Rumination: The Conclusions of 2012

Not getting up on a Saturday morning is an odd feeling after all those weekends of walking, but on the morning of 17th November I stayed in bed and was not roused from my slumber until 10.30am. Not walking turned out to be enormously relaxing, but even when the reality of walking was put away, I still had a pile of blogging to be done and only once that had been put to bed could I really consider the 2012 season to be done, and so 47 walks and 55 write-ups later, we are finished. So 2012 draws to a close and what have we learned?



The 2012 walking season
reaches its end.

The major lesson of 2012's walking season? Walking is a doddle, it's one of the most straight-forward hobbies you could have, You don't need specialised preparation, or too much specialised gear, you just get up and go. Sure you need good boots, waterproofs, a wicking vest and a stick (boy, do you ever need the stick), but that's such a small consideration for a hobby that gives you license to go almost anywhere. If I'd been told back in March that over the following 253 days, I would go walking on 44 of them, and have walked over 465 miles in the process,  I would never have believed that was possible. Surely that would be more than my completely unathletic physique could take, something would have to give and I'd only manage a couple of weekends per month as the year pressed on! Maybe something did, as I've spent much of the latter half of the year complaining about various aches and the later walks in Calderdale hurt my legs more than any at the start of the season, but I'm placing the blame for that on my work rather than my hobby. And that distance! Is such a large number possible even possible just on weekend and holiday walking? To put that in perspective, that is the equivalent of walking from my home in Morley to being 4 miles short of John O'Groats at the north east corner of Scotland, or going south and passing Orly airport south of Paris. If I'd been walking to the Mediterranean Sea, I'd be more than half way there already! The mind boggles, I can barely comprehend the total myself.

2012 expressed in colourful lines

 And all done without leaving the North Country! I may have lived in Yorkshire for over 19 years but I have interacted with the land more in the last 10 months than I had in the preceding 18 years, and even walked two separate routes all the way across West Yorkshire, which I'd doubt many people who'd lived their entire lives up here would have done. The North Country has provided me with so many different things to see, in terms of landscape and heritage, I've got in the moors, the summits and the wild rivers of the Dales and beyond; I've seen the full range of the landscape around my adopted city from stately homes and country churches to mills and mine-workings. Then there's been the many miles of canal paths in all directions across the county, and the discovery of many forgotten pieces of the old railways, and taking in many routes that I had looked at and planned but never inspired myself to walk. Along the way I've found out pieces of history and heritage that I had no previous knowledge of and discovered vistas previously unseen, and I've interacted with vast areas of the landscape that I had previously regarded at a distance and made many random pieces of the terrain fit together in my mind. Most significantly, my love for this land has grown generally and developed into a searing passion in some places, notably Calderdale, and I'm feeling inspired to continue to discover it and still have so many new places to venture to in the coming years.

Self at Nappa Cross, 03/03/12

I think I was particularly good, or lucky, in picking my routes as I got in a lot of well traced tracks and well made paths which didn't leave me wandering through a lot of unforgiving terrain or abandoning myself far from civilisation. I do enjoy the wilds, make no mistake, but sticking close to civilisation and having safety only a couple of miles distant at all times has been excellent for my my peace of mind in my first season. Finding the FOSCL group was particularly useful in giving me exposure to Dales paths that I wouldn't have ventured onto alone, and for providing me with friendly faces to associate with on future ventures, and I'm still counting on that group for at least five other routes in the coming seasons. It's also good to know that long-distance trails do not outface the novice walker, though admittedly doing a pair of circular trails does ensure that you don't have to spend too much time travelling away from home or money bunking up in the wilds. Also the weather has been ridiculously good, we might have had the wettest summer in years, but in terms of days spoiled by rain, I could only really claim one, and had a largely warm walking season and clear skies which lasted all the way into November.


Self at Stoodley Pike, 10/11/12

The last conclusion from 2012 is that I want to continue walking, sure the dark days of the year have me utterly knackered and desiring a rest, but I'm already looking towards my first potential trip of 2013, which is less than 7 weeks away as I write. I enjoy the solitude of walking, it gives my solitary nature some sort of purpose and I like to be alone beneath the sky, I am always thrilled to make new discoveries or to revisit haunts from my past and I like to take my camera out to capture memories. (As an aside, I took about 1,800 pictures during all of 2011's exploits, in 2012 I took almost 16,000.)There's still a lot of territory out there to exlore and new things to see, and I see no reason not to continue, after all I need to start the charity push that I so conspicuously avoided this year. When I last wrote a personal jounal, for a decade from 1992 to 2001, I stopped as I wasn't in a particularly happy place and wanted to put away a lot of the things that troubled me, and my last entry ended with these words: 'but fear is not a tone I wish to end on, I'd much rather end on a tone of hope for the future because many possibilities in the world are open to me and I cannot deny myself the opportunity to explore them, maybe I'll one day let you know how I got on...'. Well, it's taken a while, but I have now started to explore the possibilities of the world, and consider this as me letting you know that I am finding many things to enjoy, and there will be more of it next year, because this is my life now.