Egerton to Ramsbottom (almost) 21/07/12

Instead of additional walking on the 19th, I had my parents visit and took a nostalgic trip on the Scarborough Spa Express, getting in a repeat steam-hauled trip on the oft-travelled rails of 30 years ago. Only a three hour turnaround at the coast didn't allow much time for a wander into the unknown, but it did give me time for shopping, and Mountain Warehouse offered me up a pair of new walking boots to replace my leaky pair. So a successful (and expensive!) trip there, then, and as I've got my parents up country, that's a fine excuse to head over to Bolton for a family gathering and for me to get in a walk around the periphery of the West Pennine Moors.

Egerton to Ramsbottom (almost).  8.9 miles

Leeds to Castleford 17/07/12

Having done the walk along the Aire valley upstream from Leeds it seem only natural to do the path downstream as my next stretch of canal walking, and having chosen to start from Victoria Bridge to go south-east, a look at the Leeds waterfront guide has me realising that I have mad virtually no interaction with that area in all the time I've lived and worked in Leeds. I visited the Royal Armouries in 1997, and have had regular sessions in the Adelphi on Hunslet Road, but other than the regular bus rides over Leeds Bridge and an almost pathological obsession with the level of the Aire, I have no knowledge of the area. That needs to be rectified, and I reflect that my colleague who told me to walk the streets of Leeds might have been on to something after all.

Leeds to Castleford, via the Aire & Calder Navigation path.  13.2 miles

Long Preston to Malham via Gordale Scar 14/07/12

My first week of Summer hols comes around much more quickly than I had anticipated, and I don't have any expensive trips away planned, just good old-fashioned walking and getting back out to the Dales again so I can put the horrible experience of a month ago behind us. Also I can continue my attempts to walk from, or to, every station on the railway line between Skipton and Kirkby Stephen, starting at the easily forgotten station of Long Preston, and to renew some acquaintances with the FOSCL group under altogether more favourable circumstances.

Long Preston to Malham, via Gordale Scar.  13.3 miles

Saltaire to Skipton 07/07/12

The first week of July seemed to feature almost constant rain, with it landing especially hard at the end of the week, but the weather projection for the Saturday remained as sunny throughout, so despite declaring walking to be an almost certain impossibility on the Friday, I set out on the following morning knowing that Airedale has at least 7 hours of sunshine forecast for it. The crazy summer weather is looking like it will be keeping me alert and on my toes, but I'm gonna enjoy the season regardless of what the weather does!

Saltaire to Skipton, via the Leeds & Liverpool Canal path.  15.9 miles

Leeds to Saltaire 30/06/12

Nearly four months into my odyssey of walking and it's odd that I haven't managed to walk out of or into Leeds yet. It is the city in which I currently work, and lived from 1993 to 2007, but it has somehow not gotten onto my walking schemes. One of my colleagues recently wondered why I walk to all sorts of remote places but don't pound the pavements of Leodis, and my response was that while the city did have plenty worth seeing, the streets in between aren't really somewhere that I want to walk. There are only really three green corridors out of Leeds, and two of them follow the Aire and the paths on Leeds' canals, and canal paths look ideal for summer walking, nicely level without too much remoteness and presenting an opportunity to get plenty of miles onto my 1,000 target without too much strenuous activity in a summer that doesn't seem to know if it's going to be hot or wet. So, for the first time since my nocturnal ramble of August 2011, Let us walk out of the City of Leeds...

Leeds to Saltaire, via the Leeds & Liverpool Canal path.  13.7 miles

Rumination: 1,000 Miles

The evening of 22nd June saw one of the most singularly extraordinary rainstorms I have seen since December of 1996 (when it rained solidly for a week, and the roof of my house leaked) the sheer volume or water that came down finished off just about any interest I might have had in walking the following day. It was also prudent to stay in that weekend as I might have been needed for emergency flood relief as my friends in Mytholmroyd had been updating Facebook with anxious reports of the river rising and then having a flood in their kitchen. It turns out that it was nowhere near as bad as it sounded, but 'kitchen under water' sounded immediately alarming to me, at least. So another weekend didn't get walked, and I felt pretty miserable for it, especially as the day turn out to be pretty nice after the deluge of the previous night.

Three Dales: Horton-in-Ribblesdale to Kettlewell 16/06/12

Dropped a Saturday on the 9th June, not least because I was bloody well knackered after doing more than 50 miles over my long week off and then returning to work, so when the next weekend wheels around, I wasn't going to miss out, I was walking no matter what, and anyways it was the last weekend of spring and that would surely mean a good long day for walking. Three Yorkshire Dales in one day, seemed such an inviting prospect too, until my weather eye watched the BBC weather site giving progressively worse predictions for the coming weekend. Well, thinks I, I've not had a day of walking in foul weather, how bad can it be? Let's just say, writing this might well induce post-traumatic stress...

Active June: Day Two

Three Dales: Horton in Ribblesdale to Kettlewell.  13.2 miles

Shipley to Ilkley via Rombalds Moor 04/06/12

Ever since hatching the idea of 'walking as pastime', there has been one walk that I have always had on the slate and never gotten done, and since 2007, I haven't had the excuse of transport costs to dissuade me from doing it. That walk is the trip from Shipley to Ilkley across Rombalds Moor as it's a journey into spectacular bleakness that isn't a day's excursion away and it's a relatively modest distance on a well-defined path too. Probably cowardice on my part for leaving it aside for so long, but how it got missed off my to do list for the first three active months is something of a mystery. So let's go out for Jubilee Bank Holiday Monday, and do my bit for Britain by patriotically engaging with the countryside. Active June? Yeah, why not?

Active June: Day One

Shipley to Ilkley via Rombalds Moor.  9.2 miles

Garsdale to Sedbergh 02/06/12

So our break away comes to an end, and that's a shame for the obvious reasons, and for the fact that Kirkby Stephen has a mini walking festival coming up for the Jubilee Bank Holiday. We're not paying for any more days away though, and we pack up and express our gratitude to the owners of Manor Lodge before we head away. Just to make the end of the holiday that bit more depressing, the weather has taken a turn for the cold and foggy as we drive off down Mallerstang to the start point of my last walk of the week away, to Garsdale station where my parents can drop me off and I can assure them that they should have no trouble at all with filling 5 and a half hours with a ride out to Windermere so Mum can can get her obligatory visit to the Lakeland store.

Spring Jollies: Day Seven

Garsdale to Sedbergh.  10.3 miles