MY PLAN for this walk, as originally envisioned, had been that I would travel up to Lochailort on the 9th of May and spend the night at Lochailort Inn, ready to set off for Mallaig in the morning. That did not happen. Thanks to something of a travel nightmare, I awoke in Glasgow instead. There, I had a hearty breakfast and boarded a train that left at 8 am, the same time I’d hoped to start walking. The rail journey from Glasgow to Lochailort takes approximately five hours, which meant that I didn’t even reach my starting point until lunchtime. This did give me an excuse to nip into the Lochailort inn for a sneaky lunchtime G&T to kick my walk off, but it also meant I only had half a day to complete a walk of about 18 miles. Would that even be possible?
Tag: robin
CLXXXIV – Craignure to Pennyghael
AS THE winter nights shortened and the calendar crept towards the spring of 2018, I looked forward to resuming my perambulatory pastime. The warmer weather would also be more welcome except that it never arrived. Instead, a cold front — nicknamed the ‘Beast from the East’ — swept across Britain, burying rural areas under drifts of snow and even dusting London with the stuff.
CXLIII – Newton Stewart to Isle of Whithorn
MOST times, if I go walking, I do two or three days at a time. Thus, I usually know, if it’s day three, that it is the last day of the trip. Not so on my last adventure, where it was the middle day of five. It was also the longest day’s walk of the trip and, coming as it did after the fatigue of two previous days of walking (which came, in turn, after five months without walks), it threatened to be a challenge.
CXVIII – Liverpool to Formby
THE morning after my arrival in Liverpool saw me return to the waterfront from where I would be heading north through what was once part of Lancashire but is now the county of Merseyside. To most people anyway, especially those born after 1974.
XLIV – Mullion to Newlyn
DAY six of my week in Cornwall saw me rise bright and early and open my curtains to the sight of a wall of dense, white fog. It was, I decided, a faerie fog.