About us

How it started

A throwaway comment, then a route 48 hours later

When the 2021 Transcontinental was postponed for a second year, Rob jokingly suggested to Andrew that they should hold their own event in the UK instead. Two days later a route was drafted. A week after that a webpage went live. Less than a fortnight after the joke, the first rider had signed up.

That first edition tried to replicate the length and intensity of the Transcontinental on the roads of mainland Britain. Ten riders left Lockerbie in a heatwave. One reached the finish in the Cotswolds, 2,400 kilometres later. It was, by common consent, too hard.

What we learned

You don’t need to try to make a route hard in the UK. So we stopped trying. Our routes now simply go in search of the beautiful, the iconic and the overlooked, and the attrition arrives of its own accord. The best British riding is also the hardest: gradients above 20% are common and descents are rarely relaxing. But on a clear summer’s day it is worth every drop of sweat.

Wild West Country arrived in 2022 as the event most people could realistically finish, and it brought a wave of first-timers into the sport. Mountains of the Merfynion followed in 2023, two years in the making, for drop-bar bikes that don’t know their place. From 2026 we run two events a year: Wild West Country every May, and the other two in alternate Augusts, so that we can keep doing this properly and occasionally sleep.

About the name

“Perfidious Albion” is an old diplomatic insult for Britain’s habit of promising one thing and delivering another. British riding has the same habit. The view sells you the climb; the climb then sells you nothing. We thought that was funny. We still do, mostly.