Drain every drop!
When it comes to treading the grapes of summer, seizing every chance is at least as important as having big plans.
DAYLIGHT PILES IN drifts against your bedroom window until the pressure’s too great to bear and in it surges against your eyelids. Your brain knew it was day before you did. (Tiny receptors in your eyes dedicated solely to the purpose ‘see’ the daylight before you’re awake – even in blind people – and put the brain on notice the day is afoot. Like a school child on a snow day, it can’t wait for you to wake up.)
There has never been, in the history of the world, a richer person than you – or more refined. You have a world at your feet: a planetary body disposed in summer at your utmost comfort and convenience. And you have 1.9 million years of breeding behind you, time in which you’ve developed tools to appreciate it on a level of sophistication to make an iPhone look crude and a diamond dull. Your eyes can see 7.5 million colours, your nose distinguish a trillion scents; your legs can negotiate terrain no off-road vehicle can – and you can use these extraordinary abilities to paint the most profound experiences onto the vast canvas of your mind.
It’s summer, you’re the ultimate date, and a cosmic consummation beckons.
The world wants you to walk it. Spring showers have rinsed it clean and it’s been out to dry. Leaves are clean to the squeak. Grassy paths hush your steps and amplify the suppleness of your joints. Every corner, threshold and fingerpost issues come-hither looks. Holy lip-bite, you two go so well together.
Summer isn’t the only time walking is a splendid thing to do, of course, but it presents a menu unmatched for length and variety. So long and various in fact it can be daunting. What to choose? And what do some of these words mean?
Thankfully the metaphor falls apart in a timely fashion – because in summer no amount of optionpicking dulls the appetite or fatally dents the wallet. It’s the only all-you-can-eat meal that leaves you lighter than before.
Perhaps the best way to view summer is as the promised land it seemed from the gulags of winter. Only then will you shake off the complacency urged at every turn by the nearinfinite supply of daylight, and approach the buffet with the indiscriminate appetite your starving winter self is distantly calling for.
Say yes to everything.
Because while summer is a season for living in the moment, it’s also one for piling up stores for leaner times, like the plants all around you photosynthesising furiously. The trick is to try and do something of everything – from a five-mile walk before work to a long weekend in a county you picked at random; a breathtaking plunge into a river or a dozy hour of cloud-watching from a picnic blanket; a leisurely circumnavigation of a lake to a self-conscious and surprisingly intimate-feeling mile barefoot; a superman selfie on the trig point of a magnificent mountain, or a game of Boggle with strangers on the patio of a youth hostel at nine in the evening. In summer memories are ripe for harvest everywhere, and it’s often not the longest-planted or largest fields that provide the highest crop yield.
I’m enjoying my winter of walking right now – miles salvaged from the collapsing tent of day, ruddy cheeks an affront to the seasonal pallor. But consulting my memories of summer is like blowing the dust off a bottle of fruit punch found in the attic that has matured into a liquor of exquisite potency. The day spent climbing Bow Fell by the hair’s-breadth Climbers’ Traverse
followed by the afternoon carrying tired, brave, exultant daughter down the long knobbly path through Mickleden. The savage cold of the plunge pool in Glenridding I could have sworn would stop my heart but left me feeling reborn. The abandoned beehives between two Lincolnshire fields we peered into and perhaps inevitably ended up fleeing like the sky was falling in. The afternoon spent reading, back against the corrugated trunk of an oak tree, in a clearing in a Norfolk heath. The chalk stream we waded. The train ride we never paid for. The pub I only ever walked to, which doesn’t take cards and I couldn’t find in a car if you paid me. The hours following random paths on my local Landranger map, making me feel I’d jumped into a wonderful green sea while everyone else was milling about on a cramped ship. And all of a sudden I’m warm and a little merry.
Everyone feels as if summer belongs to them, of course. Holidaymakers, festival-goers, sports-fans, sunbathers, lager-drinkers and lawn-bowlers. And summer is generous to everyone. But there’s a difference between doing things in the warm and really engaging with the world in the way you’ve co-evolved to do, both in your summer best.
“While
summer is a season for living in the moment, it’s also one for piling up stores for leaner times… The trick is to try and do something
everything.” of
WITH LONGER, WARMER days and the prospect of summer hols, this tends to become the season of ambition. It’s a time for big adventures, bucket-list enterprises and pushing the envelope, whatever form that may take for you.
Starting off a tick-list is a great idea, as you can (hopefully) tear through a good few of your targets in the sweet-scented, blue-skied days of June, July and August. Some classic walkers’ tick-lists include the
Wainwrights (the 214 Lake District hills chronicled by Alfred Wainwright) and the Nuttalls (the 446 mountains over 2000ft in England and Wales). But the most alluring and ambitious list of the lot is that of the
Munros: all the mountains in Scotland over 3000ft. There are many to go at – 282 is the current official count – and they are a) big, b) spread out over a vast area (Scotland) and c) often remote, meaning an epic journey is needed just to get to the foot of them. None of this stops hundreds of intrepid walkers from setting out to bag the Munros each year, and in many cases, to complete the lot, be it over months, years or decades.
But where to begin? The highest of the lot – Ben Nevis – may tempt you, but other Munros can set you off just as stirringly. Perhaps the dramatic yet easily accessible Ben Lomond, rising from the shores of Loch Lomond, or the sheer-faced lunacy of Liathach, whose epic mass includes two Munros, Spidean a’ Choire Lèith and Mullach an Rathain. But for a real midsummer epic, try Stob Ban in the Mamores, the next-door-neighbour range to Ben Nevis. Stunning by itself, but also part of a long, sweeping curtain of immense peaks, it soars high above Glen Nevis and provides possibly the most jaw-dropping view of the highest peak in the land, just across the way.
TRY IT: Follow Walk 4 in this issue (but in summer!) For a list of the Munros, visit walkhighlands.co.uk
“The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were flourishing.” glad and CHARLES DICKENS, AUTHOR