Your year on foot: Autumn

JOURNEY FROM SEA TO SOURCE

The Lake District is our gateway to a season of golden glory.

IN A HOT summer Britain’s rivers can shrivel to a trickle, but autumn rains revive them to babbling, exuberant life. It’s a wonderful time to track one all the way from its mouth to its source, from where fresh water meets salt water at the estuary, up through its languid lower reaches, tracing its banks as it narrows and climbs, to triumphantly reach the spot where it first springs from the ground.

You might also witness the final miles of an incredible journey. Atlantic salmon are nearing the end of a migration that began thousands of miles away in deep-sea feeding grounds near Greenland. Guided by stars, ocean currents and magnetic fields, they return to the mouth of the river they left years ago as smolts, ready to swim upstream to breed in the spawning grounds where they were born.

As you voyage upriver on foot, they are battling the current beside you; not just swimming underwater against the flow, but taking to the air to hurl themselves up waterfalls. You can stop for a long lunch by the water, but the salmon don’t eat as they work upstream. Dropping weight and changing colour, their plump silver turns to a deep red.

Many of Britain’s greatest salmon rivers have footpaths beside them. The Speyside Way tracks 72 miles by Scotland’s Spey, from Buckie on the Foray Coast to Kincraig in the Cairngorms. An extension is planned to Newtonmore although you’re forging your own adventure if you want to hike the extra 20 miles on to the source itself at Loch Spey (grid ref

NN419937). And this water is a crucial ingredient in the world-famous whiskies of Speyside so you might have to visit a distillery or two.

Or try the Dee Way, which follows the river for 120-ish miles through the north-Welsh borders; the precise distance depends which side of the estuary you start, either at Prestatyn in Wales or Hoylake in England. The trails converge at Chester and climb gently through Chirk and Llangollen, along the edge of Llyn Tegid and up to the source on the slopes of Duallt (SH813274). And England’s 71-mile Ribble Way traces the river from the tidal marshes of Longton to Gavel Gap on Gayle Moor (SD813832), passing iconic peaks of Lancashire and Yorkshire: Pendle Hill, Ingleborough, Whernside, Pen-y-ghent.

WALK HERE: See speysideway.org; for the Dee Way see kittiwake-books.co.uk ; and for the Ribble Way see cicerone.co.uk

YORKSHIRE WATER Tracing the River Ribble near Stainforth; the falls near here are good spots to see the salmon leap. A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT The River Dee chatters through the autumnal forests of north Wales.