Surrey’s iconic Lone Rider Elspeth Beard blames ‘fearmongering 24/7 news’ for preventing motorcycle riders from enjoying their own global adventures

Surrey’s Elspeth Beard, an architect and author who published the Lone Rider about her celebrated exploits, travelled around the globe from 1982-1984. She covered more than 35,000 miles on her solo trip at a time when riders didn’t have any motorcycle aids or sat navs.

The iconic 66-year-old is seen as one of the most inspirational bikers of all time but concedes it was an advantage in some ways to complete the mammoth feat during a less technological time.

“There’s just too much information and what you don’t know, you don’t worry about and, actually, you find when you get there it isn’t a problem anyway,” she told motorcycle podcast Full Chat.

“I travelled through Iran, which was at war with Iraq, and the revolution had happened a few years beforehand. Everybody said ‘you’ll never get in and it’ll be really dangerous’ and actually they were the friendliest people. It wasn’t easy, obviously. There were road blocks, tanks and soldiers everywhere but I got through it.

“The people in the country were incredibly kind and helpful and did whatever they could to help me get through. I suppose in those days because you didn’t have this 24/7 news that you have now, being bombarded, that seems to be putting this fear into people all the time telling them everything is so bad, awful and dangerous. When you get there it just kind of isn't most of the time in my experience.

“Even now when I travel I don’t really read the news and stuff. I’ll speak to friends of mine who have been to a country and find out from them but I don’t listen to the news.”

At the age of just 23 - long before she converted Munstead Water Tower into her home near Godalming - she left her friends and family behind in London to explore the planet. A painful breakup while studying was her motivation to escape and she admits it was the perfect experience to find herself.

“When I was at uni studying architecture I met and fell in love with this guy and he broke up with me two or three months before my finals,” she added during the episode.

“So I ended up finding it really hard to work, and so I got a lousy degree for my part one in architecture. I was brokenhearted and didn’t really know if I should continue doing architecture or not because it’s like a seven-year course, so it was like another four years to go.

“I just thought ‘I need to get away’. I was at a kind of crossroads in my life, not really knowing what I wanted to do and I was feeling pretty miserable. So I just thought, why don’t I try and ride my bike around the world? And when you say you’re going to do it, then everyone expects you to do it.

“It was quite hard when I started, getting used to riding my bike for five or six hours a day, that’s a lot of time on my own with my head in my helmet. A lot to think about. I was brokenhearted, I was trying to get over this guy that I was madly in love with. So I was working out a lot in my head (of what to do), and going home was not one of them. That was not a thought.

“To me, it was just something that I did. I do still find it quite weird that people now think that what I did was such an extraordinary thing because to me, I just did it.”

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