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.

This is what lead us to spend this weekend creating The Tiers of Relative Proximity, or the Tiers of Relative Remoteness, if you prefer, reassembling eleven plus years' worth of data into tiers that describe the many trails that I have travelled in terms of closeness and distance from home, which amazingly encapsulates the entire county of West Yorkshire into only three tiers, with the first tier being all the paths that I have blazed out from Morley, in the direction of the major settlements abounding or from walking the many local circuits in recent years. This creates a surprisingly large local bubble as well as  presenting a visual spider that reaches out to many corners of the county, which informs the nature of Tier 2, which either reaches out from the destinations attained in Tier 1, or features paths which have interacted with those in the first tier, which causes locations as disparate as Skipton, Harrogate, Barnsley and Littleborough to fall within only two journeys' worth of distance from home, making them relative proximate while being absolutely quite remote. Tier 3 thus stands as all the paths that interact with the routes and destinations in Tier 2, bringing York, Selby. Doncaster, Penistone and Hadfield close in the east and south, while Haslingden, Burnley, Kettlewell and Pateley Bridge are all discovered to be relatively nearby, only three treks away on the other side of the compass rose while also covering all of the Aire-Calder-Colne catchment's upper reaches and a fair old chunk of those of the Wharfe and Don as well, and touching the Nidd, Ouse and Dearne in Yorkshire, and the Etherow, Tame, Irwell and Calder on the Lancashire side. Tier 4 is surprisingly small, mostly composed of paths in distant quarters of South Yorkshire and the trails into Nidderdale and the Yorkshire Dales National Park, while Tier 5 delves deep into sub-Peak District Derbyshire, across to My Sister's place in the West Pennines and around the uppermost Wharfe, Ribble and Ure in the Dales, with Tier 6 reaching the North and Irish Sea coasts, while Tier 7 extends to both Cumbria and Leicestershire, with remainder of trails to Windermere, the Wolds and the Old Country lying beyond, as we as leaving the remaining twenty-plus unconnected trails looking slightly abandoned, further aboard.

The first casualty of 2023 is
my long-serving office chair.

From all this is where we start to finally assemble our plans for Season 12 and the remainder of 2023, as if we're going to be suffering post-Covid fatigue issues for a while, and all indications suggest that we are, we don't want to be spending time heading out too far from home, trying to further expand the Field of Walking Experience, as escape routes are harder to come by once out of the county and I'm not proving to be in much of a mood for early Saturday starts presently, which means that local trails will come into their own again as we plot the future. We can get a bit creative in this planning in order to move some trails and destinations between tiers, bringing some already established locales a bit closer to home, by walking from Morley and making some new Tier 1 routes which reach across Tier 2 and into Tier 3, thus moving them up a level, as well as giving us some new perspectives around the county and shuffling the relative proximity of trails beyond, plausibly bringing Nidderdale out of its relative distance without even going anywhere near it. Anyways. there's still plenty of places to aim at that I've not walked towards, like the Aire Valley on either side of Leeds, or anywhere on the far side of the city for that matter, while targeting South-West of Bradford, and South-East of Wakefield could shuffle the tiers further, as we await my body returning to some sort of functional normal, which looks like it isn't going to be any time soon, when we might approach the level lands in the east along the fall of the Aire, Went and Don, where the going is easy but the distances are rather extreme. Of course none of that will be happening soon, as I've got a long weekend away planned for the first of the three (3!) May Bank Holidays, as we head of Calderdale and Manchester for company, food and music with My Good Friends in Mytholmroyd, and exercise will be necessary after that as far too much sitting down this weekend has seen me breaking my office chair, proving to be no longer able to resist my not too inconsiderable middle-aged adult weight, failing not too catastrophically but rendering itself needing immediate replacement after a decade-plus of service, and I'll have to get comfortable on a different chair to do my many hours of blogging from now on.

5,000 Miles Cumulative Total: 5967.8 miles

2023 Total: 45.6 miles

Up Country Total: 5,487.1 miles

Solo Total: 5625.2 miles

5,000 in my 40s Total: 4557.6 miles

Next Up: A May Day weekend Jaunt to My Support Bubble.