Nations
England
Scotland
Wales

Trails
East
North
South
West
Wales

General
Home
Aylmer family site
Contact

About this site

This site describes my largely solo walks across the nations of Great Britain. The principle is the same for each: to find my own line across each nation, wherever I can visiting peaks or places that have long been on my 'to-do' list.

Alas, I don't have the weeks on end that permit a non-stop walk. Instead I spend a few days a year, usually in the spring or autumn, starting at the place I had left off and ending 60 miles or so further on. Almost always, I'm using public transport to and sometimes within these breaks. Since I'm now 60, and much of the England and Scotland traverses remain, there is something of a race-against-time element (of which more below), not least because in both cases the toughest stuff is at the end.

They are mostly rural routes but not slavishly so. The Scotland route took in Edinburgh, and the England route will run through Birmingham. As a Londoner, I'm a regular city walker, so in a way it would be strange to force wide diversions around conurbations that have good through routes. But where I can, I look to the wild: not always the glamour heights, for I'm a keen moorland walker, where the crowds don't often go, and even today you can have a pathless conundrum to solve.

The walk across Wales is complete now (2002-06). It ran from Newport on the south coast to Llanfairfechan on the north, taking in the Beacons and Carneddau with drove roads and Plynlymon in between.

I started the England walk a few weeks before I finished the Welsh, in 2006. It starts from Land's End and heads to the border north of Berwick-on-Tweed. So far I've been along the north Cornwall coast and over Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor. I'm currently at Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, and plan to return in autumn 2012 to walk to the Trent Valley.

The walk across Scotland started in 2007, from the same border as I plan to reach on the England walk. As in England, a coastal start. I then crossed the Lammermuirs before returning to the coast and tracking through Edinburgh. Canals took me through the central belt before turning right for the Trossachs. I hit the Highlands proper in 2010, taking in a number of Corbetts and Munros on a route through Glen Lyon and north to Corrour, and the following year, I crossed the Great Glen and finished at the famous Cluanie Inn. In 2012 I am heading for Achnashellach. The ultimate destination is not John o'Groats but the much more interesting Cape Wrath.

Other trails

Not all my walking is devoted to the crossing of the nations to my own design. This site also looks at a wide variety of named trails, mostly in the south and east of England, which I have walked over the years. Some are solo, as principally is my current project of the Sussex Border Path (main section complete, mid-Sussex section to go). Many are in collaboration with my friend Dave Travers - we have been walking together since the 1970s, and are currently on the Essex coast at Battlesbridge - and on others you will find reference to my wife Barbara or my sons Matthew and Adrian.

Examples of other trails on the site so far are:

There are many more too - see the 'Trails' index on the left, which is split into four quarters of England plus Wales.

Walking in Essex

Inevitably the patch I know best is my home ground, in London and Essex. The latter has far more good walking country in it than people realise - it's been a place to get through rather than to, and recently too many people have been willing to go with stereotypes than make discoveries for themselves. I'm fortunate now to have the chance to set this to rights. I've been commissioned by Cicerone Press, publishers of Britain's best walking guides, to prepare a volume on 'Walking in Essex'. It's in preparation now, with a personal deadline of December 2012 and a publication date during 2013. Watch this space, as they say.

The logs

I've often noted down my progress in notebooks. This started thanks to the table in the back of my Wainwright guide to the Pennine Way, in 1976, and it's a habit I've maintained, more or less slavishly, ever since. Many of those logs are transcribed here - see the sample below. They give an indication, I hope, of just how long it takes to walk across open country. They are not a benchmark. It's not a race. I'm reasonably fast, or so people tell me, but not as fast as others. I tend not to stop much en route, as I relish the sensation of being in transit; others might want more dallying time. That's fine.

Increasing age is just one aspect of the 'race against time' element.

Another is the continuing loss of village services, which might make some aspects of logistics difficult. Bus routes, or even rail lines, might disappear as public transport is retrenched in recession; and places to stay might reduce, not least inns, for the pub trade is in a dreadful state at the moment. England is more at risk than Scotland, if only because the loss has already happened in Scotland, at the time of the clearances 200 years ago. Then and now, the threat was profit - someone else's, usually.

There's a longer term factor, climate change. It will not affect my own walk, except perhaps increasing the chance of unpleasant, and perhaps dangerous, freak weather. The climate of Great Britain will be much the same in the mid-2010s as it is now. But the mid-2050s? If, say, one of my sons should seek to recreate my exploits? None can be so certain of what they should find - for there's every prospect that the great commercial interests of oil, power and money, aided by superstition and ignorance, will do their best to stymie what faint and uncertain moves to a safer global future might be essayed by our weak and frightened leaders.

But let's not despair. I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other as long as I am able.

So what next?

With Scotland out of the way in 2014 possibly, and the high ground of England looming in 2013, I have the temerity to start thinking beyond Cape Wrath and the Berwick Border. If all stays well, a good new target would be the completion of the 2000-foot hills of England and Wales, the Hewitts. It's a serious round, with well over 200 peaks, and I'm barely a quarter of the way through so far. But with retirement being forced this year, courtesy of the Tory-led government's intention to close down any organisation staffed by people who disagree with them, I can make an early start.

In rough outline, I'm thinking of working north-to-south through Wales, and indeed started in April 2011 with a Snowdonia trip that polished off the Carneddau and Glyders, with hopefully next April, a crack at the Moel Hebog group. In England, I'll head south-to-north from the Dales upwards roughly in concert with (and hence part-enabled by) my cross-England walk, to the Cheviots. A final splurge into Lakeland wraps the whole lot up before my 70s. Maybe. You never know.