The Art of Going Nowhere: In Defence of the Sunday Drive

I'd like to make a case for something deeply unfashionable. Not a spa day, not a bottomless brunch, not a four-hour hike with a route map and a smug sense of achievement at the end of it.

I'd like to make a case for the Sunday drive. The aimless one. The one with no destination, no booking, and no real excuse beyond the fact that it's Sunday and the light is nice.

We've been doing it for a few years now, on and off, and I've come to think it's the last genuinely affordable adventure in this country. It's also the one most likely to be described by other people as 'a bit boring', which I've decided to take as a compliment.

How it started, with a wrong turn

It began by accident. Holly and I set out one Sunday for a garden centre about forty minutes away. We took a wrong exit, ended up on a lane we didn't recognise, and drove for another hour through villages with names I still can't pronounce properly.

Somewhere in the middle of it we pulled over to look at a view, drank a slightly stewed flask of tea out of a boot lid, and had one of the nicest afternoons we'd had all year. We never did get to the garden centre. Neither of us minded.

Since then it's become a fixture. Not every week — this isn't a lifestyle brand, we're not that organised — but often enough that it's now just what Sundays are for.

Why it works when nothing else does

Here's my theory. Most of the things we do at the weekend have a task attached. The shop has a list. The walk has an end point. The visit has an entry fee, opening hours, and a car park that needs paying for.

A drive has none of that. You're already in the car before you've had to decide anything. There's no entry fee, no café queue, no timetable. If it rains, the view is still good through the windscreen. If one of you is feeling tired — and on any given Sunday, one of you will be — you can still do it sitting down.

It's also, crucially, free. Petrol isn't free, obviously, and I'm not going to pretend a tank costs nothing at the moment. But two hours of driving doesn't have to be a full tank, and it's still cheaper than a family cinema ticket or a round of coffees in a farm shop.

The rules we've made up

We have a small, unofficial set of rules, which you're welcome to ignore:

• Aim for B roads. Motorways are for getting somewhere. B roads are for being somewhere.
• No destination on the map. Pick a general direction. East, south, into the hills. That's the whole plan.
• The flask is non-negotiable. Tea for Holly, coffee for me, a milk bottle in the door pocket, and something from the biscuit tin.
• One inevitable detour. If you see a sign for a village you've never heard of, take it. That's the rule.
• One stop. A bench, a church gate, a viewpoint, a pub. Just one, and only if you feel like it.
• Down with the phone as satnav. Ours stays in the glove box until it's genuinely time to come home. Nothing kills the spirit of a drive faster than being told to turn left in 200 yards.

A few words on routes

I'm wary of recommending specific routes, because the best one you do will be the one on your own doorstep that nobody's written about. But some regions are practically made for this.

The quieter roads through the Yorkshire Dales on a misty morning are near-perfect. The lanes around the Peak District, going nowhere in particular near Bakewell or Hartington, will do the job. The South Downs, the New Forest, the borders, the long slow roads through mid-Wales — all of them reward a bit of wandering.

Ones to avoid: anything within a mile of a retail park on the last Sunday before Christmas, and any A road where you can see a service station sign in the distance. Those aren't drives, they're traffic.

Pub stops and flask etiquette

Two practical notes, learned the hard way.

First: a pub stop should be short and cheap or long and lunch-y. The awkward middle — one drink each, hovering because the table's booked — is where the joy goes out of it. If the pub looks busy, carry on to the next one.

Second: find the lay-by before you're desperate for the flask. A view is 80% of the experience. Our favourite spot is a gravel pull-in above a valley with a wonky gate and a view of absolutely nothing but fields. We've been back four times. It has no name on any map and we couldn't take you there if we tried.

And do bring a bin bag. It's a small thing, but nothing sours a lovely spot like the person before you leaving a McDonald's wrapper in the hedge.

Turning it into a habit

Here's how to make it stick. Don't make it an occasion. Don't invite fifteen people. Don't photograph every stop for a grid. Just get in the car after lunch on a Sunday, put on a playlist one of you actually wants to hear, and drive until someone says 'ooh, what's down there'.

That's it. That's the whole adventure.

I know it doesn't sound like much. It isn't meant to. It's a couple of hours of low-stakes wandering in a country that is genuinely, absurdly beautiful in every direction, and there is nothing else on the calendar this cheap, this easy, or this likely to end with you and whoever's in the passenger seat having an unexpectedly good conversation about nothing in particular.

Bring back the Sunday drive. It never really left.