My Earliest Walking Experiences

When I look back on my walking history I am astounded to realise how much walking I did when I was a child. I never walked up any mountains but I went on many easy walks, especially when on holiday, with my father, but rarely with my mother. Our family walks were typically through woodland along waymarked paths with very little ascent involved. But I think the thing that really introduced me to walking was a youth group called Ambassadors at my church. They used to organise regular trips for the youngsters and on each of those trips walks in the countryside would be included in the itinerary, especially on a trip later in the year which involved a weekend in a youth hostel. Two days would be spent walking in the Peak District with a stay at one of the youth hostels in the area and I think it was these outings more than anything else that fired my enthusiasm for walking. I remember walks along Dovedale, the Manifold Valley, Lathkill Dale and Miller’s Dale, and these valleys will forever evoke memories of Ambassadors (such as happened last October when I visited Miller’s Dale again).

My most memorable family walks are after I joined Ambassadors and I am sure that I started pushing for walks because of my enthusiasm for walking gained in Ambassadors. After leaving Ambassadors, and besides family holidays which I also eventually stopped going on, I don’t remember any more walks until I went to University. However I did not at that time take up walking seriously, and never joined a Walking Club at the Uni, which is a pity as if I had I would have probably started taking hill walking seriously a lot earlier than I did. The first walk I did while at Uni was in the February of my first year when I took a train to Edale in the nearby Peak District and, buying a pamphlet with details of eight walks around Edale, I started working my way through it. On that first visit to Edale I did the number one and two walks, which totalled just five miles and climbed up to Hollins Cross, which is less than 400 metres high. I wrote in my diary: “Despite being on my own I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was wonderful.”

I think this comment was important because on subsequent visits to Edale I always took my father (being a sad git I didn’t have any Uni friends I could take!). The following month I went with my father to Edale but the weather was not kind and I got my first lesson on the savageries of mountain weather. Early on in the walk we had climbed up the side of Kinder Scout on the course of the Pennine Way and climbing no higher than 350m it started raining heavily (and hailing). We were both sliding all over the place (wearing just trainers) as we were totally out of our depth. My diary describes it as “very windy, very wet and very cold. It was hell.” By the time we got back down to the bottom of the valley the rain had stopped but we were so pissed off and wet we just walked along the road back to the station. I remember being amazed by how vicious the weather had been even though on the walk back along the road the weather seemed fine.

The following May we tried the walk again, this time in much better weather and it produced the comment: “It was very nice indeed. I did enjoy it.” Unfortunately that was all I said about it, but looking at the route in the pamphlet (I’ve still got it) it would have reached its highest point at Hollins Cross, just as on my first visit to Edale. It would be incorrect to think of Hollins Cross as a summit though as in fact it is the pass between Mam Tor and Lose Hill. I have done many walks since around Edale but the area still brings back many memories of those early walks while I was at University. It remains a great pity to me now that I didn’t take a greater interest in walking at the time, instead I had other things on my mind, but they will not be revealed on this blog …

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.