Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i Country Walking

1 There have been wins for wildlife Last year's State of Nature report confirmed wildlife in Britain is in alarming decline, but thanks to dedicated conservation work there are some glimmers of hope. In 2023, the RSPB returned beavers to Loch Lomond and water voles to Haweswater in the Lake District, while the red-listed corncrake population in Scotland grew and seabird numbers on Lundy in the Bristol Channel reached levels not seen since the 1930s, thanks to a project to eradicate the island's rats. The National Trust reported exceptional numbers of natterjack toadlets at Formby in Merseyside and choughs on Cornwall's Roseland Peninsula, while The Wildlife Trusts counted record glow-worms at Whitecross Green Wood near Oxford and military orchids at Homefield Wood in Buckinghamshire. And for the first time in hundreds…

CONSIDERING THE WISDOM of ancient philosophers, not to mention the renaissance, it's surprising what we still didn't know by the second half of the 18th century. We didn't know bloodletting wasn't the number one cure for most ailments, or that the human body could survive speeds greater than 15mph. We weren't sure baths didn't lead to more disease, or that everything in existence wasn't comprised of four elements, one of which was called ‘phlogiston’. We hadn't ruled out the existence of dragons and the invention of deodorant was over a century away. In short, there remained work to be done. And one of the biggest unanswered questions of all was one of the most basic. What did the earth weigh? In his Principia of 1687 Isaac Newton had formulated the…

‘At least 450 people reported seeing mysterious vehicles in the sky or on the land, or strange figures moving around the landscape.’ APPARENTLY UFOS AREN'T called UFOs anymore. The new official NASA term – presumably designed to reduce some of the hype and even stigma that comes with the phrase Unidentified Flying Object – is UAP, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon. Okay, fair enough. But for this story, I'm going to use FAA, or Ffenomen Anomalaidd Anhysbys. Which is UAP translated into Welsh. Because if any nation deserves to have its own phrase for UAPs it's Wales, whose modern-day history is as littered with rumoured alien visitations as its ancient history is drenched in dragons and faeries. Which is what brings me to Broad Haven in Pembrokeshire on a bright, crisp…

Lake District, Cumbria The Shepherds Arms Contact: 01946 861249 info@shepherdsarms.com www.shepherdsarms.com Nearest walk: The Wainwright Coast to Coast route and Ennerdale valley are right on the doorstep as are iconic fells. Accommodation: An award winning, friendly village inn with a reputation for excellent home made food, ideal for exploring Ennerdale, a remote and tranquil place to escape the crowds. Cockermouth, Cumbria Cragg Farm Camping Pods, Eaglesfield Contact: 07833 363490 catherine.mattinson@btinternet.com Nearest walk: There are many low level and high level walks to suit all abilities. The Lakes Loweswater, Crummock and Buttermere are just a 15 minute drive away. Grasmoor & Grisedale Pike ranges, Red Pike, High Stile & High Crag to name but a few. Great Gable being just a step further. Accommodation: Three luxury pods on a working farm…

CUT-OUT AND-KEEP ROUTES OUR POCKET-SIZED ROUTE CARDS START ON PAGE 83 SOUTH WEST East Prawle, Devon This is first class walking, some of the best of the whole South West Coast Path,’ say those really in the know. TURN TO WALK 2 MIDLANDS Stourport-on-Severn, Worcs See two charming towns, one of the country's finest waterfronts… and a pig playing the bagpipes. TURN TO WALK 12 WALES Tre'r-ddol, Ceredigion Follow an ancient track to the grave of one of Wales’ greatest poets, then descend through rainforest. TURN TO WALK 21 SOUTH EAST Great Kimble, Bucks Venture to a quiet corner of the Chilterns and find a prehistoric earthwork and a 17th-century windmill. TURN TO WALK 7 NORTH WEST Place Fell, Cumbria Walk the path Alfred Wainwright described as ‘the most beautiful…

The View INTERVIEW ALASTAIR HUMPHREYS IS on a quest to narrow his horizons. Early in his career as an adventurer, he was all about big ambitions. He cycled around the world, rowed across the Atlantic, and pulled a cart across the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula. Ten years ago, he scaled it all down with a book called Microadventures, which aimed to show how we can engage with wildness and push our boundaries without having to travel far from home. But his latest book Local distils the essence of exploration down even further. Over the course of a year, Alastair visits (and walks in) all 400 grid squares of an Ordnance Survey Explorer map centred on his home. And he believes it might be the most revealing adventure of them…

THE CUMBRIAN VILLAGE of Glenridding nestles in the shadow of Helvellyn and is the starting point for the hugely popular route to its summit via Striding and Swirral Edges. But there's so much more to the area than that classic walk. The village's other natural blessing is that it lies at the head of Ullswater, “that loveliest of lakes” according to Alfred Wainwright. And it's the lake that dominates both of our walks, whether we're walking beside it or gazing down upon it from a high summit. Our first walk climbs Place Fell, a feisty fell for its modest height, on a route which returns on the Ullswater shore path, which Wainwright deemed to be the most beautiful path in the Lake District. On the following day we climb the…

IT'S FREE, FUN, fits around your life and its benefits reach into every area of your life. You do it by walking an average of 2.74 miles – or a little under an hour – a day, every day – filling in your progress on your tracker chart, watching your miles build and awarding yourself every 100 miles with our gorgeous milestone stickers. You can read all about the transformational power of walking, its incredible effect on health and happiness, and get answers to your questions in our 64-page guide to the challenge available free at walk1000miles.co.uk/2024 By taking part in the challenge this year, you'll make the biggest investment possible in your future, and you'll join the friendliest community on the internet, where everybody is welcome and lives are changing,…

WRITE TO US AT: Country Walking, Media House, Lynch Wood, Peterborough PE2 6EA EMAIL: editorial@countrywalking.co.uk FACEBOOK: facebook.com/countrywalking TWITTER/X: x.com/countrywalking LETTER OF THE MONTH Quick steps to a wider world I wanted to tell you what your magazine has done for me since I started my subscription a few months ago. What an eye opener it was! Following the arrival of the first magazine I signed up to the 1000-mile challenge, and now have 400 miles under my belt. I have the calendar for the coming year, and have bought one for my son-in-law who is taking on a charity trek later in the year. Following a link in Country Walking I visited the Ordnance Survey site, and bought personalised maps as Christmas presents for friends – easy to post, and…

IEDGE MY FEET along the dark woodland path and feel my breath catch in my throat. The dusk has thickened to black and I can barely make out my outstretched hand. But it's not fear I'm feeling. It's awe. I've just glimpsed a star glittering through the bare branches. I've no idea which one and it barely matters. Each and every silver speck is a mind-bending miracle. A star's surface can burn at temperatures up to 200,000°C, its size can reach up to 1.5 billion miles across, it can travel at speeds up to 5.1 million miles an hour, and its light can twinkle through unimaginable expanses of space and time to reach where I'm walking on this Pale Blue Dot we call Earth, and home. Of course, awe isn't…

SOME PEOPLE JUST look at the world differently. When inventor Pip Youngman looked at the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal he didn't only see atranquil waterway through the Somerset countryside, but our entire solar system. Frustrated that little pictures in books could never express the immensity and dimensions of space, he decided to build a scale model of our Sun and planets along the towpath. A solar system you could walk. To fit along the canal's 22.5km, Youngman calculated each millimetre in Somerset should represent 530km in space, which means each step you take equates to over 400,000km out there. At the midpoint by Higher Maunsel Lock, he built a Sun 262cm across, then a set of planets in each direction so you can walk to a Pluto in Bridgwater or…

THERE'S A FROST underfoot and ice crystals melt beneath my hand as I clamber over a stile. A hedgerow leads towards a turreted building of red Somerset sandstone, surrounded by open fields. This secluded farm is an unlikely launch pad for a journey into the outer reaches of the universe and the story of modern global communications. In the mid-1930s, Ballifants Farm in the village of Ash Priors was home to a teenage Arthur C Clarke. His uncle, George Grimstone, was a constant source of electronic equipment: batteries, wires and old telephone sets. Arthur used these to build an intercom system to the kitchen; another to his bedroom; and for an ambitious project to send messages around the perimeter fence of the farm. But he was proudest of the light-beam…

Glenelg in Scotland is twinned with Glenelg on Mars – the only place on Earth twinned with a place on another planet. NASA chose the name for a geological feature near Curiosity's landing site: the rover visited it twice and they wanted a palindrome which read the same coming and going. The Martian Glenelg was in fact named after a Glenelg in Canada, where the rocks are thought to be a similar age to those on Mars. But the original Glenelg is in glorious walking country on Scotland's west coast, close to Glen Shiel, Knoydart and the Isle of Skye. In 2012, the village held an official twinning ceremony with a live link to NASA. And there's another cosmic link: a boulder Curiosity discovered on Mars was found to be…

For a luxurious stay overlooking Ullswater, try The Inn on the Lake – a 4-star hotel with gardens that lead down to the shore and a 2 AA Rosetteawarded restaurant (01474 823333, innonlake.co.uk, rooms from around £200). The 65-ft Aira Force waterfall adds drama to an otherwise relaxing area of woodland trails, picnic spots and red squirrels (01768 482067, nationaltrust.org.uk). At the budget end for accommodation is YHA Helvellyn, sitting high above Glenridding on the slopes of Helvellyn. Choose from a bed, a private room or a ‘landpod’ – a raised glamping pod with a retractable roof (03453 719742, yha.org.uk, beds from £18, rooms from £70). If two days of gazing at Ullswater entices you in (without getting wet) then the Ullswater Steamers are the grandest way to do it.…

1 The Sun is essential to life on Earth and has been worshipped for thousands of years, Stonehenge* was built to align with sunrise on the summer solstice and sunset on the winter one; walkers on the Inca Trail in Peru enter Machu Picchu by the Sun Gate, dedicated to Inti the Sun God; the ancient Egyptians built temples along the Nile to Rathe Sun God. 2 The Sun contains 99.86% of all the mass of the solar system and Earth could fit into it 1.3 million times over. As stars go though, it's only medium sized. Our Sun could fit 5 billion times into UY Scuti, the largest known star. 3 William Herschel, the astronomer who discovered Uranus, hypothesised in 1795 that the Sun was also a planet, had…

DECEMBER 13,1795 was a very strange day for farm labourer John Shipley, Most of it was perfectly normal – working the fields, as he always did, for landowner Edward Topham, But shortly before dusk he heard what sounded like two gunshots in the distance. Looking up, he would have spotted a strange dark object in the sky. He might have heard it fizzing through the air, but it was hurtling at such a pace that he probably didn't realise he was right in its trajectory. Before he could say “What the…”, it had slammed into the ground next to where he was standing, sending a wave of soil and mud all over him. One can only imagine the stunned look on his face as he wiped the dirt from his…

AT 02:56 UTC on 21st July 1969, ‘one small step’ by Neil Armstrong began the most famous walk in history. Descending from the Apollo Lunar Module, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon, leaving a boot print 13 inches by six in the talcum-dusty surface. His footprints survive to this day in the very thin atmosphere of our only natural satellite. Buzz Aldrin soon followed and their lunar walk was watched by 650 million people around the world. A little-known Cornish character called Arthur helped 220 million of those people witness events 238,855 miles away in space. Also known as Antenna 1, Arthur is an 85-foot parabolic dish at the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station on the Lizard Peninsula. Images from the Moon went first to Australia…

The Broad Haven incidents are perhaps the most publicised of Wales’ litany of UFO/UAP encounters, but there have been many others. On January 23rd 1974, residents living around the Berwyn Mountains (between Welshpool and Llangollen, pictured above) reported bright lights in the sky and loud noises at ground level. It was quickly suggested by the British UFO Research Association that an alien spacecraft had crashed, and that the event had been covered up by the government. One snappy tabloid headline writer christened it the Roswelsh Incident. However, declassified MoD documents suggest the true cause was an extraordinary combination of a meteor shower and a small earthquake, both occurring at the same time. In August 1996 came several reports of fastmoving lights in the sky, observed by residents and motorists in…

Walking wordsearch 10 words for a narrow passageway – and a bonus one! JUST FOR FUN ● GINNEL ● SNICKET ● WYND ● TWITTEN ● VENNEL ● TWITCHEL ● COURSE ● SHUT ● WALK ● PASSAGE Last month's answers WHERE IS THIS? Portree, Isle of Skye, Highland, Scotland PRIZE CROSSWORD FEBRUARY ANSWERS JANUARY WINNERS Jennie Page, Towcester Keith Brewster, Hexham Pete Stickler, Bristol Feb issue winners will be published next month. Full terms and conditions can be found at greatcompetitions.co.uk Win Cicerone guidebooks Three lucky winners will each get to select two guidebooks from Cicerone's range, including The National Trails of England, Scotland and Wales and Walking in Arran. For more details, Tel. 01539 562069 or visit www.cicerone.co.uk EMAIL COMPLETED PUZZLES TO: cwcrossword@bauermedia.co.uk Closing date: 23 February 2024 WIN! Bauer Media Group…