The Surrey Hills on a sunny May morning are unfairly beautiful. The lanes unspool through tunnels of budding beech, the tarmac still faintly damp from the night before, and the air carries that particular English countryside smell – wet earth, cut grass, possibility. I am on a Royal Enfield Classic 650, idling in the shadow of a Victorian water tower.
The tower behind me was already three years old when Royal Enfield made its first motorcycle in 1901. Both are relics of the Victorian age, both still in use, and neither appears ready to retire.
Elspeth rolls up on a Royal Enfield Himalayan with the easy confidence of someone who has ridden across five continents. She stops beside me, visor up, eyes bright.
“Shall we?” she says.
Yes, we shall.
Forty-three years ago, Elspeth Beard was 23, freshly heartbroken, and fed up with being condescended to. When a British motorcycle magazine laughed at her plan to ride solo around the world, that laughter became rocket fuel. In October 1982, she pointed her 1974 BMW R60/6 toward the horizon and simply rode.
No sponsors. No GPS. No mobile phone. With just enough money to get across the Atlantic, a Haynes manual, and a stubbornness that would prove almost geological. Thirty-five thousand miles later, in 1984, she had crossed America, Australia, Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan and Europe, surviving crashes, illness, robbery in Singapore, brake failure on Zoji La, and the danger of riding through Punjab during a period of terrorism. She became the first British woman to circumnavigate the globe by motorcycle, then went home, qualified as an architect, and said almost nothing about it for thirty years.
She is 67 now, and she rides like someone completely at home on a motorcycle.
We pull away from the tower. In 1988, she bought the derelict 130-foot Munstead Water Tower at auction without planning permission or listed building consent – a huge gamble everyone said she couldn’t win. The council insisted it was impossible to convert into a home, citing rigid restrictions on fire escapes and historic preservation. But her world ride had taught her that nothing was truly impossible; difficulties could always be surmounted. She fought for 18 months, winning an appeal to the Department of the Environment that relaxed the key rules. Over the next seven years of blood, sweat and ingenuity, she transformed it into her six-floor home, complete with 142 steps to the roof – an award-winning design that preserved its industrial soul.
The Classic 650 settles into its twin-cylinder thump beneath me, a sound that feels both contemporary and ancestral. The Surrey Hills open around us, light breaking through the trees in long slanted shafts.
I first met Elspeth in June 2024, at this very tower. I had stumbled upon her book – Lone Rider – and had reached out to her with regards to a series of overlanding stories I was writing. I arrived expecting someone formidable. What I found was someone warm, funny, precise and entirely without affectation. We had 45 minutes and ended up talking for two hours – about the ride, the BMW, what it felt like to be a young woman alone in Baluchistan in 1983, and the repairs she improvised along the way.
I asked whether she had studied the Haynes manual in detail before setting off or simply learned as she went.
“Both,” she said. “You read the manual, and then the road teaches you things the manual never thought to mention.”
That meeting led to her being invited to speak at a motorcycle festival in Goa. Characteristically, she did not land in Goa.
She flew into Mumbai, and a small group of us rode along the Maharashtra coast to Goa over three days. It was the third time Elspeth rode in India. The second was in 2002, when she returned as back-up driver and support for adventurer Nick Sanders, shepherding 23 riders across the globe in three months. She often drove a truck for 18 hours and 900 miles a day, and when riders fell off, she took their bikes.
“On that trip”, she said, “I led a part of that ride from Madras – it is still Madras to me – to Bangalore, then Goa and Bombay, riding on a Royal Enfield Bullet.”
Riding with her in India, I got to see her off the page and in the saddle. She was unfussy and unpretentious. When asked what she wanted from a menu, she would say, “I’ll just dig into whatever is on the table.” If offered a choice of rooms, she would say, “Any room is fine by me.” She rode through the sweltering coastal humidity and rural Indian cacophony without complaint and moved through each day with the settled ease of someone who sorted out her relationship with discomfort a long time ago.
The lanes narrow as we drop into a valley, the hedgerows closing in, the tarmac damp in the shade. The Classic 650 feels planted and eager, steering with the directness these roads reward. I think about Royal Enfield’s 125 years not as a heritage story, but as a geological fact. Brands come and go; Royal Enfield has just kept making motorcycles. The company is Indian-owned now, and the Classic 650 is manufactured in Chennai. Yet the silhouette and character still carry something recognisably continuous with the motorcycles Royal Enfield was making when the English throne was still warm with Victoria’s presence.
I catch up with Elspeth at a junction and we pause.
“Does a brand that refuses to let go of its analogue soul resonate with you more than the high-tech superbikes of today?” I ask.
“There is something in a Royal Enfield that speaks to the idea of motorcycling as an experience rather than a performance,” she says. “You’re not being managed by the motorcycle. You’re riding it. There are no chapters and chapters of menus and settings. It feels refreshingly analogue, and I like that.”
I ask about Britishness – whether she feels anything specific in riding the oldest British motorcycle brand still in production through these Surrey lanes.
“The old Enfields had a very particular feel,” she says. “A thump, and a fussiness– they were quite fastidious machines, actually. These new ones, the engines are smooth, that fussiness and the mood swings are gone. But the form has remained. And that form is a hark back to the glorious days of British motorcycling. Royal Enfield has stayed true to that silhouette. You see this bike on a Surrey lane and something in you remembers what vintage British motorcycling used to feel like.”
We stop mid-morning at the Little Barn Café in Elstead. We order coffee, quiche and Greek salad. The Himalayan and the Classic 650 sit outside in the sunshine like patient dogs, and over the table, the ride momentarily slows down.
I ask whether, as an architect, she sees something of enduring architecture in Royal Enfield’s century-old design language.
“It is a masterclass in form following function,” she says. “They haven’t added things for the sake of adding them. What you see is what it does. That’s honest design. In a world of plastic-clad adventure bikes that look like they’re going to the moon, there is something very grounding about that.”
“And the metal, the chrome, the heft?” I ask.
“Planted,” she says immediately. “Solid. I like the simplicity of it. You know exactly where you stand.”
“That is, unless of course, it falls on you,” she says with a wry smile – she once took a tumble as a pillion on a Classic 650 and broke her leg in three places.
I ask about self-sufficiency with motorcycles today, recalling her ability to keep the BMW running on her RTW trip through conditions that would defeat most mechanics.
“To a certain extent, yes,” she says. “You could change the oil, the filter, grease the chain, deal with a puncture. The basics. But I wouldn’t think you could strip the engine completely and rebuild it the way I did with my BMW. Which is fine – you’re not going to need to, most of the time. But the spirit of accessibility is still there.”
Then I ask the question I have been building toward all morning: if she were doing that 35,000-mile ride today, would it be possible to recapture the magic?
“You can’t do what I did,” she says without hesitation. “Not really. There is always an invisible buffer now. There is an eye in the sky even in the middle of nowhere. You can’t truly getaway. Your last credit card transaction puts an approximate fix on your recent location, and your phone can be triangulated to pinpoint your precise location. And you can’t opt out of the digital space, either. Travel today is built on the phone and the credit card. Try to go without them, and you’ll find the infrastructure simply doesn’t work for you. The world has been wired in a way that makes disconnected analogue travel almost impossible.”
She pauses and then adds, “which is extraordinary, when you think about it. And a little sad.”
We finish our meal, pull on helmets and gloves, and head back into the hills. I ride alongside her on a long straight, the two engines in an easy rhythm, and the morning opens out around us.
After 20 minutes we stop at a view point, and I ask whether it is hard to find adventure in these lanes after the excitement and uncertainty of say the Karakoram Highway.
“The riding is beautiful here,” she says. “But the feeling is completely different. Out there – really out there, far from home in a strange country – everything sharpens. You are acutely aware of every sound the motorcycle makes, every change in the road, every person you pass, because that motorcycle is all you have. That awareness is its own kind of high. Here, you know home is around the corner. You relax, you breathe, you enjoy it. It’s the difference between edge and ease. Both are real. But they are not the same thing. And honestly, sometimes you miss the edge.”
We roll back to the tower as the morning tips toward afternoon. She dismounts, pulls off her helmet, and tucks it under her arm. She opens the garage door and wheels the Himalayan inside, and I catch myself standing still.
The garage is less a storage space than a testament. There is the 1998 R80 GS Basic, bought in 2001 and still her everyday motorcycle. There is an immaculate 1973 R75/5. There is a lightweight Yamaha Serow for trail riding. There is a Porsche in there too. And there, standing modestly in a corner, is the BMW R60/6 – her R60/6 – the motorcycle she rode around the world in 1982 and later restored with painstaking care.
It sits not on a pedestal, but among the other machines, as it should: a working part of a collection still very much in use.
Looking at the garage and then at the woman who filled it, I am struck by the fact that this love affair with machines, motion and the freedom of two wheels did not begin in 1982. It began earlier, in a teenager who looked at a motorcycle and saw possibility rather than danger. That teenager became the woman who circled the globe, turned a Victorian water tower into a home, and is nowhere near done.
Back outside, she looks at the Himalayan one last time before closing the door.
“You know what’s nice about this?” she says. “It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to impress you. It just feels like a motorcycle.”
From Elspeth Beard, that is just about the highest praise a motorcycle can receive.