LEJOG 2017

If you were to ask me "Why do you go walking?" I might reply "It's good exercise" or "I don't drive." Words I have used to describe walking - commute, exercise, travel, explore, freedom, challenge, escape, holiday, view and countryside - hint at an explanation. Individually these experiences accumulate to form a lasting impression that changes or refines my opinion about many subjects, and this is a curious side-effect of distance walking that draws me back to contemplate walks long after the fact.   To put it another way, walking is a series of revelations strung together in a long unbroken line. Components such as fitness, endurance and navigation lead the walker along this path but they are not the end, they are a means.  I like distance walking because of its (sometimes brutal) honesty. It feels good to be eroded by the land and by the weather, and by the rocks and trails I walk on. My layers are peeled away. Stripped back. ...

One person's trail trash is another's trail treasure The more often I explore, the more treasures I find. These happy discoveries are always a welcome surprise and the variety of the things I find amazes me and invites speculation on the history of the objects.  A friend helpfully displaying a roe deer skull In summer 2011 I found a TomTom satnav at the edge of a field near a busy road, thrown presumably from the window of a speeding vehicle by an enraged delivery driver inconvenienced by the infernal machine's contradictory instructions. At the end of the same field on the same evening I found one of those wide metal hoop fly fishing nets abandoned by a poacher, entangled on a barbed wire fence on the bank of the River Loddon, right under one of those aggressively written "Private No Fishing!" signs. Later that year, a little further along the same route, I found a large bag of sweets carelessly discarded by a child on Halloween, which I helped myself to. ...