the Cromer Ridge up north, by the sea’.

So now I have learnt from an authority on the subject that within reach of my slightly rickety hired road machine there existed a stretch of fairly prominent terrain, which came about as an accumulation of sediments displaced by glacial masses pushing inland from the North Sea several thousand years ago. Those of you serious about cycling will already know that other than mountains natural history descriptions of this kind are the surest incentive to lure one out for a spin into an undiscovered territory. And Bob’s lovingly intricate tale of clays, gravels, chalk and shale instantly made me think of Flanders’ rolling hills and steep escarpments, and sent me out for a hunt for some undulation, which I imagined could rekindle some of the magic of the Belgian spring classics in September.

And so around halfway into my stay, I decided to exchange my comfortable work chair in the Dragon Hall’s cottage for the bicycle saddle, and took the– well, not the most direct road to Cromer. From my doorstep I cycled along King’s Street to where it joined the main traffic on Prince of Wales Road, and having crossed a bridge on the river Wensum, I turned left into Riverside Road. From there on it is basically one slightly prolonged half-mile sprint to a roundabout at the foothill of Kett’s Heights. If you’re lucky with the traffic, you’ll be able to enter the roundabout without slowing down and use a good deal of the centrifugal force from your manoeuvre to catapult you up Gurney Road.

Oh yes, Gurney Road, like its perpendicular twin, Kett’s Hill, is where you want to be in Norwich if you are looking for a semblance of the Flandrian steep gradients, requiring you to stand on pedals, a welcome exercise indeed after all those hours spent at the desk. Pummelling over the top of the promontory, I thought back to the insurgents of 1549 who must have a had a perfect vantage point for their siege of the city, towering over it, letting no movement unespied, the hills being in those times a large heath, as Bob pointed out, meaning: free of most of the trees that grow there today.

Before I leave the town for good, I criss-cross via Gilman and Denmark Rds, to climb St Clement’s Hill, another hill (!), a welcome promise of what is to come next. And then, for several lengthy kilometres, as I proceed down Spixworth Road first, then Buxton Road out of town, as I go past the Catton Park and recreation grounds, nothing comes next. Nothing really comes my way in terms of denivelation. It is just as uneventful as what you’d expect from a terrain flattened by – ‘Quaternary glaciation, the earlier one’ I can hear Bob’s voice echo in my head. ‘It had rendered most of East Anglia pretty much flat.’

But then ‘pretty much’ is probably the best way to put it, because the road as I experience it now is certainly not flat, but very slightly undulating, something you come to fully realise about the lay of the land only when you negotiate it using your own muscles.

And a welcome diversion comes soon enough, when you reach the outskirts of Aylsham, where the cycle path (to which you switched after your precarious momentary sojourn on Aylsham Bypass) runs parallel to the track of the narrow-gauge Bure Valley Railway. It is one of Norfolk’s heritage railways, formerly an extension to a now defunct East Norfolk Railway linking Norwich with Cromer. Those were the days! Now the line offers service to tourists on a route between Wroxham and Aylsham, and even if you don’t plan to board any of the tiny cars of its minuscule trains, a visit to the station is well worth your time: a workshop where they restore and repair the historical engines is open, so you can have a look at all the parts, half-assembled undercarriages and bits and ends used in the process.

And just as you’ve left Aylsham following Blickling Road, you’re stopped in your gradual descent to behold the road’s eponymous location, i.e. the Blickling estate, a National Trust-managed historic site. It comprises gardens, a park and the Blickling Hall, a Jacobean stately home built on the ruins of a property once owned by the Boleyn family, which had been the birthplace of the second wife of Henry VIII. The grounds look tempting and certainly possess some fine mews, but your two-wheeled steed is adamant about its preference for the unknown tarmac ahead of you over the most comfortable princely quarters, so there’s really no choice for you, but to follow this call of the road. You only wish you had the tiniest quantity of lube on you, since squeaking of the chain seems to be growing to match your waxing enthusiasm.

For now, just as you’ve left the stately Blickling gardens behind you, there’s a hill after hill: on your way to Itteringham and then out of it. For the better part of the remaining road you switch between pedalling seated and out of the saddle, to keep the momentum. No need to make a Chris Froome on these incidental bumps, which nevertheless can make themselves felt. The glacial terrain at its best. These can’t compete with the muurs of Flanders, those short yet nearly vertical ramps carved in the clayey soil, nevertheless owing to them your ride gets less and less predictable by the minute.

And just before in your run for the coast, you hit the longer and steeper ascents in Sheringham, you let yourself to wander aside a little. At North Barningham, from behind a thick hedgerow there sticks one of those emblematic Norfolk flint-built church steeples. It turns out to belong to one St Peter’s church, a structure from 15^th century. Inside it turns out to be full of well-preserved décor, a non-omnis-moriar to the once mighty Palgrave family of these parts.

Now, as you close in on Sheringham, via Plume Lane, Mill Road, Osier Lane, somewhere before Upper Sheringham you reach the crest of the Cromer Ridge formation. Since the glacier advanced from the north, the moraine is steeper on the side of its impact with the land mass, which means that your last kilometres toward the coast are a relatively quick job. About time to move fast and finally grab something to eat at your port of call: the famous Cromer crab or simply a plate of fish and chips. Had you stayed longer, you could go hunting for fossils on the beach: the weather, windy, with rough seas, favours new just this pursuit.

But time to go back it is, and to resume your hunt for whatever rolling experiences the road ahead has yet to offer. You leave Cromer behind you to its moderately dense crowds of tourists, and lumber on towards Mundesley with the sea coming into view on your left hand side every now and then and paragliders criss-crossing precariously low above your head. The wind has picked up, but once you’re past Walcott, and head for Honing, Worstead and then Wroxham, known as the Capital of the famous Norfolk Broads, you have the advantage of it on your side. Flying south-east down Wroxham and Sprowston Rds, you negotiate the last of climbs to finish yourself off for the day, and on the minor ramp between the Fye Bridge and Tombland, you risk a final 300-metre dash for the local KOM. You end up 92nd, not bad. Congratulations: your Norfolk loop’s done. Repeat ad infinitum now, and you’re ready for Flanders!

Mikołaj Denderski

Mikołaj Denderski is a translator of English-language literature into Polish. Born in Bytom, Poland, he lives in Krakow, where he graduated in English Studies from Jagiellonian University. He has translated modern fiction, literary essays, popular science and humanities. His translations include works by American and British authors (e.g. James Baldwin, Eliot Weinberger, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, David Graeber) as well as by writers of the English language from Southeast Asia (Amanda Lee Koe, Shubhangi Swarup). In 2022 he was granted a Visegrad literary residency (to work on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time), and in 2023 he received recognition as a recipient of Krakow UNESCO City of Literature Award. He taught classes in literary translation at Jagiellonian University and the University of Lodz.

Commission supported by UNESCO Circular Residency programme.