Musing on Walking

I don’t update this blog very often because I don’t go on big walks very often. I don’t live in an area with particularly interesting scenery so I have to make an expedition of it whenever I do go to a mountainous area, staying a day or two there to justify the cost of travelling. I wish I lived near mountains like the Lake District, then I would be able to go for a walk almost every day (whenever the weather is good). There are websites written by people who do live near mountains and they are able to go up the hills frequently, a very good example of this is Sean McMahon's excellent Striding Edge website which features a new walk sometimes everyday, even if the walk in question is only an hour or two long. If only I lived in or near the Lake District ...

Until my dreams are fulfilled I am stuck in Leicestershire where the highest hill is less than 1000 feet, and all those highest hills are stuck on the other side of the county so I still need a bit of a drive to get there. The countryside around where I live is all arable with low rolling hills and farmland a plenty that do not make for inspiring walking. However despite this, when not spending loads of money travelling to true mountainous areas, I still go for a walk locally at the weekend if the weather is good. These walks however rarely feature in this blog, exceptions usually being when these local walks have been extended to last all day. These walks will usually last for only a couple of hours, in the afternoon, so I don’t bother talking about them. I suppose I could start mentioning them, but compared with expeditions to the Lake District or Scotland they are worthless.

For example, last Saturday the weather was unseasonably warm and sunny so I went for a walk around the Hambleton peninsula at Rutland Water, the largest reservoir in Britain (an aerial photo that I pinched from the Internet is above that clearly shows the reservoir and the Hambleton Peninsula that I walked around). It was a nice walk, the weather was lovely, but was it worth writing about in this blog? Maybe not. But the aforementioned Striding Edge website doesn’t have the detailed right ups of their walks that I do, instead they feature mostly just photographs rather than text. Maybe I should go in that direction myself, but actually I’m not really into taking pictures and I just take photos to illustrate the walks that I do, they are not an end to themselves, but it is something to think about. Something I could do is delve into my old diaries and see if I can explore my walking history since I was a child up until I started this blog.