One-week trails
You want to walk a long-distance trail but only have a week to spare? Don’t worry! Many of Britain’s finest are still within your reach.
Six classic UK long-distance routes that are perfect for summer
Many walkers limit themselves to single-day routes, wrongly thinking that a decent trail will take up to two weeks or more of their precious annual holiday allowance to complete. But if I told you that my wife and I walk a multi-day route every year and we only ever dedicate a week to it, you might view the whole thing rather differently. There are plenty of long-distance footpaths of around 100 miles that can be nicely slotted into a week, and they are scattered over every area of the UK.
Firstly, let’s just take a moment to quantify what I mean by a ‘week’. Most people’s holiday entitlement is measured in working days and usually spans the Monday to Friday bracket. So, a week off work takes five holiday days out of your kitty. Add a two-day weekend at either end of this and you suddenly have 9 days to play with. This gives you a good 7–8 days of walking time with a day to spare. And you can walk a long way in 7-8 days!
When we were younger, we would backpack long-distance trails and think nothing of spending two weeks carting our camping gear along the likes of The Pennine Way and the Coast to Coast. It saved us money, and as it was probably the only holiday we would get that year we didn’t mind losing so much time for it.
However, as we got a bit older and we liked to also have a week or two abroad in some other country’s mountain regions, we found there was another way of doing the whole long-distance footpath thing in much greater comfort and without the drain on holiday entitlement. Welcome to the world of one-week trails!
Pretty much anything between 80 miles to 120 miles can be walked in seven to eight days, and if you work out your route so you stop each night at a pub or B&B, you get the added luxury of warm grub and a proper bed to sleep in too. Throw in a baggage transfer service to take your luggage from overnight stop to overnight stop (meaning you only have a daypack to carry) and the whole experience becomes addictive. And there are plenty of superb routes that fit nicely into this mileage category. True, it’s a bit more expensive than backpacking and catering for yourself, but what the hell… you only live once, so why not enjoy it?