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Hiking / Rambling / Walking
As long as I can remember, I've enjoyed walking in the countryside.
From an early age, my parents took me walking in the Yorkshire Dales and
Moors, the Lake District and in Scotland. My school geography teachers
were also keen walkers and encouraged an active school rambling club -
and the school CCF organised "Arduous Training Courses" involving pretty
strenuous hikes all over the Lake District. Later, during my 20 years
working in Manchester, I kept myself fit by playing a lot of cricket and
by rambling all around the Peak District, as well as spending many short
breaks in North Wales and the Lakes - and when I returned to Ripon in
1989, I embarked on a mission to explore every corner of the Yorkshire
Dales.
Some friends and I thought it might be a good idea to try to develop a
new "Long Distance Footpath" in the Dales, so we devised the
"Round-the-Dales Walk" - a circular route of about 170 miles,
circumambulating the National Park. We researched it all pretty
thoroughly but, because several stretches didn't conform to existing
rights of way, the Countryside Commission and the National Park
authorities were not over-keen. Now that we have the "right-to-roam"
over open moorland, I would rather like to resurrect the idea so, if
anyone is interested in helping to research and then publish this
delightful route, please contact me and I will supply full details of
the walk.
I had already completed one or two Long Distance routes - and my partner
Jane, also a keen walker, was eager to add a few more to the list. So
far, the list includes the Cleveland Way, the Coast-to-Coast, the
Cotswold Way, the Dales Way, the Dales Three Peaks, the Gritstone Trail,
the Lyke-Wake Walk, the Pennine Way, the Two Moors Way, Offa's Dyke,
some of the Pembrokeshire Coast and most of the West Highland Way.
However, Snowdonia has always been a firm favourite for both of us.
We've done all the Welsh 3000s, some of them several times, and
countless other wonderful walks in North Wales. The place was becoming
like a second home for us - so we bought "Twryg", a small cottage
in Tanygrisiau. Sadly, it was not very successful as a holiday let so we sold it a few years ago. We do miss our holidays in Snowdonia but we still visit occasionally.
Over the last few years, Jane and I have also tended to explore further
afield, with holidays walking in Dominica, Corsica, Crete, Ithaka, La Gomera, Majorca, Provence,
Sardinia, Tasmania & New Zealand (three times) and Peru!
Age takes its toll - and I decided quite a while ago that, in my 60th
year (2009/10), before I became too old, infirm and grumpy, I would walk from
John O'Groats to Land's End. It didn't happen then (too much work to do!) but it's happened now! I didn't do it all in one go - it took 123 days of walking, in 18 separate stretches, spread over about a year from 1 October 2011 to 20 October 2012 - and it came to a total of around 934 miles and 20,245 metres of climbing. Called the "Andante Project", it was much more than just a walk - the idea was
to make it a sort of "Musical Pilgrimage" and to take the opportunity to
explore the state of music-making throughout the country. We contacted every musical group or organisation we could find along the
route, invited them to join us for bits of the walk (on a sponsored
basis, to raise funds for charity or for themselves) and also met with some of them in the evenings to discuss their music, needs, problems,
funding requirements etc. At the end, I produced a report, summarising my findings - and this is available for download here (The Andante Report - see right). It has been sent to the Ministers for Arts, Culture, Education, Arts Council and a host of other agencies, organisations, associations and individuals interested or involved with music and music education. It did create quite a stir but, since then, things seem to have actually got worse! Obviously, nobody took any notice but, in the current political climate, that isn't very surprising. We have to keep trying so please download it, spread the word and feed back thoughts and ideas. I intend to write a "follow-up" report soon.
A couple of years ago, I had to have a hip replacement - probably due to all that walking! It has worked superbly and I'm now back up to doing walks of about 6 or 7 miles without too much trouble. What next? Well, I'll just try to keep fit and explore more bits of the UK and other parts of the world that I haven't seen before.
