Rumination: To Coast, and Coast.

After a holiday, a break is usually necessary, a sad cliché that any time out from work leaves you tired enough to need another holiday, and after completing the major plank of my walking plans for the year, some rest, self imposed or otherwise, is a good idea before the final quarter of the season goes down. As it happens, there proved to be no scope for a fourth day of walking as my holidays came to an end, the third rest day being used for a trip to Fleetwood Freeport for some useful retail therapy, and then for a drive back down the Blackpool promenade without actually stopping, surely the best way to experience that town. The only stroll of note coming as I wandered up to the viewpoint at the top of Mellor Moor, 200+m above the Ribble Valley, and only half a mile distant from Finch Cottage, to examine the remains of the Royal Observer Corps bunker and to take in the panorama that encompasses the entirety of the county of Lancashire. With the West Pennines to the south, the Forest of Bowland to the north, inland towards Pendle and Rossendale and the coastal plains spread to the west, clearly this a county to explore further, though my next pair of holidays are already planned for 2016-17, and the Ribble Way might have to wait until 2018 at the earliest. The Saturday than brought the poor weather that we had dared to anticipate for the whole week on the other side of the Pennines, so no opportunity for a dash out with My Sister could be found between the rain showers, and anyways, my nieces had a cycle ride to do in the morning and a school fete to attend in the afternoon, so sociable brews were to be had in Egerton instead. The plotted walks will have to wait for another time then, and there's still plenty of future time to fit in the railway walk between Ramsbottom and Accrington, the Leeds & Liverpool canal between Wheelton and Wigan, or the railway and moorland fringe paths on the edge of the West Pennines. So altogether a triumphant holiday, getting in plenty of sights around Lancashire, a county which all of the family could use to spend more time exploring, not least because My Parents still haven't managed to visit Rivington Park in more than a decade of travelling this way.

North Sea Coast attained!
at Hornsea

The real triumph of the holiday is the trail blazed to the Irish Sea coast, complementing the North Sea trail from the spring and giving some of my walking mileage a real feeling of distance, for I might blather on about the apparent distance travelled from home as all my local wanderings are added together, but the feeling changes when you actually start putting them end to end. Regular mileage within a small area gives you a feeling of intimate knowledge and familiarity with a landscape but the five (or six) days that it takes from Morley to Hornsea or Southport to cover the 70-odd miles has the feeling of bringing a lot of fresh territory into your field of experience. I've noted before the visibility of the Yorkshire Wolds from the top of Woolley Edge, and the view across the coastal plain from the West Pennine hills, but the act of walking between and beyond these locations has the effect of  drawing these distant locales into my immediate recognition. A long trek like these thus has the effect of mentally reaching out and bringing both coasts much closer together and wholly within the regular arena of my understanding, the distance between the coasts is no longer 130+ miles, but they are now both much closer together; the strange mystery of walking again being proven, days of walking brings things closer together than hours of driver ever could. A useful insight is also gained as to the scale of Yorkshire and Lancashire, both being large counties, with most of their major centres of population compressed into a relatively small area, but Yorkshire seems to be three times as wide, with Lancashire having most of the same sequence of Landscape wrinkles but compressed into a third of the space. Oddly, the Pennines seem to be pretty far off from the middle of the country, pretty odd to find that they are two days west of home, with only three days of the country beyond, and even then they just keep on going to within about 20 miles of the coast. It's fascinating how the North country continues to shrink, as places fall within your walking territory, and you realise that a trek from Morley to Wales would be only six trips long, and that Scotland is about nine days distant, with Leicester and the old country also being within reach, with only one whole county between my original home and my current one.

Irish Sea Coast attained! (sort of)
at Southport.

So now we have a moment to pause and reflect on the walking year so far, largely because this weekend has been dropped from the schedule due to having a concert to attend with my closest friends in Manchester (the BBC Philharmonic doing John Foulds and Olivier Messiaen, if you are interested), and a head cold coming on heavily at the end of the week caused all wandering plans, brief as the were, to be cancelled. A look back on my plans for the start of the year suggest that I could easily choose to suspend the season and rest on my laurels as all the targets for the year have been met, with trips to both coasts completed and the target of 500 miles met. Trails have taken me through Leeds and on to the north and east, as well as around Wakefield district to such a degree that in the months since completing the Wakefield Way it has almost felt like a second home to me, and whilst there's not been a lot of fresh canal paths to find, there have been plenty of railways to find. It's this last point that will be keeping me on the trail for as long as the decent weather and energy allows, as I've still got 60+ miles and five days worth of  railway walks plotted to do in and around Wakefield district, and if all of those can go down, I can look on to see that I have only 72.5 miles to go to 2,000 on the walking career and 74.7 miles until I hit 600 in 2015, and there's seven viable weekends left of the season to fit that into. Both are totals that seemed remote at the start of the year, and inconceivable when my walking odyssey started in 2015, but I see no reason now to push for them now, I might be feeling somewhat drained after the exertions of this season, and the regular strains of my working life, but I can surely inspire myself to reach for a total that would have me averaging 500 miles a year since I started out, and if I can keep attaining that modest (!) total over the next couple of years, I can look forward to a slightly reduced but more extensive walking career as my legs get older. It's all very well burning every public path in West Yorkshire, but I'm probably two years off from running out of places to see that are within straightforward reach of home, and the future will involve going much farther afield on my travels, which will get longer winded and more expensive, so lets push to 2,000 in 2015, and think about the possibility of attaining 3,000 in 2017, and then let the future take care of itself.

Next on the Slate: Railway walking in Wakefield District, I've got five plots to choose from!