Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i Country Walking

NESTLED AT THE head of Loch Tay sits Killin – a small village with a giant personality. It has every kind of walk, from family strolls along the shores of the loch and through the surrounding woodlands, to the more challenging Munros (Scottish mountains over 3000ft) of the Tarmachan ridge and the Lawers range. As you enter the village from the west you cross the magnificent Falls of Dochart. The River Dochart originates in the foothills of Ben Lui near Tyndrum, wending its way through Killin and into Loch Tay, after which it becomes part of the Tay, the longest river in Scotland. Killin is situated in the central part of Scotland known historically as Breadalbane, translated from Gaelic to mean ‘the high part or upper part of Scotland’. The…

PART 2: The Most Adventurous Valley Walk SO, CAN A PATH beside a lake be as much of a challenge as a high-level hike? Well, yes. Just look at this photo. Welcome to Wasdale, and specifically to the slopes where the north-west face of Illgill Head plunges headlong into the deepest lake in England. Not many people call it Illgill Head, mind. To most observers, this face is known as The Screes, or the Wast Water Screes. From the top of the fell at 1983ft, the face slides 1723ft to the lakeside – and it doesn’t stop there. In fact the hillside continues for a further 258ft down into the depths. But just above the waterline, there is a path. An extraordinary path. A traverse leading all the way from…

THE ENGLISH COUNTY of Hampshire is a place of rolling chalk hills and vales, criss-crossed by 3000 miles of footpaths. Walk a few miles north of Winchester, near the bucolic village of East Stratton, and you’ll find those paths skirt a country estate called Stratton Park. This rural idyll once belonged to a founder of Barings Bank. Notorious, now, for its 1995 collapse after a rogue trader lost £827 million, Barings Bank was founded in 1762 by three sons of John Baring, a Bremen wool merchant who’d settled in Exeter. The bank was led by Sir Francis Baring and, from the early 19th century, his son Sir Alexander. At this time, Baring Brothers and Co. was the most powerful merchant bank in Europe. Specialising in international trade and loaning money…

Sea to Summit for giving us the Telos TR3 (£725) to use for this feature – a three-person wild camping tent that gave ample room for me, Dylan and our kit. It weighs just over 2kg, has doors on both sides, and it packs away into three stuff sacks to share the load. Extra features include a rainfly that can be set up first to keep the inside dry, a lightbar that diffuses light from a headtorch, and a ‘hangout mode’ that turns the rainfly into a semi-open shelter (seatosummit.co.uk).…

IT’S CALLED A WORM. It looks like a snake. It is neither. The slow worm is a legless lizard, and a beautiful one too, with smooth scales that shimmer like burnished metal. Female slow worms often sport a dark stripe down the back; the male is sometimes speckled with sky-blue dots. Like a snake, it flicks its tongue in and out to ‘smell’ the air. Unlike a snake, it can blink its eyes. It can also amputate its own tail. Under attack, its first defence is a foul-smelling poo, but if that doesn’t work, it fractures its spine with a sharp muscle contraction and drops its stilltwitching tail to distract its predator and make its escape. Its scientific name, anguis fragilis, means ‘brittle eel’ and while the tail does grow…

MAY ANSWERS APRIL WINNERS Lynn Weir, Carluke, Heather Price, Powys, Clive Williams, Cheshire May 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: 20 June 2025 WIN! Bauer Media Group (the publishers of Country Walking) have other great offers and promotions that we think you’ll like, but if you’d rather not hear about these offers, please tick this box □ For our privacy policy visit bauerdatapromise.co.uk Bauer Media Group consists of Bauer Consumer Media Ltd, Bauer Radio Ltd…

PART 1: The Easiest Mountain THE IDEA BEHIND these two parallel stories was simple, and it evolved from two questions: 1) What’s the easiest mountain walk in the Lake District? 2) What’s the most adventurous low-level walk in the Lake District? You can see our thinking. The received wisdom is: if you’re gonna try and climb one of the big Lake District fells, you’ve got a tough day ahead of you. Steep slopes, stony paths, rocky outcrops, spiky bits. Conversely, if you’re a seeker after thrills and adrenaline rushes and big challenges, wisdom says the valleys of Lakeland have nothing to offer. You must surely need to go up high to find that sort of thing. But we asked the questions because we believe those two ‘wisdoms’ aren’t really that…

Middle Fell This one’s a perfect companion to the Wast Water circuit, as it’s an easy(ish) high fell with a cracking view across to those infamous Screes. Wainwright called it ‘a motorist’s mountain’ as it can easily be accessed from the laybys along the north-western shore of Wast Water. Initially the path climbs into Greendale (where the late, great fellrunner Joss Naylor worked for most of his life as a sheep farmer) before veering sharp right up a steady path to Middle Fell’s 1909ft summit at grid ref NY150072. The view is sensational – not just the Screes, but one of the very best views of Scafell Pike and Scafell, too. Scafell Pike’s topknot is usually hidden from the Wasdale valley – but from here you can gaze upon the…

HE LOVES ME, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not: the petal-plucking game of romance is thought to have started with the oxeye daisy. From May to September the white and gold blooms of our largest native daisy bob merrily in meadows and verges across Britain. Up to two inches across, the flowers can gleam so bright on summer nights that the plant is also known as moon daisy and moonpenny. Each daisy appears to have the cheery simplicity of a flower a child would crayon, but it is in fact a complex beast. What appears to be one bloom is a composite of many flowers: the yolk-yellow centre is a collection of disc florets; the white ‘petals’ surrounding it are ray florets. The plant can…

IF YOU’VE EVER watched a butterfly flutter by on a summer day, it’s hard to imagine it making purposeful progress over any distance. But the painted lady does. Weighing less than a gram, it migrates north from sub-Saharan Africa in spring, and back again in autumn. This 6000-mile round trip isn’t made by individual insects but by successive generations: each painted lady flies several hundred miles, lays eggs, and its offspring continue the journey, often riding the wind at altitudes over 1500 feet. The butterfly life-cycle is of course extraordinary, starting with that tiny egg glued to a leaf. It hatches, as Eric Carle taught us, into a very hungry caterpillar which eats so voraciously it splits and sheds it skin four or five times over as it grows. Painted…

Matthew Pike, Routes Editor Miles walked this month: 104 Route 4 in this issue is a stunning walk written by Andy Weekes which features cannons, lighthouses, beaches and red squirrels. But one thing that really caught my eye was that each footpath he used has a name. Not descriptive ones – there are no paths called ‘Rocky Road, ‘Mud Fest’ or ‘Mind Your Head’ – but rather useful ones, such as CS31 and N201. This is because Andy’s walk was on the Isle of Wight, where all footpaths are named like this, and marked as such on signage – a brilliant system that got me wondering if every local authority could do this. Apart from aiding navigation, it would lift the status of our footpaths. Far trickier for a landowner…

1 We can dim the sun …and scientists are planning to test whether it can help in the fight against global warming. The research, funded by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, will involve spraying particles into the stratosphere to deflect a tiny proportion of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface and – it’s hoped – help to cool things down a bit. Elsewhere, on England’s south coast, a scheme called SeaCURE is also trying to achieve a climate breakthrough by removing carbon from the ocean. It turns the carbon into gas, which is then concentrated and stored. The low-carbon water is then released back into the sea to absorb more CO2 from the air. The theory is that removing carbon from water might be more efficient than removing…

A HEALTHY HEART. CALVES of steel. Guilt-free Frazzles. Appeasing the dog. There are already a gazillion more reasons to go for a walk than there are to stay at home. And now we have a gazillion and one: planting trees. The idea comes from entrepreneurs Jon Bunning and Keith Mortimer, the creators of Treekly – an app that rewards your walking by planting trees when you hit milestones. The app is free to use, and a tree will be planted when you walk over 5000 steps for 20 days in a month. And considering 5000 steps is around 2-2½ miles, it means anyone doing our Walk1000Miles challenge – which averages 2.74 miles per day -could be using their miles to create forests. “We hear from lots of our users saying…

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 Caught on the back foot Reading Stuart Maconie’s Found on Foot (April issue) about walking backwards reminded me of a walk I ‘volunteered’ to go on with a friend who was training for an ultra marathon. We walked from our village in the Rhondda valleys to Pen y Fan in the Bannau Brycheiniog, and in order to get there for sunrise we had to do a ‘little’ walk of 35 miles, in the dark. On the way we endured two miles of tussocks and knee-high bog. I actually fell asleep whilst walking too. When we got to the bottom of Pen y Fan, we realised…

I love the gear reviews in Country Walking, but would love to see you test more high street stores, as brands like Rab, Montane and the like are very high priced for people starting out. I use Mountain Warehouse and Go Outdoors, as the quality is good and at a fraction of the price. I use Mountain Warehouse’s IsoCool wicking tops at a cost of £9.99, micro fleeces at £20 and an insulated jacket for £20 with rating down to -10. My Highlander sleeping bag goes with me everywhere, even on the Three Peaks Challenge! Kevin Weller CW says: Great point Kevin. We do try to make clear that low-cost kit can often do the job perfectly well depending on your needs. We test a fair bit of Mountain Warehouse kit…

THE SONG OF the skylark is a beloved sound of summer, as notes cascade from the heavens in what the poet Shelley called a ‘rain of melody’. Weaving together up to 460 different syllables, its song has also been compared to the sound of dial-up internet, or perhaps most poetically as ‘a silver chain of sound, Of many lines without a break’ in George Meredith’s The Lark Ascending – which inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams’ famous piece of music. And the skylark’s ascent is extraordinary. The male lifts vertically on furiously flapping wings, singing all the while, in a show of strength designed to lure mates and intimidate rivals. Alauda arvensis can be incredibly hard to spot; often no more than a vibrating speck in the blue. Up close, they fall…

THREE MARBLES CLING to Dylan’s owl – one gold, one red, one green. They’re not really marbles, but they certainly look like them. They’re actually four-spot orb weaver spiders – chubby vibrant gemstones that have taken a liking to my son’s favourite cuddly toy. You might think this would horrify a seven-year-old, but he’s fascinated by them. He’s never seen these colourful creatures before. Neither have I. As we sit next to a tent in our own giant meadow, the sun that has now vanished from view turns the sky golden before a deep blue sets in, gradually darkening with every sleepy blink of the eyes. “Look Dylan!” I whisper excitedly, wide awake again. “A barn owl.” We both watch as it glides silently towards the giant oaks that surround…

NEITHER NORTH NOR south, east nor west, just somewhere fairly average in the middle of England: Northamptonshire has never been a destination county. That’s unless you like your hedges lush, your woodlands ancient and your buildings the colour of honey. Full of sinuous lines and subtle forms, it’s a county that’ll get under your skin if you give it a chance. One person – the writer ‘BB’ – knew the secrets of its beauty more than most and shared them with the outside world for many of his 85 years. BB was the pen name of Denys WatkinsPitchford, and it comes from the calibre of shot used in wild fowling. This shooting of geese and ducks was one of his passions, along with fishing and – surprisingly – conservation. The…