(3 posts in two days? ‘What is this madness?’, I hear you cry. It might be something to do with clearing a backlog before I go on a two week holiday to Italy tomorrow, and if two days in the Peaks mean 3 posts then God help you all when I come back from a country I’ve never visited before after a fortnight…)
We wanted to do a slightly longer walk on our one full day in the area, and thanks to a book of walking routes we’d picked up last year we’d earmarked having a look at the route to Kinder Scout. The whole thing was probably longer and harder walking than we particularly wanted to do, so we planned to trim it down to 4 or 5 miles around a reservoir and up a river valley before returning in our footsteps.
Well.
We had clearly forgotten what happens when we go for a walk. Especially where there are high points involved, because the trouble is that you get to the top of one and then see another on the horizon. And suddenly you MUST see what the world looks like from there. Because it’s higher. And therefore, somehow, better. And because then you will have achieved something. Another deciding factor on this occasion was a desire to not repeat our footsteps, partly because it was a bit boring to do so, and partly because it would be a trickier descent than ascent.
This is how we came to walk 9 solid, and sometimes not very easy, miles. This is nothing to many people, but for those of us who only really do any kind of walking maybe three or four times a year it was definitely an achievement and also an interesting experiment in just how much lactic acid can build up in leg muscles during a 15 minute car journey back to the B&B.
That is the story of the day, the story of the photographs was governed by changeable – although not rainy – conditions, interesting landscape changes over the course of the walk, and the occasional wildlife. I shall let them do the talking, save to say there are quite a lot of them and so I shall select a few for highlighting and post a gallery at the end.
Av, 55mm, 1/80 sec, f/20, ISO 160
