How do you get your fun? Does the prospect of spending a couple of hours crawling on hands and knees through freezing cold water sound enticing?
Or squeezing into a gap so tight you have to turn your head sideways? How about battling against a torrent of water in the dark, soaked to the skin? Sounds awful? Well, you’d be wrong. It is fun, fun, fun!
A caver enters Upper Long Churn Cave
The walker setting forth on the West Highland Way is embarking on a trip through history. Not only will his or her route pass through scenes of bloody massacre, betrayal, lawlessness and military campaigns, but the way itself is the result of the historic movement towards forging routes to enable the masses to enjoy the open countryside and escape the dark urban confines of Britain’s towns and cities.
The West Highland Way approaches Buachaille Etive Mòr in Glencoe
From the skirmishes between northern English ramblers and gamekeepers on the moors and fells of the Peak District came the notion of a long-distance path running from Derbyshire to the Scottish Borders. Tom Stephenson’s Pennine Way would be a long time coming, being opened finally in 1965, 30 years after the journalist first mooted the concept.
Earlier this year, a small team of climbers made it to the top of Mount Everest. What marked them out from the crowds of summiteers was that they had more in mind than simply standing on the roof of the world.
Everest shows its awesome beauty as sunlit cloud streaks from its ridge
Their mission in climbing to the top of the Himalaya was to get to the bottom of why some people survive life-threatening situations and others perish. Their findings may yet save hundreds of lives across the globe – for patients in hospital intensive-care units as well as high-altitude climbers who push their luck.
With the credits barely faded from our television screens, Warner Home Video has issued a two-disk DVD of the Mountain series in which former Not the Nine O’Clock News comedian Griff Rhys Jones explores Britain’s high ground.
There are two types who would fork out for the set: the mountain aficionado who can shout ‘been up that one, fallen down that crag’ at the family and the genuine ingénue who may be tempted to don boots for the first time and start to explore the magical mountain world which some of us have jealously coveted for years.
Take a stroll today through the quiet Derbyshire town of Hayfield and you’ll get a sense of understated affluence.
There are no obvious grand country houses, no palatial mansions. But it has that comfortable feeling so often encountered in country towns and villages. Adding to that feel is the steady stream of expensively clad walkers setting out from the town for the high ground of the Peak, their brightly coloured Gore-Tex rustling as they check their GPSs and consult their maps.
Picture this: a private company wants to build a massive new transport route through some of England’s wildest country.
Right: on the route, wild Pennine scenery
Thousands of foreign workers will be employed during the construction project, and local resources will be plundered to provide stone and other raw materials for building.
Row after row of shiny new waterproofs, pristine fleeces and softshells; rucksacks with high-tech materials to shave the last few grams from the scales, boots to suit every type of terrain from frozen waterfall to blistering sand. The range of outdoor gear is mindbending.
Some of the prices are pretty astounding too, and it’s frightening to tot up the amount we sometimes carry on our backs when we struggle up the mountains and fells. We’re not talking pounds weight, but pounds sterling. Try the exercise yourself and be astonished at the worth of the average walker’s kit list.
So, clutching our platinum plastic or hard-won folding beer tokens, we venture into the Aladdin’s cave of the outdoor outfitter. It’s a fair bet we’ll have taken care to research and compare features, price, colour, size, length, weight, inside leg, outside edge… But how many of us look at the ethics behind what we slip on when we take to the wilds?
Do you ever get the impression, as you’re pulling on your boots and tightening your rucksack straps that the locals are distinctly unfriendly? Do you find negotiating footpaths more of an obstacle course than a relaxing stroll? Or are you left with that uneasy feeling that the café owner would rather you’d bugger off with your muddy boots and dripping Gore-Tex?
Hebden Bridge (above) first town in Britain to get the Walkers Are Welcome accolade
Well, maybe that’s about to change, at least, if a band of activists in West Yorkshire have their way.
Alfred Wainwright said that every walk should have a goal. He also said: “This is a place only for men with hair on their chests”, so that proves nothing.
Well, how about a walk with not one, but seven goals. And not easy ones at that. We’re not talking about grade-three scrambles or anything too taxing in terms of distance. This one relies more on brain power than staying power and is a refreshing change to the usual race up and down the highest hill.
Above, little green monsters are not the only thing you'll find in Upper Wharfedale's hidden treasure chests
Thousands of walkers must every year teeter with a mixture of vertigo and lurid imagination near the lip of Yorkshire’s most famous open chasm and wonder what wonders – or horrors – it holds.
Gaping Gill's main chamber (above) during this year's August bank holiday winch meet. The main shaft is top centre, with the Rat and Mouse waterfalls entering on the left. The floor is littered with small rocks and muddy clay. The cavern regularly floods to a depth of 60 feet.
Well, twice a year walkers, and anyone else for that matter, have the chance to find out, when two potholing clubs set up winches to get the non-caving public down the 340-feet-deep Gaping Gill.
