Clare in a different saddle for her Pennine odyssey

Following in the tracks of journalist and cycling enthusiast Harold Briercliffe, who wrote bestselling guides to cycle touring around Britain back in the 1940s, Balding pedals along some of the country's most picturesque and historic routes, and hears stories of some of the events and characters that helped to shape both landscape and communities.

Rochdale-born Briercliffe's detailed accounts of the more obscure byways of Britain have long been out of print, but Balding uses the writer's own Dawes Super Galaxy cycle to follow some of his favourite rides – including a 30-mile round trip from and to Hebden Bridge in the rugged Pennines of West Yorkshire, taking in Haworth, Wycoller, Blake Dean and Hardcastle Crags en route.

Balding finds that Briercliffe had little to say about Hebden Bridge, apart from "Hebden Bridge should be left by the Keighley Road...", yet the presenter herself finds the town charming and is smitten by the story of Alice Longstaff, the weaver's daughter who became apprenticed to a local photographic studio in 1921 and went on to spend a lifetime chronicling the town's highs and lows, leaving behind a collection of 10,000 photographs when she died in 1992.

"Alice Longstaff's work made Hebden Bridge one of the best-chronicled communities in Britain in the 1940s and early 1950s," says local writer Angela Cairns, who wrote the play Secretly Pleased about the photographer's life. "She also left behind a mystery about her own life. Married for 57 years, Alice disinherited her husband John in her will. She definitely wore the trousers, but no one seems to know the full story."

Balding's ride takes her past glorious stretches of open moorland and into winding valleys. Briercliffe catalogued almost every rise and fall of the road, and on arrival in Haworth seemed to be disappointed at its lack of gloominess. The presenter meets a couple of Yorkshire cyclists on one of the town's steep cobbled streets, who impart some sage advice: "There's no shame in getting off and pushing..." or, as the exhausted Balding puts it: "Park your ego and push."

Cycling on under gathering clouds, she crosses the Lancashire border temporarily, to explore the old village of Wycoller and the ruins there that feature in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, when Mr Rochester retreats in his blindness to "Ferndean Manor" which in reality was Wycoller Hall.

Balding finds a handy developing theme for her ride, with the tales of Susannah Benson and Evelyn Jowett – two more local heroines without whom the village would have disappeared under the waters of a planned reservoir. Briercliffe did not delve into such stories, and instead spent more time listing the peculiarities of local bridges, including the "Clam Bridge" – no more than a rather effective boulder – thought to be 1,000 years old.

Safely back over the border in Yorkshire, local historian Nick Wilding explains the little-known tale of the Henpecked Husbands' Society, a secret club of "wife-fearing" males which met once a year on Easter Monday to escape the demands of their other halves. Their "antics and hullabuloos"included mock trials, in which they admitted the vile demands made on them by their wives. Punishments involved wheelbarrows. The society is said to have been caught on camera only once – on Heptonstall High Street in 1974, around the time they are believed to have disbanded.

The heart-stopping views from Hardcastle Crags, a 400-acre unspoilt wooded valley owned by the National Trust and popular as a picnic and walking destination, almost arrest Clare Balding in her tracks. It's hard to imagine that for four years almost a century ago (1903-1907) a community jokily called Dawson City (after the American Gold Rush town) sprang up near here to house 600 Irish workmen and their families while they built the Walshaw Dean Reservoir.

Yet again a redoubtable local woman was mixed up in the story: the clay pipe-smoking, cloth cap-wearing Thurza Adams was the cook who ran a ship-shape mass-catering operation, making sure that the navvies, wives and children got a hot dinner every night. After the job was done, Thurza joined the menfolk for a few hands of cards – and it's said she also preferred to use the gents' loos.

As Clare Balding cycles on, leaving behind the majestic vistas of West Yorkshire, her Pennine odyssey serves to remind the viewer of the rugged beauty of the Upper Calder Valley and how lucky we are to have so much beauty laid out before us in every direction. And we are able to call all of it Yorkshire.

Britain on a Bike can be seen on BBC4 on Tuesdays at 8.30pm. The episode featuring West Yorkshire can be seen on

August 10.