Without Devon I wouldn’t be a cyclist at all. You might think it a quirk of timing. Maybe I just happened to be living here when I hit the age when many find themselves drawn back to two wheels (it’s 35, face it). You might be right. But I’m pretty sure that without the boundless charm, verdant beauty and pure pleasure of this county, my bike riding would have been either a short-lived dalliance or a grim persistence. Instead it’s become a love affair, a marriage you might say, with all the challenges and rewards that implies.

It began in 2005 or so, just over a year after we moved here. Friends we’d made turned out to be mountain bikers and so we tagged along, at some point buying ourselves what seemed at the time like expensive hard tails. £500 each as I recall. We rode in the Quantocks, on Dartmoor, Woodbury and Exmoor. I can barely remember those early rides. I never once asked how far we’d ridden, how much climbing we’d done. Now we could join in now whenever biking friends were down this way. I remember slogging around Dunkery and Dunster after my friend Andy, a veteran – to me a pioneer – of 24 hour solo races and 6 month cycle tours, and his wife Liz, a crushingly persistent pedaller. We enjoyed spending time with our fiends doing something new and mountain biking is fun.

Then one day, I reckon in 2006, I found myself wondering whether it would be possible to ride my bike to work. I’m not sure what the catalyst for that initial thought was. I don’t recall it being Ride To Work day or some similar initiative. I think the idea just occurred to me and wouldn’t be shaken. So I did it. I had no idea whatsoever how long the ride was or how long it would take. In fact, had I known how long the ride was going to be, I still wouldn’t have known how long it was likely to take me. Days of pushing to average 15mph or better on my commute were a way off yet. My calculations got no more sophisticated than thinking it took roughly an hour to drive door to door, and a car was probably at least 3 times as fast as a bike, so it would take me at least 3 hours. I actually thought it would be more like half a day.

I set off with a route planned out which would take me through places i’d never been before, along roads I’d never driven. It felt like an expedition, an adventure. I had an ordnance survey map with me and enough stuff in my rucksack to survive for a week if I happened to get stranded in the middle of the wilderness. It was a tough ride, as I recall. I’ve since discovered that every ride in Devon is a tough ride, pretty much. I had to stop often to check the map. I climbed hills and descended and slogged on. And slowly but steadily the places I’d picked out on the map began to connect up. An hour and three quarters later, I arrived in Exeter. I’d ridden 17 miles. It felt like a triumph, and it was. This was the first of a handful of times I’ve got on my bike to go somewhere genuinely unsure whether I would be able to make it. But i’d gone anyway, trusting myself.

The year after that my employer began to offer the Cycle to Work scheme and I started to wonder whether I could actually make the trip more often. I used that as a pretext for buying my first road bike, a Marin Lucas Valley. Essentially it’s a hybrid, supposedly designed by one of the company’s head honchos as the perfect bike for his ride to Marin HQ each day. There have been some times during the intervening period when i’ve wondered whether that was the right choice. Should I have gone for one of the tricross bikes I also tested? Should I have gone for a pure road bike? These thoughts most often tumble around when i’m trailing someone up a big hill and looking at the leaner lines of their bike as they slowly stretch out ahead of me.

But for the rest of the past 7 years i’ve just had a blast with it. It’s this bike that really got me. I would get up with the larks on Sunday mornings and pound up and down the valleys of East Devon, ploughing into the early morning mists, sliding over frozen farm slurry, crunching down baking lanes of indeterminate surface. For at least one Summer I rode to work and back 2 to 3 times each week and loved it, both the in-the-moment experience and the fact that I was actually doing it. I rode it over Dartmoor, did 100 miles in a day with my friend Tom – another of those spins into the unknown – rode small events here and there, and eventually built up to taking the thing all the way up to John O’Groats.

I loved the bike and still do, but even more, I loved where it took me. Devon is a stunning place to live and work. We moved down here from Manchester for that very reason, but until I started to sortie through its lanes, I didn’t know it at all. Fields, hill, farms, valleys, rivers, moors all seen through the windscreen were largely abstract until I went at them on my bike. Through my bike, I found a home here.

Without Devon I wouldn’t be a cyclist. Without cycling, I wouldn’t know Devon at all.