WANDERLIST: 5 STEPS TO ROAMING LIKE A PRO
1Start small Walking off path for the first time can be daunting. Where do you begin? It doesn’t have to be a remote mountainside or desolate moor. In fact, it’s generally easier and safer to cut your teeth on the friendlier topography of lower hills. Hazards tend to be fewer. And with obvious features at hand, you’ll have less difficulty finding your bearings and locating a path. Away from upland areas, you can hone your offpath wayfinding in open access heath or downland. With training and experience will come the confidence to venture higher and roam further off path.
2Plan ahead Whether it’s necessity, curiosity or roaming for the sake of it that has lured you off path, you should always have a plan; even if it’s only a rough one. Be prepared to adapt it. And be generous with your timings. A goal gives purpose to your practise: it could be a waterfall, a trig point or other off-path point of interest. Guidebooks and websites like geograph.org can be a mine of information and inspiration when researching possible routes. In upland areas, where poor visibility will greatly impede navigation, it’s especially important to check mountain weather forecasts before heading out (mwis.org.uk).
3Go equipped Pathless terrain calls for stout footwear. Invariably it will be uneven underfoot; often rocky, boggy or scrubby too. Robust trousers and gaiters not only shield your legs from wet, scratchy vegetation, but also biting insects, including ticks (which can carry the bacteria that cause Lyme disease). Walking poles have a multitude of off-path uses beyond lessening knee strain; you can use them to feel your way over treacherous ground. GPS devices or smartphone apps (like OS Maps) are useful navigational aids, but bear in mind their limitations (eg. battery life). Be sure to preload any mapping you need. And always carry a paper map and compass as backup.
4Know your map Without green or black dashes to guide you, interpreting contour lines is key to wayfinding. Rusty brown on the Ordnance Survey’s 1:25,000 Explorer maps, they define the elevation, aspect, angle and shape of hills and valleys. Look for spurs, saddles and easier gradients when planning a route. Identify spot features to aim for and linear features you can ‘handrail’ too: streams, fences, wood edges and walls. It’s also important to familiarise yourself with the symbols for vegetation and natural features that denote hazards, obstacles and challenging terrain: cliffs, scree and marshy ground. Look for gaps or safer routes around.
5Learn from the best A hill skills course is by far the best way to earn your off-path walking wings. So much more than a solid grounding in map-reading and compass bearings, it will also cover kit, movement skills, hill safety and upland ecology. The next step up is a mountain skills course. Mountain Training schemes run by qualified instructors and leaders (like Mark back on page 36) are listed at mountain-training.org. A National Navigation Award is another excellent way to develop your offpath walking repertoire, from pacing and contouring to all-weather and nighttime wayfinding (nnas.org.uk).
But only about a third of the summit plateau could be explored at will. Partitioned by enclosure walls, the rest was off limits, as was Addlebrough’s tantalising west side. Now it is open access land, I’m free to navigate my own way up the hill’s craggy aquiline nose.
There’s a brilliant blue sky overhead when I set off from Thornton Rust in early summer – optimal weather for roaming off path. I follow the road west out of the village and hang a left at Cubeck up a farm track. In a mile or so I’ll be swapping its stony and restrictive ruts for springy and pathless peat. Coming to the road for Carpley Green, I’m treated to a splendid view down into the lush basin of Raydale, where Semer Water is twinkling away like a polished sapphire. The road is my cue to leave the bridle path and turn for the top, parallel with the stone wall climbing east up the tussocky fellside.
This flanking manoeuvre takes me past a glacial erratic known as the Devil’s Stone. In Dales mythology, this enormous boulder was hurled by the Devil at the giant who lived on Addlebrough. In all fairness to Old Nick, who occupied the rugged hill spur on the far side of Raydale, it was the giant who took the first potshots. His missiles fell short too, landing by Semer Water, which features in another outlandish folktale about the drowned town said to lie at the bottom of the lake. In the story, Yorkshire’s Atlantis is engulfed by flood waters when its wealthy citizens turn away an old hermit who is seeking shelter from a storm.
Suitably acropolis-like, Addlebrough looks impenetrable up ahead, where the slope gets punishingly steep. Thankfully, there’s a small breach in its limestone battlements where I clamber up onto the plateau. Uphill toil over, I can revel in a stupendous view. The quilted greens of Wensleydale flow away to the west, where they fade into coffee-plum moorland. This prospect only grows lovelier as I trail Addlebrough’s rim to the de facto summit on its northern crest. It’s crowned by what is left of a Bronze Age funerary cairn, testifying to the fell’s long-standing mystique. Already robbed out and eroded, its remaining stones suffered the egregious installation of a trig pillar in the 1950s (which is now no more). Years of desecration have exposed prehistoric rock art in the form of several cup marked boulders.
Perusing my map for a diverting route down, my eyes fall upon another puzzle piece from Addlebrough’s ancient past: the word ‘Settlement’ in olde gothic typeface. Below these rubble remains I stumble upon that enigmatic pepper pot cairn in a quarried nook. It has four arms, one longer than the others, which correspond to the cardinal directions on a compass. Secreted in an alcove nearby there’s a wooden seat into which are carved the initials ‘MBE & KME’, dated 2006. Maybe it’s a monument to love by a gifted dry stone waller. Who knows?
Being a sucker for all things archaeological, I’m intrigued by another cluster of ruins on my map. They’re sprawled half a mile to the south on a shelf of high ground called Greenber Edge, where a huge
burial cairn labelled ‘Stony Raise’ looks like another worthy goal. But getting there proves more tortuous than I bargain for.
The Countryside Code has the following advice on crossing field boundaries: ‘use gates, stiles or gaps in field boundaries where you can’. In other words, please don’t go clambering over fragile dry stone walls or rickety fences. What the code doesn’t tell you is that crossing points can be few and far between. Except where paths and tracks cross, they’re virtually impossible to discern from my map. Heralded by a pink sea of marsh orchids, there’s also the small matter of a mire to negotiate before I reach Stony Raise. Struck through by an enclosure wall, this impressive rubble mound would have been even larger originally. The stones used to build the wall almost certainly came from this ancient tomb.
Fed up with dry stone obstructions and dodging bogs, I decide it’s best to find the nearest path back to Thornton Rust. Walking without these guiding lines can be vexing and arduous sometimes. But I think you’ll agree, roaming off path can be tremendously exciting and wonderfully stimulating too.