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A Blackpowder Blast From the Past
IUSED to blow up huge chunks of Cumbrian hillside for a living. I stopped doing it not through any regard for conservation or the environment, but because I’d noticed that none of my more senior...
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Mud: It’s Alive and Sticking
MUD. Don’t go there except with your feet. Let it fill your boots and stick like it’s supposed to. But don’t delve any deeper unless you want a shovelful of acronyms . . . Back in November I set out …...
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Only a Rosedale, I give you . . .
THIS set out to be a hike to the Rosedale iron mines – but I got tangled in a fox hunt and that’s far more entertaining. It was also a day of bewildering signposts, dazzling sunlight, heather fire haze...
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London 3: A Cold Wet Walk for Pie and Mash
THE worst weather is wet snow. It saps the spirit and soaks through to the shoulders. When it whips off a river on an easterly wind it stings and sucks life from fingers and feet. Just as well we’re...
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London 4: William Morris and a Wander Through Walthamstow
A WIND to slice ears off whips across the entrance to Walthamstow Central tube station. The temperature is below zero degrees Centigrade and snow settles behind chimney stacks on bleak roofs. This is...
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London 5: Butchers, Saints and Sinners
BLOWN on a thin wind around a corner from the Barbican tube station past a private park surrounded by private railings to a place where knights once jousted on a meadow called the Smooth Field – which...
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Forever Changing – Broad Majestic Duddon
A walk along the shifting sands of the Duddon estuary . . . Continue reading →
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Sutton Bank, Witches and Featherless Geese
A walk along the Cleveland Way from Sutton Bank . . . Continue reading →
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Thirty Years On – Cwmorthin Revisited
From one side of a Welsh mountain to another – underground and overground . . . Continue reading →
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Manod and Mysteries, Earth and Environment
Underground bunkers in the Welsh mountains . . . Continue reading →
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Above Bethesda – Ancient and Modern
TO the south-west of Bethesda an open moor rises towards the clouded heights of Elider Fawr and Mynedd Perfedd. It’s a wild place dotted with occasional ruins and sheepfolds and crossed by indistinct...
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Mourne Mountains: Slieve Binnian and Second Impressions
Northern Ireland's best-kept secret – the mountains of Mourne . . . Continue reading →
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Blencathra by the Back Door . . . Grudgingly
MUNGRISEDALE is a village where curtains twitch. Eyes watch your every movement from behind rhododendrons and clipped hedges. Security cameras are positioned above cottage doorways. And the parish...
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East of Ullswater – An Inland Voyage
THE steamer Lady Wakefield chugs down the lake with its cargo of day-trippers. This is the way to embark on a walk. Throb-throb of engines; white light shimmering on water; the scent of fresh-cut hay...
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Green Remembered Woods
WANDERING through hay meadows. See twisted hawthorn trunks and rusted metal gates hanging from stone stoops; fields swooping down towards an estuary and distant Lakeland fells. Smell hay and damp...
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Coniston Fells: Highways, Byways, Narrow Ways
A day tramping over the Coniston fells . . . Continue reading →
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A Pennine Trek, Part 1 – Moorland and Mustard Gas
The first stage of a three-day walk from Bowes to Hexham . . . Continue reading →
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A Pennine Trek, Part 2 – A Night Beneath Hangman Hill
McEff continues his backpacking trip to Hexham . . . Continue reading →
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A Pennine Trek, Part 3 – Hell and High Walking
The concluding episode of McEff's Pennine walk . . . Continue reading →
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In the Footsteps of Offa
CALL me a romantic, but occasionally I have been known to throw a load of camping gear in the back of the car and head off – on the spur of the moment – towards unknown mountains, with neither care …...
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