Travelogues on the homepage?

Heya,

I wrote a travelogue of a recent cycle trip (https://cycle.travel/by/dan200/london_to_portmeirion_a_tribute_to_the_prisoner), but I noticed it's not showing up on https://cycle.travel/travelogues or the Homepage.

Are these pages manually curated or automatic, and if the latter: are they working properly or did I do something wrong?

- Dan

London to Portmeirion (A tribute to The Prisoner)

In June 2026, I cycled 350 miles across England and Wales to recreate the journey taken by "Number Six", the protagonist of the classic 1960's spy-fi series "The Prisoner". Along the way, I made a short film in the style of the show's iconic opening titles, which you can see for yourself here.

I’d wanted to visit "The Village" ever since I first watched The Prisoner, so when I found myself thinking about my next cycle tour earlier this year, Portmeirion was an obvious destination. When I had the further thought of beginning the trip at Six's underground spy headquarters in Westminster, the plan was set.

Plotting the route wasn't too difficult: I knew I wanted to sightsee along the way, so I added stops in Oxford, Warwick, Birmingham and Shrewsbury. This took me close to the famous Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in Wales, and from there I followed the Dee valley to Rhyl, continuing along the north coast of Wales the rest of the way. Cycle.travel did a good job at linking these sections together, putting me on canal paths, country lanes and cycle routes for most of the journey. In all, there were only a few miles of unpleasantly busy roads on the whole trip.

The biggest complication turned out to be the weather. After a few sunny days, the heavens opened while I was cycling along one of Birmingham’s canals. The next two days had more bad weather forecast, and it took frequent use of the Met Office weather radar to avoid getting caught out in a thunderstorm. The last thing I wanted was for the trip to end with me getting struck by lighting on top of a Welsh mountain.

As well as being my most ambitious cycle journey to date, this trip also served as an interesting filmmaking project. Before the trip I bought a secondhand GoPro and a HoverAir drone from eBay, and made sure I got some practice using them. Once on the road, I constantly looked for opportunities to shoot interesting POV and "ride-by" footage. This added hours to each day of cycling, but I found this extra creative element really engaging. In London, I enlisted a friend’s help to shoot an almost exact remake of the beginning part of The Prisoner's iconic opening titles, to really sell the homage I was going for.

At the end of the week, I had collected over 3 hours of footage, which had to be brutally filtered and edited down to get to the 3 minute montage I had in mind. I had to leave some really great shots on the cutting room floor, but I’m very pleased with how the final film turned out. I’ll definitely be thinking about filmmaking ideas when it comes to planning my next trip.

Watch "Return to the Village" on YouTube

Rendering issue on Android mobile app

Hiya,

If I open the following route on the Android app:

https://cycle.travel/map/journey/890269

The line rendering goes all screwy, like so:

I've only seen it happen with this route I'm particular!

"Look Ahead" option not working on Android app

Heya,

I'm not sure when this started happening (I tend to stick to local rides in the winter, which I don't need navigation for), but I've noticed recently that the map on the Android app no longer rotates to face your direction of movement when you have the "Look ahead" option selected (instead, it's always oriented north). I went for a tiny ride down the road just now to demonstrate:

I have my location permission set to "only when using the app", but it seems to be same when "all the time" is selected.

Fingers crossed it's a simple fix!

- Dan

Suggested OSM Tagging for very poor roadside cycleways

This is the A34 between Oxford and Bicester.

The path on the left looks deeply unpleasant to ride on (narrow, bumpy, and inches away from roaring 70mph traffic), but because it's signposted to allow cycling, it's (correctly) tagged as bicycle=designated on OSM.

Thus, cycle.travel includes 3 miles of this path on it's suggested cycle route from Oxford to Cambridge. If I hadn't checked out this bit of the route in advance, I'd have been in for a nasty surprise I think.

Are there any tagging improvements I can make to steer CT away from picking this route? I've added accurate "width" and "smoothness" tags, but I'm curious how much these will help. There's also an existing "adjacent=trunk" tag, maybe this could be useful?

I appreciate it's a tough balance to make on your side: if this path was a meter wider, a little smoother, and seperated from the roadway by a grass verge this would be perfectly fine to ride on!