A little off the beaten track
RAMBLING FREE: After writing 250 walking columns for The Yorkshire Post, Roger Ratcliffe tells of encounters with hostile dogs, quicksand-like mud and almost coming to grief on Yorkshire’s highest mountain.
O one seems to refer to walking as “rambling” any more except the Ramblers pressure group, formerly the Ramblers’ Association. The name is a quaint throwback to those halcyon pre-war days when the popular image of ramblers was of people wearing woolly hats, khaki shorts and canvas knapsacks as they marched along singing The Happy Wanderer.
To me the word suggests an unpremeditated, casual attitude to walking, and I can imagine many who called themselves ramblers half a century ago would set off into the countryside with only a rough idea of their route, especially since the Ordnance Survey’s finely detailed 1:25000 scale maps were not widely available then and comparatively few walking guidebooks had been published.
Now, though, we plan almost every step before leaving home. Maps have become masterpieces of accuracy and there are GPS versions on phones to keep us on a path which long ago might’ve been ploughed up or washed away. In addition to a vast library of guides in bookshops by authors such as Alfred Wainwright and Yorkshire’s own Colin Speakman, there are also cut-out-and-keep routes in newspapers like The Yorkshire Post. No surprise, then, that country walking has become Britain’s second favourite leisure activity. Only shopping is more popular.
Since 2007 I have compiled walks published in The Yorkshire Post’s Country Week section, beautifully mapped and designed by my colleague Graeme Bandeira. After completing my 250th route, their combined total of 1,500 miles measuring a bit more than if I’d walked from Leeds to John o’Groats then turned round and slogged south to Land’s End, it is interesting to look back over my shoulder at the challenges, near-disasters and laughs.
Like postmen, the bane of a walking writer’s life is the hostile