Country Walking magazine December 2015

GPS GENIUS GUIDE 2016 10 amazing steps to digital map, app and GPS mastery this Xmas

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December 2015

SHIPPIN FORECAST ◆ BILL BRYSON ◆ GPS GENIUS GUIDE ISSUE 348 CHRISTMAS IN CASTLETON ◆ CAIRNGORMS ◆ INN-TO-INN LAKE DISTRICT ◆ WALK THE SHIPPING

Britain’s best-selling walking magazine

Christmas

on foot A FESTIVE SPECIAL STARRING

CASTLETON ✶ CUMBRIA ✶ THE CAIRNGORMS The Peak District walk Two days, two inns, Wild walks and wilder life

Christmas was made for

five fantastic fells

in Britain’s North Pole

www.livefortheoutdoors.com

DECEMBER 2015

LAKE DISTRICT: A SHEPHERD’S GUIDE

27 ROUTE CARDS

Enjoy a great wintry walk this weekend

PLUS Walk The Snowman’s South Downs Spot the hidden wildlife in waterfalls Walks with robins, mistletoe and holly How to take better photos on your walks

A WALK WITH THE COAST AT BRYSON: WHY BRITAIN’S LAURIE LEE ITS FRESHEST BEST FOR WALKING Read his lost masterpiece on walking at Christmas

Your guide to walking the Shipping Forecast

South Downs, Norfolk, the Dales: his favourite places revealed

HAPPY HOLIDAYS Discover frosty hills and golden views this Christmas, like here at Derbyshire’s Mam Tor.

PA C K E D W I T H G R E AT WA L K S : Y U L E T I D E I N T H E P E A K S P 3 2 ✶ T H E S N O W M A N ’ S S O U T H D O W N S P 3 6

✶ FESTIVE SPECIAL✶

Christmas tm

on foot Several stockingsful of ideas for the present we all want more than any other: a walk to remember at a magical time of year…

PHOTO: WWW.STEPHENELLIOTTPHOTOGRAPHY.CO.UK

✶ LAURIE LEE’S LOST TALE P38 ✶ ROOM AT THE LAKE DISTRICT INN P44 ✶ AND MUCH MORE… DECEMBER 2015 COUNTRY WALKING 31

s Christmas

o t on foot

A Cold Christmas Walk in the Country ✶ BY LAURIE LEE ✶

Recently discovered by his daughter, this spellbinding lost story was never published in the Cider With Rosie author’s lifetime.

HE WOMEN IN the kitchen are wrapped in their ritual vapours, having swapped dreamy beds for the clanging hellfires of ovens, spitting bird-roasts, bastings, boiling suds of greens, baked pie-crusts and mysterious stuffings. Distracted but agile they shove me against the wall as I grope to look for my boots. Women preparing a meal, like women at their make-up, inhabit a similar chaos that is not to be tampered with.

‘Think I’ll take a small walk. Up the road,’ I say. ‘Past the wood. Down the Pond. I think.’

Spoons flashing in bowls, they raise their heads vaguely as though they’d heard an odd sound in the plumbing.

Their eyes look through me but do not see me. I belong to an army of men-inthe-way. I get some raw mince on my fingers, lick it off, wish I hadn’t, muffle myself up, and go . . .

Outside there is no surprise in the coldness of the morning. It lies on the valley like a frozen goose. The world is white and keen as a map of the Poles and as still as the paper it’s printed on.

Icicles hang from the gutters like glass silk stockings and drip hot drops in my hand as I breathe on them.

Taking the air in my teeth I feel the old excitement, the raw echoes of an ancestral world, crammed with bullheaded mammoths and tusktoothed tigers, of flint spears and boasting in caves. Today is the winter as it always was, and when it wasn’t it was not remembered. Forgotten, now, are the small freaks of weather, the offbeat heatwaves and wet-warm Decembers that have cropped up now and then in the past. Winter was always like this 38 COUNTRY WALKING DECEMBER 2015

since the beginning of winters, since the first man learned to sneeze.

Pushing the cold before me like a sheet of tin, I set off up the Christmas road.

I have a new thorn stick with a silver band and new gloves with an itchy price tag. Before the New Year I shall no doubt lose the lot. It doesn’t matter, they were made for this day.

It is a morning for heroes and exhilarating exile, a time to shock the blood back to life, while I go stamping frost-footed along pathways of iron, over grass sharp as wire, past cottages hollowed out like Hallowe’en turnips all seething with lights and steam.

“To be walking today is to be followed everywhere by auras of pearly cloud. The wandering cows are exhaling too – pale balloons of unheard conversation” ‘Same to you, Miss Kirk!’ An old lady totters by, bent double like a tyre round a dartboard. Ancient spirit of the season, she is distributing tea to the peasants, which she has done for the last fifty years. She doesn’t have to worry where all the peasants have got to; we all admit to being her peasants today.

I climb up the valley, breathing hard the sharp air which prickles the nostrils and turns to vapour. To be walking today

is to be followed everywhere by private auras of pearly cloud. The wandering cows are exhaling too – pale balloons of unheard conversation. The ploughed fields below me have crusts like bread pudding, delicately sugared with twinkling frost. The distant pastures are slivered, crumpled and bare. Even the light they reflect seems frozen.

Where was this valley last summer?

It was not here then. Winter and summer are different places. This beech wood, for instance, so empty now, no more than a fissure of cracks in the sky – where is the huge lazy heaving of those Junethick leaves, reeking of sap and the damp roots of orchids, rustling with foxes and screaming with jays and crammed to the clouds with pigeons? The wood, for the moment, is but the scaffold of summer.

It stands stripped to the bruising cold.

A dark bird or two sit along the bare branches. None of them move. They might be caged.

Approaching the pond at last I notice a sweet smell of ice – or perhaps it is the only memory of it. We could certainly smell ice when we were boys; even in bed, before getting up. One sniff of the air at the moment of waking and one knew whether the pond was frozen, knew the quality of the ice, whether it was rough or smooth, and even (I swear) its thickness.

This morning it is a plate of dark-green glass, wind-polished and engraved with reeds. An astonished swan walks slowly around it, testing the ice for a hole to sit in.

Unable to find one it rises up on its webs and flogs the air with its puzzled wings.

Like the wood, the pond is under a spell, silent as a loaded gun, its explosions of moorhens, coots and lilies held in check for a suspended moment.

I look through the ice and see tiny bubbles u

Step into the frozen world of an old-fashioned Christmas, where the ice smells sweet and birds skate the frozen ponds.

PHOTO: JOHN CURTIS/REX SHUTTERSTOCK

WINTER AS IT EVER WAS

Christmas

on foot ✶ THE LAKE DISTRICT

Room at the Inn In tribute to the Christmas story, Country Walking set out to find a perfect weekend walk that would yield innkeepers, shepherds, an angel and a very special journey. Here it is…

WORDS: NICK HALLISSEY PHOTOS: TOM BAILEY

TR AVERSING AFAR With Windermere glinting in early winter sun, we set out on an epic preChristmas journey across the the e fells e s of o Lakeland. a ea d

FROM ONE INN …

The Kirkstone Pass is one of nation’s oldest and highest inns – and the highest inhabited building in the Lake District.

…TO ANOTHER While lower down in the valley is the ivyclad Brotherswater Inn – a window on the eastern fells of the Lake District.

DECEMBER 2015 COUNTRY WALKING 45

Christmas in the

Cairngorms Discover what Christmas Day is like at Britain’s North Pole – the coldest, wildest corner of the country – and where to walk to have your own magical encounters.

WORDS & PHOTOS: PETER CAIRNS

I’M LATE , I’M LATE A mountain hare – unlike rabbits and brown hares, a true British native – dashes across the snow, mindful of predators watc g from watching o above

DISCOVER The Cairngorms

S SAUCER-SIZED SNOWFLAKES FLOAT down from a leaden night sky, carpeting forest and farm, rural Britain falls silent save for the occasional throaty bark of a roe deer or the otherworldly shriek of a quartering barn owl. Closer to the city lights, urban foxes dodge and weave, badgers forage in gardens and starlings huddle for warmth and protection. The cheery banter of late-night Christmas revellers is muffled by the gathering carpet of snow as final yuletide greetings are exchanged before the most ingenious, adaptable and successful mammal on the planet heads home to its shelter, a gadget-laden, brick-built haven, warm and safe. It’s Christmas Eve and up and down the country, people are sleeping.

A long way to the north – almost as far as mainland Britain extends – a very different Christmas scene is unfolding. High on the Arcticlike plateau of Ben Macdui, Britain’s second highest mountain at the heart of the Cairngorms, the relentless wind lashes fractured granite and throws spirals of snow across a deep carpet of white. For the few creatures that can survive winter in the Cairngorms, the Christmas-card idyll bears precious little resemblance to the day-by-day struggle for survival.

The only protection from the relentless winter onslaught is a shallow snowhole in the lee of an ice-encrusted boulder. Here, sheltered from the elements, a ptarmigan sleeps, insulated by layer upon layer of downy feathers, nature’s winter duvet.

As the dawn sky breaks, she will need to feed and in doing so, expose herself to predators: golden eagles, foxes and wildcats all patrol these inhospitable slopes, themselves facing a continuous knife-edge existence. Furtively she pops her white head above the snow. Her Christmas meal will be meagre pickings: shoots of heather and tundra mosses, excavated from the permanent ocean of white. In this treeless snowscape she relies entirely on her cryptic plumage: white in the winter morphing into a subtle blend of granite-coloured greys and browns in spring and autumn: a coat of many colours for a permanently changing arctic landscape.

Nearby, as the short winter day emerges and the sun caresses the boulder fields carpeting the floor of the northern corries, a night worker returns home; a ghostly white shadow gliding effortlessly on snowshoe feet: a mountain hare, a relic of the ice Red squirrels thrive so well in the Cairngorms they’re exported from here to other parts of the country.

DECEMBER 2015 COUNTRY WALKING 53

u

Viking, North Utsire, Dogger... the Shipping Forecast is an institution both to mariners and weather-obsessed walkers. Explore the history, walk the coastal stations and discover what severe gale 9 feels like...

W O R D S : C H A R L I E C O N N E L LY

62 COUNTRY WALKING DECEMBER 2015

DISCOVER Shipping Forecast Southeast Iceland

Faeroes Fair Isle

Bailey

Viking

North Utsire South Utsire

Hebri s Hebride de des Cromarty Rockall

Forties th Forth For

Malin

Tyne Tyne Irish Sea Shannon

Fitzroy

German Bight

Humber Thames

Fastnet Sole

Dogger

Fisher

Lundy Dover Portland Wight Plymouth

Biscay

PHOTO: Š TOM BAILEY

DECEMBER 2015 COUNTRY WALKING 63

Expert advice on the kit that makes a difference

10

things you didn’t know you could do with GPS The basic job of GPS on your phone or dedicated unit is to get you from A to B safely. But you can unlock some amazing features that might change the way you walk...

PHOTOS: RICHARD FAULKS

C

ountry Walking has been reviewing GPS devices, software and apps for at least a decade. Fair enough, it’s very much an evolving market, but the essential ideas don’t change: whether it’s a dedicated tough-shell handset or an iPhone app, the basic function is the same. But what else can GPS do, besides stopping you from getting lost?

To answer that, we asked outdoor technology expert Andy Macauley to find ten things that a GPS can do for you in addition to its raison d’etre. What he came up with is fascinating, funny and incredibly useful in equal measure.

So read on, and find out how the world of digital mapping can do everything from turning you into an artist, to helping you save someone’s life.

The ‘Steve Jobs line’

Each of Andy’s ideas comes with a ‘Steve Jobs line’ to help you cut through the technobabble that often plagues GPS. Back in 2001, Apple was struggling to make people understand how a little thing called the iPod was going to change the world. But one day, CEO Steve Jobs stood on a stage and said “this puts 500 great albums in your pocket” – and that did the trick.

So Andy’s ‘Steve Jobs line’ aims to make each idea that simple.

76 COUNTRY WALKING DECEMBER 2015

ANDY MACAULEY Andy is a designer in the outdoor industry and a Lowland Rescue volunteer in the Shropshire Hills.

He is a respected speaker on outdoor technology and edits the gear review website www.gearweare.com.

For more about the work of Lowland Rescue, visit www. lowlandrescue.org

Just looking for a review so you can buy GPS for the walker you love this Christmas? No problem – find our most up-to-date reviews at www.lfto.com/gpsreview.

Match your photos to the view that produced them Create your own guidebook Send a route to a friend Fly like a bird through your next walk Save a life Learn secrets the rest of the world doesn’t know Turn a walk into a treasure hunt Make your own unique artwork Keep yourself healthy Keep track of your dog, kids, husband, wife‌ Turn over to read each idea in detail...

27 ROUTES with Ordnance Survey Maps

Britain’s best

WALKS DECEMBER 2015

s Theree’ar one nu! yo

SOUTH WEST

SOUTH EAST

PHOTO: © DAVID WEBB / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

MIDLANDS

EAST

NORTH WEST

ACROPOLIS , WOW! No, itÕs not the Parthenon during a cold spell, but a Victorian folly just outside Sunderland. See the Penshaw e s aw Monument o u e t on o Walk Wa 21.

Festive on foot

Follow famous footsteps in the Cotswolds l Marvel at the cairns of Nine Standards Rigg l Walk the Wildcat Trail in the Cairngorms... and more great wintry walks

NORTH EAST

WALES

SCOTLAND

IRELAND

Britain’s est

WALKS

SOUTH WEST SOUTH EAST

Find a great walk near you...

MIDLANDS EAST

01 Devon North Bovey & Moretonhampstead

NORTH WEST

02 Wiltshire Devizes 03 Somerset Wellow

26

NORTH EAST

04 Gloucestershire Fairford

WALES

05 Hampshire East Meon

SCOTLAND

06 Buckinghamshire Thornborough

25

07 Greater London Totteridge

IRELAND

08 Essex Ashdon 09 Worcestershire Wichenford

21

10 Northamptonshire Stoke Bruerne

16 17 18

11 Shropshire Ludlow

15

13 Derbyshire The Great Ridge 14 Norfolk Sandringham

13

24

15 Lancashire Hurst Green

23

16 Cumbria Kirkstone to Hartsop

11

09

22

19 North Yorkshire Pikedaw & Malham

01

23 Ceredigion Furnace

Route update

26 Highland Wildcat Trail

E

A B

NAVIGATION: Good map-reading and compass skills required in places.

DISTANCE: Route is between 8-12 miles from start to finish.

TERRAIN: 3,000ft+ with sustained steep ascent/descent; possible scrambling.

W

N

S

E

92 COUNTRY WALKING DECEMBER 2015

TERRAIN: Min 2,000ft ascent, sustained steepness and rocky or boggy ground.

S

TRAILZILLA ID (on reverse of card) We upload all our walks to Trailzilla.com so subscribers can use the unique code displayed on the back of each route card to download and print the route.

GRADE Our routes are graded easy, moderate, challenging or occasionally extreme, depending on distance, terrain, elevation and ease of navigation. Easy and moderate walks are usually less than 8 miles with relatively gentle gradients. The table below shows how we grade our more challenging walks:

W

GRADIENT PROFILE Check the ascent and descent (hilliness) of the route with a quick glance at this profile.

If you spot a route which needs updating, email cwroutes@bauermedia.co.uk

N

ABBREVIATIONS We have abbreviated left to L and right to R.

CLASSIC ROUTE

u Fridaythorpe, East Yorkshire, October 2015, Walk 18 The Trailzilla ID code for this walk is TZID27864

challenging

25 North Ayrshire Knock Hill

extreme

24 Conwy Conwy Falls

OUR EXPERTS All our routes are written by experienced and knowledgeable walkers who are experts at finding the best walks in their area and describing them clearly.

07 05

22 Monmouthshire Llanfoist

WALK INFORMATION An estimate of how long the route will take, based on a pace of about two miles per hour, with allowances made for slower, hilly routes.

08

04 03 02

CHALLENGE WALK

21 Tyne & Wear Penshaw

How to use your routes

27

10 06

18 Cumbria/North Yorks Nine Standards Rigg

27 Cambridgeshire Wicken Fen

14

12

17 Cumbria Hartsop to Kirkstone

20 East Yorks Flamborough Head

20

19

12 Staffordshire Martlin Hill

A B

NAVIGATION: Sound navigation skills required; route may be trackless.

DISTANCE: Route is more than 12 miles from start to finish.

MAPS (on reverse of route card) Follow the red route marked clearly on the map.

It’s essential to take the relevant Ordnance Survey map with you in case you get lost and inadvertently leave the area covered by our map.