ABSTRACT
Adventurously athletic travelers a wheel during the 1880s, perched atop elegant bicycles with grand front wheels, pedaled boldly beyond commercial avenues or suburban streets and into open countryside, hoping to observe new places from a distinctive perspective and pace. Surprisingly, most of the geographers, historians, and writers who have shaped human awareness of our landscapes have overlooked cycling’s contributions. In addition to providing a body of descriptive writing, imagery and other geographic evidence that informs understanding of our surroundings, cyclists’ contributions to landscape-related studies often address the temporal aspects that Jackson and other writers have attached to land places, but without attribution. Cycling’s journalistic narratives also benefitted from imagery of exceptional quality, which transported readers to imagined places. The distinctive melding of sense of place, time, memory and distance that shapes cyclists’ perceptions of our built, cultural, and natural environments represents only one aspect of cycling’s contributions to landscape-related studies.
