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The MI, February 2001. Haven’t you always wondered about the brown signs on motorways, wondered and been a little curious? They plague me, fill the small, sleepless hours with visions, they niggle. What are they? Who decided on them? What lies beyond them?

The green, blue and white signs are all written with a direct, Anglo-emphatic common sense. Travellers’ health warnings and timely topographic explanations. But the brown signs are oblique, runic, frankly weird. What, for instance, is Owl and Otter World? Or the American Adventures, in Derbyshire, or Butterfly World, or the mysterious Billings Aquadrome? They’re like the goblins’ and sprites’ incarnations in fairy stories, tempting you to turn from the familiar mortal straight lanes into some windy, wooded enchantment. They seem totally at odds with the know-it-all instructions of the modern matt, black-and-white tarmac world, like the guesses and rumours on medieval maps that explain the gaps: “Here be dragons”, “a land of blue men with two heads”, “monsters and giants”, “fountains of eternal youth”. They flash past as we humdrum up the road to some pedestrian destination, and we think: “Better not, not this time.”

Other men dream of expansive adventures, or traversing deserts on mopeds, circumnavigating in balloons shaped like beer cans, punting up the Orinoco or just walking to some pole. But me, I’ve always yearned to visit every brown sign on the M1. One day I’d do it, and then one day I did.

In search of the brown signs of Middle England, I needed a car fit for adventure. Just standing still, the AC Cobra fair takes your breath away. It’s every boy’s image of the perfect sports car. If you’re in the market for an expensive strap-on-penis – and these days, who isn’t? – then this is the jobbie that summer’s gala balls were made for. And if in those dreams you genitals could talk, this is the noise they’d made – a leering, Cro-Magnon glottal guffaw.

But it has one glaring design fault, one terrible oversight, or rather way too much oversight: there’s no roof. Not even anywhere to put a roof. Having got the car, I needed a driver, and the promise of being able to belt on the Cobra brought Jeremy Clarkson panting. He wants to go at 100-and-frozen-to-death up the motorway, push the envelope, re-create the good bit from Back to the Future, and I should say right here: “Don’t try this at home.” One, it’s illegal, and two, it’s unlikely that your hall is long enough to get into second gear.

The M1 ought to start with a triumphal arch. In practice, it sort of sidles out of Brent Cross shopping centres. I’ve always considered that its real beginning in the Scratchwood service station, now Blairishly renamed London Gateway. It’s here that you feel you’re leaving behind the safety of the city, all that is comforting, familiar and, well, just civilised. Ahead of you stretches Oop North in progressive shades of ee-by-gum intensity. We ate a last breakfast here and a brace of pastel-shingled, randomly cackling old ladies came up to me saying: “We’re going to the Isle of Wight.” It seemed a suitably surreal omen for the journey.

Jeremy took off with a squeal and a great roar of exhaust. Then we got into the car, which, being red with two white stripes, in a fit of Arthur Ransome whimsy I’d named the Rasher. Sedately we made for our first brown sign like Gawain and his squire on a quest, or perhaps more like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Under a blissfully sunny sky, with the wind playing croquet with our sinuses, we motored up the lads’ lane of the M1.

The first brown sign wasn’t far off: Whipsnade. Not much of a surprise there. I suppose I must have been to Whipsnade before during some desperate half-term, but I have no memory of the place. It returned with the torpor of amnesiac familiarity. Whipsnade was the first of the “I can’t believe it isn’t a zoo” zoos. It’s meant to be a new habitat, somewhere between the interesting high security of a real zoo and the tagged freedom of the Serengeti. A sort of open prison for ungulates. And, like some trompe l’oeil painting of a Tuscan landscape on a suburban dining-room wall, it isn’t fooling anyone, least of all the inmates, who seem to have been chosen to colour co-ordinate in shades of grey and taupe. The great endangered stand in miserable huddles in themiddle of off-season rugby pitches. Rarity is not necessarily concomitantly interesting. Przewalski’s horse, like a herd of skinhead donkeys.

Relieved of the need to avoid predators, little bands of animals have not another single thing in their heads, and stand imbecilely chewing gum, staring at postponed extinction. A drab gene museum, their only purpose and excitement is the annual 30-second legover. Sancho Clarkson is as bored as a desert oryx. Even my enthusiastic explanation of the interesting fact that white or black in relation to rhinos doesn’t refer to colour (they’re both grey, of course) but lip shape, surprisingly, didn’t fire his imagination and he headed for the one spot of colour, the souvenir hut – which turned out to be everything a zoo should be, stuffed with bright, animated, pettable nylon nature. I bought a cow with Velcro arms for the car and he got a baseball cap shaped like a zebra head. It was very Clarkson. Back into the Rasher.

Woburn Safari Park and Abbey was the next brown stop, just around the corner. The park too has non-indigenous animals in fields, which, without too much arm-twisting, I agreed to give a miss, only pausing to mention that there must be more rhinos in the home counties than there are in Kenya. The best that can be said for the abbey is that it’s big. But then so is the Barbican. Bigness is all it’s got going for it. There’s a big drive through a big deer park and a big sign at the start like a cricket scoreboard informing how many big deer have been killed on the road this year. Which goes to confirm the suspicion that the aristocracy is two quarterings short of an escutcheon. Any ten-year-old could have told them deer can’t read.

The house is a dusty auction waiting to happen, no less endangered than Przewalski’s donkeys. Gregorian knick-knackery, crippled furniture and the dust of decrepitude wait behind red ropes for the inevitable tumbril. Someone, presumably a wandering marchioness, has added homely touches like embarrassing family photos and the odd jokey soft toy, which only counterpoint the uninhabitable pointlessness of the place. The Russell family have evidently spent a couple of dozen generations rapaciously buying pictures by the yard. They have yet to snag a good one. Sancho’s favourite object was a stuffed canary. Now, how bored do you have to be to consider getting the canary stuffed?

The Rasher sped on. Gulliver’s Land was the next sign. Ah, but which land? Would it be a land of civilised horses and violent yahoos? No, that’s Gloucestershire. Would it be lots of brilliant scientists living with their heads in the coulds? Hardly, for this is Milton Keynes. We almost didn’t find out. I asked the lady in the kiosk for two adult tickets and she said: “Where are your children?” Choosing to believe this was Midlands warmth rather than insufferable noisiness, I told her: “In the south of France, actually.” “Don’t you have children with you?” “No, do I need some?” “Everyone else does.” “Well, can I rent any?” “You want to come in without a child?” Preferably, yes, I’ve already got him. Her eyes wandered over to Jeremy, then to her lap, where I expect there was a cut-out-and-keep News of the World I-spy monsters page. “I expect it’s okay, but there’s nothing in there for you.”

And there wasn’t. Gulliver’s Land is the sort of place I’d imagined disappeared with teddy boys and the Panthé News. The sort of can’t-complain, jolly decrepit Portakabin and cardboard funfair with rides that anywhere else in the post-moonwalk world would have been mechanised. But here the customers provide the power. Let me tell you, pedalling up a scenic switchback isn’t something to be undertaken without a fit seven-year-old. There was a misshapen sculpture in the middle of the kingdom just before you got to the MDF fantasy castle. I think it was meant to be Gulliver. Michelangelo’s David it wasn’t.

Back on the road, Jeremy put his foot down. One of the nice things about an open-top sports car is that you can really enjoy the view. It’s a Cinemascope experience with Dolby static. You simply can’t talk. In space and in a Cobra nobody can hear you scream, so best of all I didn’t have to listen to the running if-this-car-were-a-Belgian-prostitute commentary.

Billings Aquadrome. I had no idea places like this existed. Actually there can’t be another place like this, a trailer park set around some flooded gravel pits. There are pubs, shops, roads, a couple of funfairs. It’s a holiday park perched on the edge of the motorway. Traffic hisses just the other side of the trees. But here in the meadows is a perfect working-class getaway. I don’t mean that snidely. But Billings is, unselfconsciously, tabloid fun. Aesthetically nude. Unencumbered by improving good taste or Tate Modernish, Dome-ish sensibilities. It’s a little spot of England where Channel 4, the Guardian, Alessi orange squeezers, ciabatta and the Booker short list don’t exist. Its denizens, who have paid up to £20,000 for a hut, are all from the north. This is as far south as most of them want to get. This is salty Lancashire’s Mediterranean, and earthy Yorkshire’s West Indies.

The cul-de-sac of mobile homes (not caravans, these stand on sleepers and have picket fences, satellite dishes and decks) make up a small back-to-back nostalgic fantasy of what working-class life should have been if the industrial revolution and the welfare state and trickle-down economics had panned out. It’s Catherine Cookson without the cobbles and smoke and abortions. Here all doors are open and it’s safe for kiddies. Men stand and chat on the communal lawns, handing out beer cans, watching their crop-haired sons juggle footballs. Men and boys dressed identically in bright polyester football shirts and tracksuit bottoms. The only things that distinguish the generations are the beer guts and tattoos of the mature adult.

If watching the laddie endlessly dribble palls, there’s all the jet-skiing on the lake, or monkey bikes and go-karts, or more football on the TV. And there’s a big tent with a koi carp show. Koi carp are distressingly large palomino goldfish. There are dozens of blue paddling pools full of the nightmarish things for sale for thousands of pounds. Big, bouncerish men with scarred, annotated knuckles struggle to hold squirming plastic bags. Koi are unlikely working-class pets. They don’t bite burglars. You can’t take them to the pub. They won’t watch EastEnders with you and you can’t eat them. But there you go. Those who only know the English working classes as awayday thugs know only half of it. There is also a deep, sentimental streak that idolises childhood, loves noisy motors that travel in pointless circles and worships fish.

It was with great reluctance that I left Billings. I was truly envious of this comfy, ugly Elysian field. As we scraped over the kiddie-friendly traffic humps, past the pedalo swans, it struck me in a sadly typically smart-arsed, brittle-intellectual, cosmopolitan way that this was far more like one of the Swift’s kingdoms than anything I’d seen. And I would dearly love to be unshackled from my bookish heritage and have the culture, freedom and the nerve to join in.

Continuing north to the American Adventure, another tacky, low-rent theme park that exploits every cowboy film cliché from American adobe burger bars to Monument Valley-style Geronimo heads. Well, what do you do with reclaimed pits and slap heaps? You turn them into a Saturday afternoon B-movie set and truly bury the memory of industry, like putting a supermarket over a war grave all built with Tory guilt money. It’s half-full of teenagers; they’re here for one thing only, a particularly unpleasant ride. Without the Skycoaster, the American Adventure would be another cowboy cliché, the ghost town. But adolescence will travel great distances and stand in depression-style queues to either get its ears broken or its sphincter loosened. This does both. I watched the youngsters being terrified out of their skulls, emitting jaw-dislocating screams, and thought: “Thank God that’s not me.”

But then one of the many, many disadvantages of travelling with Sancho Clarkson is that the sort of men who manage fairgrounds adore him and want to do things for him. An eager chap in a thin tie with a walkie-talkie came over all wall-to-wall smiles and asked if he’d like to go: “Seeing as it’s you, we can jump the queue.” Jeremy and I caught and hugged each other’s eyes. In unison they silently yelled: “Noooooooo!” But his mouth said: “Thanks.” And we were taken to be strapped together in an all-in-one straitjacket. “Who wants the toggle?” said the manager. We tossed a coin. I got the toggle.

Then we were led past jeering youths and clipped to a wire. The other end of the wire was tied round the little finger of God’s right hand. Swaying ignominiously face down, we were winched up and up until on my left I could just make out Copenhagen and on my right Seville. The view below was what you’re used to seeing from business class. A faint voice shouted: “One, two, three, fly.” Knowing that the only way down was down, I pulled the toggle and we fell. We fell for about a lunar month, and I was paralysed by one hysterical thought: “Please, please, dear Jesus, I don’t want to die strapped to Jeremy Clarkson in a big green nappy.” It wasn’t a nappy when we started, but it was by the time we reached maximum velocity. And just as the concrete puckered up we were swinging out faster than a bird, faster than a place, faster than vomit.

“Ohhhhhh mach one,” yelled a hysterical Clarkson to an imaginary camera. This was the most distressingly unpleasant and humiliating experience of my life that didn’t involve medical staff. Sancho said he wanted to do it again.

The driving changes as you go north. Outside Leicester everyone careens with a fatalistic mania, playing dodgem karma. Suddenly there was a series of rapid explosions, a drive-by shooting from a white stretch limo. But it turned out to be an exotic wedding procession. Onward and northward. Sherwood Forest. I don’t know why there’s a brown sign for Sherwood Forest on the M1, it’s only just this side of Brussels. They were holding a Robin Hood festival. Well, I suppose they’re unlikely to hold a William Tell one. It consisted of a lot of rugger buggers in vaguely old-English Xena the Warrior Princess motley whacking each other with broomsticks while over a crackling PA the hospital-radio DJ kept up a jolly commentary: “and Guy of Gisborne takes Alan-a-Dale from behind, a typically dirty Normal trick. Boooo. Come on, everyone, boooo.” There’s a medieval market where post-Black Death villains practise medieval crafts: groat forgery and gnome decoration. It’s pretty depressing.

The smell of the merry band of burghers filled the air. I began to realise that, oddly, the entire holiday throng of several thousand were speaking Italian. Don’t ask me why Sherwood Forest and chaps with jesters’ hats and penny whistles should be big with the Eyeties. Perhaps it’s light relief after the high renaissance, or maybe with his gang of merry men (and Maid Marion), his godfatherly protection of peasants and tax avoidance in very tight trousers, Robin Hood is more Naples than Nottingham.

The Heights of Abraham – how did they get from Quebec to Derbyshire? After a long, windy drive they turned out to be a cable car in Matlock Bath. After the American Adventure I wasn’t doing anything that involved vertical wire. But Matlock was another revelation, a pretty Victorian spa town on a tumbling river. And it was stuffed, choked and cluttered with motorcyclists in all their peroxide balding, heavy-metal bondage, romper-suited wonder. In the immortal words of Jacques Cousteau, “Ooo knows where zey come from, ooo knows where zey go?” There were thousands and thousands of them. Swinging their gaudy helmets, they looked like a gay hanging-basket convention, and they hated Jeremy. They hated him a lot as the proselytiser of four wheels good, two wheels bad. He was Torquemada, and in the Rasher there was no place to hide his big, familiar coconut head. We drove slowly through town to a cacophony of loathing and derision from hordes of Meat Loaf impressionists.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I’ve always wanted to visit this place. A rolling landscape where Henry Moore’s monumental organic statues are exhibited among the sheep that so captivated him. No other modern sculptor has such a symbiotic connection with the landscape. I was halfway through this sentence when Sancho was transfigured into Harry Enfield’s Kevin. “Oh, I don’t want to walk. I don’t do walking. Oh, this is shit. They’re all shit. Look at that piece of sheep shit. It’s the same as that lump of bronze, isn’t it? Explain to me why that isn’t a big lump of sheep shit.”

I could see this argument stretching wearily ahead like a Philistines’ traffic jam with added aesthetic rage, and decided that sometimes silence is the better part of culture. On the way out we passed a particularly fine minotaur on a plinth. “Oh, look, a man with a cow’s head,” jeered Sancho. “It’s Michael Ayrton,” I told him. “How do you know, how do you know that?” he huffed, as if recognising sculpture was a potentially evil form of train-spotting. “How do you know what the bloke with the horns is called?” Just drive, Sancho.

Clarkson likes being in Yorkshire. God’s own county. Clarkson’s own county. The county where Clarkson and God are peers. Still smarting from the sculpture park, he said: “Over there, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote Ivanhoe.” No he didn’t. “Yes he bloody well did. Don’t tell me he didn’t because I know. This is where I come from, clever dick. He did.” Have it your way, Jeremy Paxman.

The National Coal Mining Museum near Wakefield is a truly poignant place. Set over a dead pit, kept open for the inquisitive like Lenin’s tomb, it’s more a battlefield than a museum. The exhibits have the fevered, Blue Peter look of a sixth-form project. Bits of chunky, gap-toothed machinery sit and rust. You can go down to the useless hard, black face, but it’s sunny up here and the Grimethorpe Colliery Band are playing beautifully. Alfresco brass-band music was ever the most evocative propaganda of the industrial north. Their audience is half a dozen stallholders selling cheap tat to nobody. The remnants of the industry that didn’t just make this part of Britain, but forged the lives of a quarter of the world’s population, are desperately meagre. Yellowing cuttings, some worn-out clogs and baskets. What’s remarkable about the precipitant full stop of the mines is how little is left behind them. After barely a decade there are more Celtic and Roman remains in this country than mining ones. All the workers in the museum are ex-miners. They skitter about in electric buggies emptying the bins, dressed in helmets with lamps and kneepads.

It’s ignominious. As the band played “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”, I talked to a gentle, softly spoken miner about the strike, the police and the scabs. He was like a man scratching an itch on the stump of a phantom limb. Behind us a trickle of football-shirted, tracksuited men brought in their sons to show them what their granddads did and what they were missing. But there’s precious little sense of what mining meant or was. It was a culture of doing and being, not of artefacts. The resonance is all in memory, and that’s fading like firedamp. I bought a small, rude carving of a miner done in coal. Later, I gave it to my seven-year-old son. He took it without interest. “It’s made of coal,” I told him. “Oh,” he said. “Do you know what coal is?” He shook his head.

The miner told me in passing that all the mines linked up underground, and that if you had a mind to, you could have traversed the north of England underground. The image is chilling. A troglodyte echo of the bright roads on the surface, thousands of mole miles of Bible-black empty motorways, streets, lanes and culs-de-sac, gaseous and watery, and in them the ghosts and bones of hacking, hard, inch-by-inch lives. It was difficult to leave this place with the remembrance and the power of its deep ley lines. Finally I asked the miner whether he preferred digging coal or working in the museum. He smiled: “That’s the question, isn’t it?” He stared out at the rolling countryside, remembering 2ft horizons. “This is better,” he said quietly.

The M1 stops at Leeds, or rather it used to stop at Leeds. Now it has tacked-on addendum that joins it to its older competitor, the A1. Why it went to Leeds in the first place is a mystery. What London had to say to Leeds or Leeds to London that couldn’t wait was never explained. But the point of roads is journeys, and the point of the journey is the going, not the arriving.

Back in London I was surprised at how moved I had been by this journey. What started out as a jaunt became a sort of pilgrimage. The weekend turned out to have the dreamish narrative of an ancient saga, an episodic archeology through the strata of England from loony heraldic beasts and decrepit stately homes to the industrial set-aside of funfairs. An organic mulch of our culture, the kitsch and oddness, the order and obsession. It had an un-intentional coherence, a plot, a road ran through it. A tale that was more than the sum of its parts. A series of blurred snapshots, of an England I thought I knew and therefore hadn’t bothered to examine. And I discovered in passing that I’m far fonder of it all than I imagined. The M1 is one of the world’s great journeys and it doesn’t go where you think, it goes home. You should set out – just follow the signs.

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