WELCOME
Tiny feet, big imaginations
ALL MY BEST MEMORIES as a child stem from being on walks with my parents in the landscapes of northern England.
But they weren’t simply walks – they were fantastic, outlandish adventures.
While the adults behaved like Walkers – scrutinising unwieldy maps, making admiring remarks about the scenery and talking about boring grown-up stuff – we kids completely disappeared into warrens of fantasy. We ran amok through bracken and boulders. We concocted stories that stretched out into odysseys with a lifetime’s worth of triumph and tragedy compressed into a matter of hours. Misty old lead workings on the moors became abandoned mining outposts in far-flung alien worlds; mossy ash woods became tiger-prowled jungles; the sinuous limestone cataracts of the River Wharfe became the world’s greatest water park. Good times.
Our lead features in this issue celebrate outdoor life as a family, and the great rewards it can bring. Hanna Lindon’s bumper feature on page 28 contains a wealth of inspiration and advice that draws on her own experiences as a parent and those of others. On page 38, Mikaela Toczek gives a remarkable account of continuing to live adventurously as a pregnant outdoor instructor. And Chiara Bullen has also rounded up some fantastic child-friendly hills on page 20.
Despite the ubiquity of the Internet, the family remains the single biggest conduit through which people get introduced to outdoor activity and the natural world. And when fostered young, a love of the outdoors endures for life; according to Sport England, the children of parents who are active outdoors are twice as likely to be active as adults.
This was certainly true for me. A sunny afternoon can pass me by in a blink of busyness now, but those days of infant adventuring seemed to exist in a near-eternal vastness. As children with a miniaturised sense of scale, we’re more likely to be excited by the intricacies of a rock pool than the grandiose drama of a mountain landscape; but our sense of time is boundless. That’s why I think it’s so important to be able to experience unfettered immersion in the wonder of the natural world at an early age, when our minds, emotions and imaginations are at their most receptive. As we get older, our understanding of scale expands, but we lose much of that sense of imaginative possibility.
On some level I think all my outdoor adventuring as an adult is motivated by a desire to recapture the joy and freedom of those formative years. I suspect the same is true for many of us who were fortunate enough to have the outdoors in our upbringing. In the famous words of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”