I RETURNED to walking after a five month gap, the delay having come about on account of being a bit under the weather. Not me, you understand, but south west Scotland, which had spent much of the winter assailed by flooding and storms. Since I planned to go walking, not wading, I patiently waited this out until the first signs of impending spring brought calmer, warmer and — most importantly — drier weather. And then I got sunburnt. In Scotland. In March. It’s like my special super-power.
Tag: rabbit
CXXX – Millom to Ravenglass
I
SHOULD know better than to try to make plans. Staying overnight in Millom, for instance, so that I could just get up early and start walking. That was a plan right up until the day before, when my hotel turned out not to have an actual room for me to stay in.
Some last-minute problem-solving saw me staying at St Bees instead, which meant that my hotel was right next to a beach but not, unfortunately, next to Millom. My earliness would now be constrained by the railway and the rest of my plans would have to be somewhat fluid…
Continue reading “CXXX – Millom to Ravenglass”CIII – Llanfair PG to Malltraeth
IT WAS just before six in the morning when I returned to Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, having negotiated the cunning and secret railway challenge designed to prevent you from doing so:
Not only is the station saddled with the impressive (if contrived) name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch but it is also a request stop, which means that the train will only stop to let you off if you can successfully tell the guard that that’s where you are going. It also helps if you can stop saying it before the train hurtles past.
Continue reading “CIII – Llanfair PG to Malltraeth”L – Padstow to Trebarwith Strand
LAST Monday was my fiftieth walk along the coast.
This noteworthy adventure began on an overnight coach to Plymouth. Having arrived in my favourite city, I immediately left it on the first train out, which conveyed me to Bodmin Parkway, a station which is essentially in the middle of nowhere.
Continue reading “L – Padstow to Trebarwith Strand”XLVIII – Portreath to Newquay
THE penultimate day of February saw me once again arriving in Plymouth at an ungodly hour in order to catch the first train out to Redruth. Having arrived in this old mining town, I immediately tried to leave it again. On the wrong bus.
XIX – Emsworth to Portsmouth
YESTERDAY saw what I now consider a ‘short’ walk even though not that long ago I would have considered it a sizeable distance, i.e. twelve miles. The length of the walk was determined by a moment of unexpected synchronicity – it just so happened that I would reach a handy station (Portsmouth Harbour) twelve miles on from Emsworth and that twelve miles from Emsworth would, quite coincidentally, also be my three hundredth mile.