Rumination: The Tiers of Relative Proximity

Another weekend drops from the walking year as the bloom gathers and the pressure of balancing work and an active lifestyle keeps me in bed on Saturday morning, feeling drained and grabbing a couple of extra hours of sleep as a small bonus, stalling the season again though all is not lost as a result as there are still some minor creative endeavours to get involved in while we are resting up, which mostly involve directing my thoughts to where we might actually direct this twelfth walking year when I am feeling energetic enough to get myself going. This comes together thanks to having myself a new laptop to play with, replacing my previous one of almost nine years of service, one which is notionally a gaming PC, which I acquired thanks to it having a significantly more powerful processor which can actually handle running Google Maps, which my old machine absolutely loathed causing it to run obscenely slow to the point of absolute frustration, which led me to using Google Earth for my plotting purposes instead after drawing several routes that took almost as long to plot as they did to walk. Eleven seasons' worth of data was thus available to reassemble on two maps, the first being The Ongoing Walking Career, which needed to re-done as the ten layer limit on a MyMaps sheet rather scuppered my intent to have a layer for every walking season, though the extraordinarily high limit for plots and markers on a single layer means that I could still have a good couple of decades to add to that before it becomes so data-bust that only a computer with a god-tier processor and graphics card would be able to handle it. The second idea was one that came to me during the lockdown walks of 2020, when being confined to local circuits for three months had me expanding the scope of terrain that I'd seen when walking from home and got me thinking about how relatively close come locations were to my base in Morley, having blazed trails to many of the major settlements in West Yorkshire and encompassed areas of South Leeds and North Kirklees in my local travels, while other parts of the county still seemed rather remote, even as my Field of Walking Experience expanded into North and South Yorkshire and over the top of the Pennine into Lancashire.

Headingley to Menston 15/04/23

8.8 miles, via Kirkstall, Kirkstall Abbey, Kirkstall Forge, Hawksworth Wood, 

 Horsforth New Road Side, Low Fold, Park Mill, Low Green Rawdon, Nether Yeadon, 

  Henshaw, New Scarborough, Nunroyd park, Guiseley, White Cross, and High Royds. 

Having had three rest days over the Easter weekend, and only worked four days of the following week, we feel good enough to go again as the next weekend rolls around, giving us a seemingly rare occasion for a bit of Saturday walking, not that we seem to have schemed out 2023 yet, aside from having an idea of targeting a number of railway station that haven't been used as destinations over the last 11 years, and maybe threading all my trails for the season into a single continuous line that reaches all over Leeds district, an idea that's as fanciful as it is ridiculous, one that would be sure to tie me in mental knots. Regardless, we ride out to Headingley on this gloomy morning, alighting at 10.05am and feeling none of the warmth in the air that we might be anticipating this year as we target a long stretch of road that we haven't approached in full along the days of our walking trails, to be found down the drop of Kirkstall Lane and beyond the Morris Lane crossing, where new development emerge on our left on the way down to Kirkstall Lights, where we take a right turn by the leisure centre to immediately join our trajectory for the day, north-westerly on the A65 where Abbey Road has had it Beatles connection noted as it leads us on between the Abbey Mills and West End Inn, and below the drop of the terrace ends. Just around the corner lies Kirkstall Abbey, the most enduring historical pile in the city which we haven't seen from the main road side on the course of my travels on foot, so a different aspect is presented as we go by its north face, passing the crowds that have already gathered in it parkland and progressing on pat the Abbey House museum and the fields of Burley RUFC on the way on past the Vesper Gate inn and on along the roadside to the Kirkstall Forge milestone marker and the observation that hardly any further development has occurred on the forge site itself since we first passed this way in 2017, judging by what we can see over the high perimeter wall that we pass around.

Burley Park to Headingley via the Meanwood Valley 07/04/23

10.9 miles, via Headingley, Woodhouse Ridge, Buslingthorpe, Sugarwell Hill Park, Miles Hill,

 Meanwood (village), Meanwood Park, Meanwood (wood), Scotland Wood, Five Arches, 

  Adel Woods, Adel, Weetwood, Far Headingley, Beckett Park, and Queenswood

My N-th pair of Boots
is ready to hit the trail!

A seemingly early Easter weekend, arriving at that point in the year where you would start to expect the sir temperature to start to rise and the Sprig warmth comes on gives us the second opportunity to attempt to restart the walking year for 2023, heading out to where we last dropped feet in Season 12, and also donning my new Skechers boots for the first time, with an unusual sort of route in mind, which might give them an opportunity to demonstrate their all-terrain versatility as we go in search of the hidden green valley that hides in the middle of Leeds, while also dramatically splitting the city in half. So for Good Friday's stroll, we return to Burley Park, deep in terraced Leeds, with a proper mileage in mind for the start of the third walking month of the year, alighting the train at 10.35 and immediately setting course north-ish for the long uphill sweep of Beechwood Crescent, around the edge of my old stomping grounds in the first decade of full time residence in West Yorkshire, tracking up through the allotment gardens beyond and over the railway via the high bridge on St Michael's Lane, and hanging a left to join the footpath that skirts both Headingley RLFC stadium and the Cricket ground on the way up to Kirkstall Lane. Passing below the shadow of what's no longer called the Carnegie pavilion, we pass the Cornerstone Baptist church and the run of stores and that surround the sadly lost Lounge Cinema, before the B6157 meets the A660 Otley Road by the Arndale centre and our no easterly trajectory takes us onto the least of the crossroads' routes as Wood lane leads into Headingley's district of Victorian villas and student flats as we crest over toward the edge of the Meanwood Valley, betting the grand old reveal of Leeds's hidden valley from below Ridge Terrace before we join the path high wooded path that runs along the top of Woodhouse Ridge.