Pennine Way Memories

On Bleaklow

In the New Year, my thoughts tend to be about my plans for walks in the year ahead but recently, as well as making plans to continue my LEJOG hike in April, I have been looking back through my blogs of some of my favourite walks. I have walked in many spectacular areas and enjoyed most of them, but to date, I think my favourite thru-hike was the Pennine Way. I have tackled this twice, once in 2014 when, because of a bout of shingles contracted around three weeks before I starting the hike, I was forced to retire just before the halfway point at Keld. In hindsight, I really wasn't well enough to attempt the walk as I had barely recovered from the illness and I reluctantly finally arrived at this conclusion and retired with the intention of returning to Keld to continue the walk the following year. 

Whitely Pike

As it happened, I re-started the walk from Edale in 2015, setting off with a friend who unfortunately got injured and had to pull out at Middleton in Teesdale. From this point, and as the Pennine Way headed into the more remote terrain of the Northern Pennines, I found my enjoyment of the walk increasing with every mile. I relished the lonely, wild moors and hills and found that I disagreed profoundly with the many opinions I had read that this was a boring route across featureless bogs with little to recommend it. For me, it had that extra ingredient of wildness that simply wasn't present on other long distance hikes I had walked previously. By the time I reached the Cheviots, the weather turned and I spent over ten hours on the final day battling a combination of driving rain, mist and flooded peat bogs as I crossed the lonely hills to the finish point at Kirk Yetholm. I saw only one other person on this section and despite the challenging conditions, I thought it was a fantastic finale to what had for me been the best through hike I had ever walked. 

Kirk Yetholm

I have since walked most of the Cape Wrath Trail, which is also a spectacularly remote and tough route, but I have yet to do this as a continuous hike. I will re-acquaint myself briefly with the Pennine Way in the spring as I continue my hike to John O'Groats as I intend walking the section from Mill Hill to Gorple reservoir before heading off on a more westerly route towards the Lake District. I know however, that when I leave the Pennine Way, a part of me will be fondly remembering that epic trip along this iconic trail in 2015. 

Kirk Yetholm

The Coast to Coast Walk 2011 - Richmond to Robin Hood's Bay

After leaving Richmond, we crossed the flat Vale of Mowbray in beautiful sunshine to Ingleby Cross. This signalled the end of the good weather though as we walked the final three days in rain that was at times very heavy, particularly on the Cleveland Hills. We reached Robin Hood's Bay after thirteen days of walking.

Sawyer Mini-Filter Flow Test

I created this video because I've read so many opinions online and also watched Youtube videos claiming that the filter is difficult to use because it takes so long to filter water. I find this baffling as I have always found it efficient and fairly quick to use. Using a stopwatch, this video shows how long it takes to filter a litre of water.

Land's End to John O'Groats 2019

Having halted my Land's End to John O'Groats walk in the summer, I was anxious to get back on the trail ASAP to enable me to complete the entire walk within less than one year. The original plan was to walk the whole route in one but due to unforeseen circumstances, I decided to temporarily halt the walk in Hay-on- Wye. This time, rather than setting off in the summer, I am planning to start hiking in the middle of April 2019. There are two reasons for choosing April, one being that it will mean that I finish the walk in well under a year and also, I should hopefully finish before the main midge season starts in Scotland. I also intend wild camping more often on this trip. Although I camped a fair bit in the summer, I mostly used official campsites as I found locating wild campsites in the areas I was walking through difficult. 

Now however, I will be walking through more remote hill country so I can avoid using too many campsites, some of which in the summer in the West Country were grossly overpriced. My route will be roughly as follows, Offa's Dyke path to Chirk followed by a combination of the Maelor Way, South Cheshire Way, Gritstone Trail along with a few more minor trails to reach the Pennine Way near Hayfield. Having walked the Pennine Way in 2015, I am not interested in walking it again so soon so will be leaving it fairly quickly to follow various trails including the Pennine Bridleway to the Forest of Bowland. After reaching the Lake District I will walk the Cumbria Way to Carlisle, then a combination of the Annandale Way, West Highland Way, Rob Roy Way, East Highland Trail and the John O'Groat's Trail to the end.

Altra Lone Peak 4.0 - First Impressions

The Coast to Coast Walk 2011 - Borrowdale to Patterdale

For Day 3 of our 2011 Coast to Coast hike, we had a short, easy day climbing over to Grasmere from Borrowdale. Here, we caught a bus to Ambleside as we could not find a BnB in Grasmere. The following day, we headed through the Grisedale Pass to Patterdale where we camped at the Side Farm campsite. The video quality in some scenes isn't the best as it was filmed on a fairly basic, pocket camcorder.

The Coast to Coast Walk 2011 - St.Bees to Borrowdale

In 1998, I solo walked my first ever long-distance trail, The Coast to Coast walk through northern England taking twelve days to complete it. This was for me the realisation of a long-held desire to walk a long distance trail and sparked a fascination with long distance hiking that I have to this day. In 2011, I decided that I would hike the trail again only this time, I would be hiking with a friend. Another difference to my 1998 hike was that a tent formed the majority of the 'accommodation´ along the way, camping being something that I had not even considered on that first hike. The 2011 hike was a great success, although we did suffer some pretty horrible weather over the last three days but overall, we thoroughly enjoyed the walk, which took us thirteen days. I have since hiked the trail for a third time with my wife and had a more leisurely trip this time taking sixteen days to complete it. Why am I writing about my 2011 hike it now? Well, after completing the hike, I made a Youtube video of clips and photos taken along the way and unfortunately included quite a lot of music that violated Youtube's  copyright policy, which caused them to mute the audio track. I have just begun re-editing the material from this trip into short videos, this is the first of these.