Woodlesford to Wakefield 18/10/14

If you cast your minds all the way back to the start of this year's walking season in February, you might recall that my trip from Morley to Wakefield took in a section of the old route of the Leeds Country Way, between West Ardsley and Alverthorpe, and so another section must remain of the 1980s route, unwalked to the east, discarded when the route was sensibly re-directed entirely with Leeds district. Helpfully, this section between Fleet Bridge and Alverthorpe doesn't come into too much contact with tracks already walked in the Leeds - Wakefield hinterland, and I need a reason to stroll in this quarter after spending so many weeks in the grip of Kirklees. Also, if you recall this time last year I was owing Kirklees an apology for having neglected it so badly in 2013, and now I find myself owing an apology to Wakefield for letting it drop from my schedule so comprehensively in 2014, especially as we got out to such a good start before it only made one appearance in the second half of the year, I guess that the Wakefield Way and this land of coal and agriculture will have to wait until 2015, it's good to have something to look forward to, I guess.

Woodlesford to Wakefield, via Bottom Boat & Stanley  10.5 miles

Huddersfield to Halifax 12/10/14

I'm not going to ruminate on running out of steam as my third walking season runs into Autumn, that would involve even more writing when my enthusiasm for this blog is already at an all time low, so let's just admit that once October rolled around, I was desperate for a weekend off to have a couple of long mornings in bed and to look forwards to running down the season with some more modest exploits. That means there will be no attempt on Black Hill this year, and a late season jaunt to Mallerstang shifts to the improbable side of unlikely, and filling in the blanks on the map starts to look like the plan for the remainder of the year, as once the three years of lines have been overlaid on Google Maps, there are still a few distinct holes where my feet have failed to fall. So after the third celebration of a 40th Birthday this year, for my best friend IH whose distaste for birthdays is unmatched among all the people I know, has gone by on the Friday evening (Thai food and Ales in Hebden Bridge, if you are wondering), I've still got most a weekend to use, and going out for a Sunday morning exercise seems to be the best course, and to make a return trip to Calderdale after claiming that I would only make it out there the one time, and the plan for the day is Colne to Hebble, or out through the north of Huddersfield, and into Halifax from the south, both routes which I have not taken on my travels around the county.

Huddersfield to Halifax, via Lindley, West Vale and the Halifax Arm.  10.4 miles

Cossington Mill to Kilby Bridge 16/07/14

First summer break from work, and down country to enjoy my parents' hospitality, I need a walk that doesn't look too challenging as the season starts to warm up significantly, and as my Old Country walks so far have kept me well away from the City of Leicester, it's time to make amends for that and to plot a path along a stretch of  the Grand Union Canal. As canal companies go, this one isn't particularly old, having only been founded in 1932, but actually being an agglomeration of several older canals, notably the Regent's canal and the Grand Junction, established to attempt to stay in business as the days of the canals passed in the 20th century, and to continue to provide a link between London and Birmingham, and the East Midlands into this century. The so called Leicester Line, the longest and most significant branch from the main route, reaches from Norton Junction, Northamptonshire, to Ratcliffe on Soar, on the Nottinghamshire border, where it feeds into the River Trent, and along the way it passes all the way through the city of my birth. There probably isn't a better way to traverse the city during this season, one that keeps away from the roads that can be walked once the season turns, and gives me some countryside to enjoy whilst the hot season comes down upon us.

Cossington Mill to Kilby Bridge, via the Grand Union Canal path  16.2 miles

Wakefield to Barnsley 12/07/14

So why walk to Barnsley, I keep promising it but it keeps on dropping from my schedule, so why does it need to be done? Well, I've never wandered that far into South Yorkshire in all my travels and only know the town from my rides through on the railway to Sheffield, and more pertinently, there's a canal walk to follow, one which I missed out on my travels in 2012 because a disused canal surely couldn't be as interesting as the six active waterways in West Yorkshire? As this year has taken a much greater interest in the trails of industry around the county, this seems as good a time as any to dive into the heart of coal country to see what's left of a canal that history seems to have completely forgotten, finally getting this off the slate of unwalked routes before the summer gets much older. Anyway the Barnsley Canal is too important a canal to ignore anyway, opened in 1799 and travelling 16 miles between Wakefield and Barugh, it was a booming route through much of the 19th century before the railways dominated the transportation of coal, providing a key link between the waterways of the Aire - Calder basin and the Dearne - Dove - Don basin to the south. It enjoyed a good 150 years of service before closure came in 1953, finally done in by declining traffic and the problem that has blighted South Yorkshire ever since the commencement of deep mining, subsidence, now a channel that has retreated far into the landscape, only to be rediscovered by the most intrepid of explorers.

Wakefield to Barnsley, via the Barnsley Canal and the Trans Pennine Trail  14.3 miles

Castleford to Knottingley 12/04/14

With the 1,000 miles before I'm 40 target achieved, and three more 1,000 mile targets set, this is not the time to rest on my laurels, as there are new paths to be traced, and this journey through my mind has me thinking of a view from my childhood that I have never forgotten, and I want to go see if it's still there, and still the awesome sight that my 7-10 year old brain thought it was. It will also allow me to complete an error from my 2012 season, having bragged about walking from one side of West Yorkshire to the other, when in reality I had actually come up a few miles short, plus it's in a corner of the county that hasn't been visited yet, and it allows me to get in another stretch of Canal Walking after being forgotten during 2012's exercise, as well as earning a Better Late then Never tag, as you might have noticed that the power stations down the Aire valley have kept popping up in my commentaries, but have remained at a studied distance.

Castleford to Knottingley, via Fairburn Ings and the Aire & Calder Navigation.  10 miles

Emley Moor & the Dewsbury Arm 08/03/14

Once I started thinking about places that I have regularly regarded whilst on my travels but never visited, the list started to rapidly expand as tracks and high points started to be recalled and added to my list. So onto my plans go Almscliffe Crags (the first visible high point of Lower Wharfedale) and the pair of Great Whernside and Buckden Pike (seen from afar on so many times on my trails about the Wharfe and Aire), and then you start considering the routes you had plotted and then never gotten to, like the Barnsley Canal and the long odyssey between Towton and Marston Moor battlefields, and they have to be added on too. Plus small fragments and un-used deviations start to appear as you plot, and future routes start to get shaped to somehow add them into the schedule, so that a route might start to look somewhat eccentric, but adds in a mile or so that you wouldn't have been able to factor in otherwise. That is why the Dewsbury Arm of the Calder & Hebble Navigation got onto today's route, with the Emley Moor transmitter being the primary goal, because of all the features of Yorkshire, this really is the one that is the standard candle, the landmark that can be seen for, quite literally, many miles around.

Shepley to Dewsbury, via Shelley, Emley Moor, Flockton, Thornhill and the Dewsbury Arm 
      11.4 miles

Skipton & Flasby Fell Circular 03/11/12

As my last 10 walks from home have all been somewhere in the vicinity of the River Calder, I think it's time to find some other part of Yorkshire to explore before the season comes to an end, so it's to upper Airedale we head for a complete change of scenery. I'd fancied a shot at the FOSCL walk from Dent to Ribblehead today, but the changeable weather put me off that, and its wouldn't have linked up my walks in the Dales as the section from Garsdale to Dent would have been missing and I'm not going to venture solo into the Dales at this time of year. So instead, let's at least stitch together my canal walks in West Yorkshire to my ambles in the lower Dales and also return to part of the scene of my very first walk of 2012's season, and to get in one of the hills that I have observed many times. After all there are not that many opportunities for a canal walk and a summit on the same day!

Skipton & Flasby Fell Circular, by the Leeds & Liverpool Canal path to Gargrave,
              and return via Skipton Woods and the Springs Branch.  13.1 miles.

Cooper Bridge to Standedge 05/09/12

Catching the 220 bus from Morley to Cooper Bridge seems a much more sensible trip than riding the train to Mirfield and having a couple of miles of extra walking, even though the bus is something of a dawdlebug and wanders all over the Spen Valley en route to Huddersfield. What I hadn't realised is that September coming on means that the school term has started up again, and the service is crawling with children. Kids everywhere, and it's just as horrifying as it was when I was a youngster, and just to add to the ridiculousness, many are travelling from Queen Street to Bruntcliffe college, less than half a mile! Madness, all of it madness, and getting some downtime on the ride into darkest Kirklees is necessary to let the PTS of school memories pass away.

Cooper Bridge to Standedge, via the Huddersfield Broad & Narrow Canal paths. 12.4 miles

Mytholmroyd to Summit 01/09/12

The relief that comes with a week of being NIW is huge, especially when you have been able to relax some and refocus your interest in walking for the remainder of the year, plans are set out and targets are chosen and my head is back into the place that wants to walk. Still, I almost didn't get out as I'd got Lorna-ed the previous evening: getting hauled out for post work drinks against my better judgement. I know I mostly avoid using names here but some social interactions do need to be named after their progenitors, like getting Banner-ed: persuaded to stay out for more drinks when you really should be going home. Not really anything to do with walking, but a small insight into my world, and the reason that I got out an hour later than I had planned to.

Mytholmroyd to Summit, via the Rochdale Canal path.  10.7 miles

Mirfield to Sowerby Bridge 18/08/12

An important thing to do when walking is to trust your map and to hold the idea that what the page states is where you should be going. The map is your friend and your helpful guide and you must believe in it and what it tells you, but sometimes it is wrong and will lead you astray, lead you into potentially dangerous places and you will wonder why the map misled you. Then you will realise that the map has one major limitation, it is only as good as the person reading it and the flaw is not with the map, it is with the interpretation of it, and you led yourself into peril and can be the only one to blame for your actions. If you are wondering how this relates to river and canal walking, read on...

Mirfield to Sowerby Bridge, via the Calder & Hebble Navigation path. 12.9 miles.

Wakefield to Mirfield 11/08/12

I've been resident in West Yorkshire for nearly 19 years now, and I'm amazed that I can still find areas near to Leeds that are still completely terra incognita to me, and that is the case today. Despite having taken all sorts of routes across the county over the years, my only interaction with the lands between Wakefield and Dewsbury has been tearing up and down the M1. I would have ridden that way taking the train from Morley to Wakefield via Mirfield but failure of the trains to run to time means that I have to go the long way round, via Leeds, before I can venture into the unknown.

Wakefield to Mirfield, via the Calder & Hebble Navigation path.  11.6 miles

Castleford to Wakefield 04/08/12

New Shoes: Does anyone else do the skit of discovering that somebody has new footwear and going 'Noo Shoos! Noo Shoos!' repeatedly? I do, and have no idea why! But it's new boots day for me, and having made no attempt of any kind to break them in, let's hope they're not going to rub me up, I'd worried that they might pinch a bit when I bought them, but today they felt a bit on the roomy side, so I hope my feet don't slide all around inside them. They're as comfy as you could want though, and it's going to be nice to be able to wade through puddles and not worry about leakage, and maybe I should take good care of them too, like scrubbing them occasionally and not letting them get them all scuffed up, I might finally look like a proper walker! So, let's hit the trail and get these new All-Leather babies dirty!

Castleford to Wakefield, via the Aire & Calder Navigation path. 9.8 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

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

Sowerby Bridge to Mytholmroyd, plus Bonus Stroll 05/05/12

Ever since my closest friends moved to Mytholmroyd in 2006, I've been entertaining the idea of walking there or back, but that plan has a couple of major drawbacks, most notably the fact that it is a really long way. Morley to Mytholmroyd is 19 miles, by the direct route and 26 by the prettiest, and doing that I'd probably be in no state to socialise if visiting or having to walk off the hangover from the previous night if going home. Walking back to grab the train at Mirfield looks like a possibility, but there are virtually no trains on a Sunday, my favoured travel-home day, and doing that on a Saturday after the work/booze mix of Friday does not appeal all that much. So if that walk does ever get done, it will probably be done in pieces, starting today, kicking off Active May.

Active May: Day One

Sowerby Bridge to Mytholmroyd via the Rochdale Canal path  4.2 miles
 plus Bonus Stroll  2.8 miles