Her first journey takes Clare to the rugged and beautiful Atlantic coast of north Devon - from Lynmouth, scene of Britain's worst flood disaster in the early 1950s, to Ilfracombe via Little Switzerland, and a hidden silver mine whose riches probably helped England win the Battle of Agincourt.

Clare's journey into Wales is rich in literary connections to both Bruce Chatwin and AE Housman. She reveals how a cycle factory went to war and finds out about the Bride's Tree - a bizarre village ceremony with a dark secret.

Her journey to the Isle of Wight explores its unique sense of otherness - a strange power which could cure Dickens's writer's block, repel the deadly attentions of the Luftwaffe and give Victorian poet laureate Tennyson a comforting sense of his own death.

As she cycles through Bronte Country on the Yorkshire/Lancashire border, Clare uncovers a unique photographic collection depicting the hidden daily life of a Yorkshire mill town, a string of truly remarkable women and a secret club for henpecked husbands.

Clare Balding tests the limits of pedal power again with a cycle trip through an area considered one of the prettiest in Britain, the Cotswolds. Following the wheel tracks of cycling author Harold Briercliffe, whose guide books of the late 1940s paint an evocative portrait of Britain on B-Roads, she encounters not only beautiful countryside but one or two surprises.

Clare goes in search of the world he described and charts how a series of incomers have changed our view of the Highlands - a diverse group which includes Dr Johnson, an English army of occupation, a North American spruce tree and author Gavin Maxwell, plus otter.