Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i Country Walking

1 Essex has 21 brand new islands The coastline at RSPB Wallasea in Essex is changing. Higher tides are swamping mudbanks which, combined with longer droughts, means liveable tidal habitats are shrinking for species like lapwings and avocets (pictured). Past projects have seen new islands built to help the birds, but these are already succumbing to the rapidly changing conditions. The latest islands – 21 in all – have been created behind a protective sea wall, which means the RSPB can control water levels using sluices, keeping conditions just right for waders and a population of water voles. 2 King of horror has made a walk scary If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you cross Weatherman Walking with Speed and The Hunger Games, then check out The Long Walk. This dystopian…

IF YOU’RE PRONE to a bit of doomscrolling and tempted to think what awful times we live in, consider the plagues of the past. Since antiquity, mysterious diseases have stalked the land, wreaking abysmal havoc on a bewildered British population. Imagine it: in a time before news, before medical understanding, before any recourse to help or counsel, suddenly and for no reason people around you start bleeding - internally and externally – to death, as happened between 250-270 AD. Or your neighbours’ fingers blacken and skin begins to bubble in inexplicable ‘buboes’, that will first necrotise then rot in the brief time their hosts have to live – as first started happening in the plague of 664. Or the millions who would suddenly shrink from the light, sicken and drown…

THE SEXTON BEETLE has nothing to do with sex. Quite the opposite, in fact: a sexton usually refers to a member of the clergy devoted to keeping the churchyard nice and tidy, whose duties might also include digging graves as well as tending to them. Thence cometh the name of the sexton beetle, a rather gruesome little bug famous for burying small dead animals. Once they’ve detected something small and dead using the acute sensory receptors on their antennae, they work in a male and female pair together to dig underneath it, gradually sinking the carcass and covering it with soil. They then prepare the dead as food for their young, stripping it of fur or feathers, rolling it into a neat ball, sometimes coating it with antibacterial secretions to…

JUST LANDED MEINDL Baltimore GTX RRP: £225 Target price: £200 Reviewed by: Fliss Freeborn, StaffWriter MEINDL, THE GERMAN boot brand, was founded in 1683, when King Charles II was still on the throne in England. The marque pre-dates steam engines, hot air balloons and the smallpox vaccine. Over 300 years later, the brand is still family-owned and based in Bavaria. It takes soul-deep quality and consistency to sustain that kind of longevity. The Baltimore Lady GTX is my first ever pair from this storied brand, and since it came into my life six weeks ago, I’ve barely taken a step without them on. The Baltimore GTX feels incredibly well-made, with great stitching, high-quality metal hardware, and a pleasingly timeless style. These don’t come with any modern gimmicks gaudy colourways or six inches of heel…

WHAT DO YOU think was going through my mind when the photo above was taken? ‘When can I get off this hill?’ … ‘How long can I keep this smile going for?’ … ‘Is this why Nick and Jenny said they were too busy for this job?’ Oddly, I remember feeling how strange it was to feel so warm. Here I was in a needle-like blizzard trying to find my next footstep in the deepest snow North Yorkshire had had for a decade, and yet I was actually teetering along the border between comfort and being slightly too warm. I have never felt the benefits of top-notch winter clothing more emphatically in my life. So many of my winter childhood memories involve fingers too chilled to move; and aching, drenched…

PRIZE CROSSWORD OCTOBER ANSWERS SEPTEMBER WINNERS David Holvey, Rugby Maria Playdell, Lancashire John Hooley, Nottingham October issue winners will be published next month. Full terms and conditions can be found at greatcompetitions.co.uk WIN! Win Cicerone guidebooks Three lucky winners will each get to select two guidebooks from Cicerone’s range, which includes 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: 7 November 2025 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…

THIS STORY BEGINS with a sign. Nailed to a fingerpost in the Lancashire village of Barley, the waymarker shows a crone with a hooked nose and prominent chin. Soon, another sign: this one etched with a woman in a pointed hat flying on a broomstick. A third notice in pink and purple lettering warns: ‘Beware of Witches’. They conjure the cartoonish character of a wicked witch: cackling, warty, tending a bubbling cauldron, waving a wand with a black cat in tow. But here in the shadow of Pendle Hill, witches are serious business. In 1612, 10 local people were put to death by hanging on charges including sorcery and murder by maleficium. On a stormy autumn day, it would be hard to imagine a scene more suited to this sombre…

IS THERE A more dastardly name for a mushroom than The Sickener? Sure, destroying angel comes close, perhaps – but that cheeky ‘er’ suffix on sickener gives this pretty little brittlegill its own odious agency. The definite article adds to its main character energy too. You can just imagine it scuttling into a pine clearing, cackling, ‘I am The Sickener and I shall cause you great pain.’ Its other name, Russula emetica, also warns of its nauseating effect, but really, that’s the extent of the sickener’s power. It won’t kill you, just turn you into a human Catherine wheel for the next 24 hours or so. It also happens to be a particularly beautiful mushroom: a child-like drawing of a toadstool with a shiny red cap, white gills and a…

DO NOT TRY this at home (or anywhere) but apparently you can eat the red berries of the yew tree. They’re said to taste like lychees. Crunch through the seeds in the middle of the berry, though, and that’s you snookered: convulsions, nausea, vomiting, and unconsciousness, followed by death. The rest of the yew tree, including the bark, needles and sap, is also a no-go for foragers: just 50g is the lethal dose, and any mushrooms growing from a yew’s trunk can also be infused with its deadly taxine alkaloids, which when ingested lead to cardiac arrest. The toxicity of the yew tree forms part of a long legacy across European folklore. Symbolically, yews have stood for millennia at the boundary between life and death, a living monument in churchyards…

THE TREES LOOK like fire. I’m standing at the edge of the Hanbury Crater on a chilly day in autumn, and the descending rows of birch and larch have turned striking shades of gold, scarlet and orange, like spires of flame reaching out of the void. The irony is inescapable, because this vast hole in the ground was created in a split second of fire and fury. Trees and soil were thrown into the sky; a mushroom cloud rose above the Staffordshire landscape. Dams broke, fields vanished. And the earth was ablaze. This is the Hanbury Crater. Site of the largest ever explosion on UK soil, Britain’s largest ever wartime disaster, and one of the biggest non-nuclear detonations in human history. There is a sombreness to this place, one that…

Email your picture, along with a few words about the walk and your contact details to cwroutes@bauermedia.co.uk THIS MONTH’S PRIZE WINNER SKIDDAW, Route 15, June 2025 In August, we spent a week walking in the Lake District, aiming to tackle some of its iconic fells. I prefer steady paths to rocky scrambles and this route was ideal: steady terrain, rewarding yet manageable, with ever-expanding views all the way up. From the summit, the panorama was breathtaking – made even more so when my partner dropped to one knee, making Skiddaw a mountain we’ll never forget. Bethany Fowler (soon to be Luffman), Devon LLANMARTIN, Route 19, January 2025 What an absolute treat! Some sections were a bit overgrown (thanks crazy summer!) but what a little gem. It’s so easy to overlook the…

KESWICK HAS AN embarrassment of walking riches. Not only are there a host of fine hills such as Cat Bells, Blencathra and Helvellyn all just a short bus hop away, but there’s varied woodland and lakeside walking right from the town itself. One walk which combines hill, woodland and lake directly from the town is our first walk: Walla Crag and Derwent Water. Look out for red squirrels on this route as you pass through pockets of oak woodland to climb above the sheer crags that overlook Derwent Water, returning on a fabulous lakeside path. However, no stay in Keswick is complete without climbing Skiddaw. This 3000-footer looms over the town rather like Mont Blanc dominates Chamonix. It can be climbed direct from the town, but the connoisseur’s route is…

Your View EMAIL: editorial@countrywalking.co.uk • FACEBOOK: facebook.com/countrywalking • INSTAGRAM: @countrywalking WRITE TO US AT: Country Walking, Media House, Lynch Wood, Peterborough PE2 6EA We read with interest Matthew Pike’s fascinating interview with Kevin Parr in the October issue, about creatures which shouldn’t be here, and it reminded us of an incident while we were walking during a holiday in Dumfries & Galloway in July last year. We were enjoying a beautiful walk from Kircudbright (pronounced kurkoobree) along the banks of the River Dee when we were stopped in our tracks by a surprising sight. Fortunately, as is the case on nearly every walk we do, I was carrying my camera and telephoto lens and managed to fire off several shots including the attached – yes, it’s a kookaburra! (In Kurkoobree!)…

THE BARN OWL is an enigma of a bird. It makes an ungodly shrieking noise and builds nests out of its own mouse-vomit (experts call these regurgitations ‘pellets’ but we know they’re really rodent-flavoured chunder). Yet a rare glimpse of one, its face a heart-shaped moon and its flight as soft and silent as winter snow, is always a reminder that it is one of the most ethereally beautiful creatures ever to take to the skies. Birds have long been feathered vehicles for human superstition, but unlike ravens (pretty ominous, see p66) and robins (the plucky wee good guys), folklore flaps about when it comes to the moral judgement of the barn owl. Being a creature with a cool 60 million year evolutionary history, it features across a huge range…

IN A DARKENED farmhouse in the late 1700s, two French soldiers are sitting slouched at a table. One is finishing his 12th mug of Portuguese wine, the other has fallen asleep in his. The conscious one downs the final drops, murmurs something incoherent, then starts to doze off himself. At that moment the front door bursts open. It’s a deafening noise, yet only one of the men is startled enough to lift his head. By the time he has opened his swirling eyes, there’s a pitchfork inches from his nose. Behind this threatening instrument is the most furious-looking woman he has ever seen. She uses the pitchfork to jab the other soldier from his slumber, then snarls at both men through gritted teeth. The Frenchmen don’t understand what she says,…

CHATGPT. PERPLEXITY. GEMINI. Millions of us around the world are wondering how artificial intelligence might take our jobs. We’re not the first to question the rise of new technology. In the 12th century, ‘walkers’ employed to tread woollen cloth were outraged by the introduction of the water-powered fulling mill. In 1589, Queen Elizabeth I refused to grant a patent for a Stocking Frame, because she feared it would ‘bring to nothing the work of young maidens who maintained themselves by knitting’. Most famously, the 19th-century Luddites smashed mechanised looms and machines in textile mills. Named after legendary figurehead King Ludd (who some believed roamed Sherwood Forest like Robin Hood), the moniker is still slapped on anyone slow to embrace the new. And here in Kent, rural labourers took their hammers…

A CONSPIRACY. A TREACHERY. An unkindness. The collective nouns for our largest crow speak of centuries of suspicion and anxiety at their presence. Perhaps this isn’t surprising. In years past, these scavengers would be first to the scene during battles, beheadings and plagues. And being both cunning and synonymous with death has led to complex and often dark associations in folklore across the world. In Sweden, ravens were considered the ghosts of those murdered without a Christian burial. In Iceland they were associated with bad omens. In parts of India they were messengers of death, and in Germany they were damned souls. It’s not all terrifying, though. In Welsh mythology they’re regarded as guardians and symbols of wisdom. And others hold the birds in the highest esteem: the raven is…