other adjectives are available
AS HAS become my autumnal tradition, I was distracted from the write-up of my summer walking trip and thus it’s now a quarter year since the actual walks took place. That being so, I suppose I had better get on with it.
The fourth day of my August 2025 trip found me up and about at an early hour wandering the streets of Alnmouth. Well, one of them, at least…
Continue reading “CCLXII – Alnmouth to Newbiggin-by-the-Sea”
TOWARDS the end of August 2024, I returned to Edinburgh to continue my coastal adventure. The first day of the trip, I intended to do two walks, the first being a stroll up Leith Walk into the centre of Edinburgh, and then an ambling circuit around parts of that city centre. The second was to take me out of the city along the John Muir Way to Prestonpans but, as I looked out at a misty, grey morning, that part was definitely for later. So, Edinburgh in the rain, then…
ON DAY five of my April 2024 trip, I bounced out of bed, ready and eager to continue my peripheral perambulation of Great Britain by walking from Kirckaldy to North Queensferry. Sorry, did I say ‘bounced?’ I meant ‘slumped.’ For one reason and another, I had become slightly out of practice at the hiking thing and, while that hadn’t been too bad an issue so far, four days’ worth of cumulative fatigue had suddenly manifested all at once. I briefly considered making it a rest day, but I knew I didn’t want to do that. I resolved instead to set off and see how far I could get before fatigue forced me to quit…
OVER Breakfast on the twelfth day of September 2023, I wrestled with a choice of routes by which I might head south from Aberdeen. There was a coastal path for at least part of the way to Stonehaven, and it had been my original intention to take it. I had, however, since learnt of the existence of a mediaeval drovers’ road named the Causey Mounth, which had served as the main highway between Aberdeen and Stonehaven until the current A92 was constructed in the 1960s and 70s. This faced me with something of a dilemma; after all, I could hardly do both, now could I?
I RETURNED to the great grey granite city of Aberdeen just before mid-September in a largely successful bid to get a few days of walking in before the weather changed from summery to autumnal. A train journey lasting several hours conveyed me north from London and it was early evening when I finally alighted at Aberdeen station. From there, it was a very short walk to check in at my hotel, after which I was faced with the question of what to do with the rest of my evening. The obvious answer was to find food and go over my plan for the following morning’s walk. What I actually did was go for a walk right there and then. In the rain.
THE last day of my October 2022 trip began with the gentle sound of raindrops upon the windows of my hotel room. Once again, this eased off during breakfast but most of my morning’s exertions would still be cooled by the lightest of misty drizzle hanging damply in the air. I didn’t mind this in itself – I quite like the rain – but it did threaten to hide any scenic views that my day’s walk had to offer. The walk would be from Forres to Lossiemouth along part of the Moray Coastal Trail…
BECAUSE of a small inconvenience on Day 5 of my April 2019 trip — i.e. my hotel having ceased to exist — Day 6 actually began in a more leisurely manner than it might otherwise have done. I awoke in a pleasant B&B that was right at the start of the day’s walk (and not three miles away, as the hotel would have been) and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and a lengthy chat with some other guests who were happy to enthuse about walking.
KNOWING that I would push myself with respect to terrain and distance in the first half of my April 2019 trip, I had anticipated that I would feel somewhat tired towards the end of it. Accordingly, the last three days were all much shorter walks, coming in at just under fifteen miles each. This meant that I had no issues about trying to cram x miles into only y hours and so could afford to have a lie-in and catch up on some Zzz.
FOR reasons I’ll dub ‘the Three Ws’ — work, weather and walking-related injury — a six-month gap interceded between my last trip and this one. But March 2019 presented me with a window of opportunity. It was a narrow window and made no efficient or economic sense but that hardly mattered. I thus spent two days almost entirely on trains (i.e. there and back) for one single day of walking. I was, you might say, getting back on track…
THE previous day’s walk may have ended ended in grey raininess but the third day of September 2018 began with mostly bluish skies and sunshine, though a crisp bite to the air had developed. As I stepped from my hotel, I was confronted with the sight of the Cuillin veiled lightly in thin, misty haze.