Wiltshire, Cheshire and Lancashire have one. Avon has one, despite not even being a county any more. But Oxfordshire no longer has a county cycleway.

There was a brief vogue in the late ’80s, I think, for these – circular on-road routes that generally looped around the edge of the county. Oxfordshire’s was officially withdrawn around 2005 due to rising traffic levels on certain parts of the route; rather than actually making conditions better for cyclists, the County Council decided to cancel the route entirely. (Contrast with Cumbria, where the Cumbria Cycleway was put in abeyance for the same reason, but is now being revived with Local Sustainable Transport Fund money.)

There’s certainly some truth in this. The route over Newbridge, for example, is highly unpleasant on a bike. The staggered A40 crossing east of Burford isn’t fun at all. But both of these could have been fixed at relatively minor outlay.

Even now, you can still see Oxfordshire Cycleway signs here and there: there’s a modern one on the road from Charlbury to Burford, which I think was put up after the route was cancelled, and a number of more-or-less decrepit ones poking out of hedges. But piecing them together into a navigable route isn’t easy.

Anyway, yesterday in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford I found, for the princely sum of 50p, the official route map from 1980something. (Or, at least, pre-1995, as all the phone numbers are missing the 1 after the initial zero.) So here it is: the main circular route, and the east-west route confusingly marketed as the Windrush Valley Cycle Route even though half of it is nowhere near the Windrush.

There’s a small amount of coincidence with today’s National Cycle Network, but for the most part it’s independent. The route in the north-west of the county (say, Cropredy to Kingham) is particularly lovely and I could perhaps be tempted by an afternoon jaunt…