The sights, sounds and smells of simple excursions into nature…
Ten minute escape pods for when you don’t have time to go yourself…
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All images in Walking diary posts are photographs taken by the author
5 ways walking the winter landscape will inspire and uplift you…
Pathways open to sweeping landscapes that were once hidden. We become masters of the land around us – for the first time seeing and understanding its contours – its rise and fall, the very bones and essence of its form. In this new light, the naked terrain of winter makes us feel the landscape viscerally,…
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Walking Diaries*Winter*The Wild of the Moorland
Beyond the trees, the land opens out, untamed and barren – tussocks of long grass the only relief to open plains of waterlogged ground. The wind travels unhindered across these flat moors, insisting on its wildness with every breath…
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Walking Diaries*Winter*Chasing the sunlight…
Dry stone walls ramble, reassuringly ancient, over the bare winter mountain, accentuating its stark seasonal architecture. They are innocuous but immovable, like tenacious bones of history – holding the landscape together.
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Walking Diaries*Winter*Into a frosty wonderland
Winter opens such different vistas – landscapes once obscured, appear in different scale and detail, birds otherwise hidden amidst green canopies become suddenly and joyfully visible…
On the forest side of the road, further evidence of autumn’s resolution not to be forgotten, a sheltered tree clinging to its crop of bronzed leaves, the warm russet…
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Walking Diaries*Autumn*A spooky dusk walk into the Wild Wood
It is T-minus 90 minutes till sundown. The impending dusk is creeping up the mountain like an embarrassed ghost. Strange rustles in the undergrowth could be furry creatures preparing for bed, or they could be dark ghouls with the stolen souls of dead mushrooms.
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Walking Diaries*Autumn*Season of mists and fellow bootiness…
On a thickly foggy October morning, the high mountaintops beckoned me. The low autumn sun shimmered through a veiled sky, gilding the russet leaves in gold, and forming magical landscapes that emerged and evolved from the mist…
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Walking Diaries *Autumn* Cocooning calm on the canal-side…
Is there anything more tranquil than the gentle plop of a duck into the still waters of a canal? Soft autumn colours, tranquil reflections and comical birds in a gentle leaf-dusted ramble…
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Walking Diaries*Autumn*The secrets of the mountain..
A journey into a cloaked landscape.
Skies overcast with the palest of greys have rendered a flat, still light, hiding the depth and contrast of the hills.
It is like nature, in the midst of its magnificent tumble into autumn, has chosen to have a little snooze – to rest a moment from the…
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Walking Diaries*Autumn* Forest life from the coal dust…
Today’s walk heads into the land of deep evergreens grown upon the spoil of our mining past. A mountain whose landscape has changed and evolved through the mists of time…
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Walking Diaries*Autumn* The magical light of Equinox
The night has fought at last to equal length, and the shadows of the year are creeping up behind the trees. Despite this, the morning light of the low autumn sun is bright – iridescent – and this landscape on the brink of change feels never more in tune with the magic at its heart.
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Walking Diaries*Autumn*The bracken turns to bronze…
The mountain landscape, gilded in low autumn sun, is at the very cusp of change. Verdant green oaks spill their prolific bounty to the ground below, mingling with the first russet leaf-drop.
On the open hillside above, the bright green ferns, bejewelled with raindrops, sit aside their newly bronzed companions. The hazy light softens the…
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Walking Diaries *Autumn*The first whispers on the wind…
Enter that liminal time where summer flowers are fading, but autumn colours have not yet ripened. It prompts us to rove the landscape for bright splashes, hints of magic, and bold defiers of the lengthening night…
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Walking Diary *Summer* Cliffs, Coves and Choughs in wildest Cornwall
There is no walk quite like a Cornish cliff top. And today’s weather has furnished us with that most quintessential of Celtic weather systems, a blowy mizzler. ..
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Walking Diary*Summer* Hidden pools in the land of lost treasure
As I step over the stile onto the path proper, I feel like I am in wonderland. There is not another soul in sight, butterflies are darting back and forth all around me amongst the long grass, and skylarks are rising from the ground and whirling overhead…
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Two bats and a squirrel – The birth of an ADHD walking diary
…there is something different here. It doesn’t feel ground-breaking, it doesn’t feel like it will change my life. But it’s a gentle, tangible tonic. It’s a slower stream of oxygen through otherwise stormy veins…
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Walking Diary*Summer* Adventure beyond the fallen oak…
This sort of looks like it could once have been a path, but directly ahead of me a huge limb has been severed from a living oak, and it is impossible to progress in this direction without going either over or under…
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Walking Diary *Summer*Sandmartins, Swifts and secret pathways…
Today’s walk was veritable banquet of wildlife, and a testament to the glorious abundance of June. I hadn’t gone out expecting very much, rather, feeling somewhat low in both energy and spirits this morning
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Walking Diary*Summer* Runaway robins and retreat in the trees
I arrive at my walking destination knowing I don’t have much time today, but determined to soak in what I can before the days work ahead of me
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Walking Diary*Spring*Wind in white flowers
An evening walk. And the air has a brooding quality to it, grey skies and sharp pulls of wind, like something more ominous may be afoot. This evenings walk is in Gloucestershire
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Walking Diary *Spring* Tunnels of dappled light
A slight shift of focus, a slight lift of mood, as I continued past the busy roundabout and onto the industrial estate at the rear, from which you can access the glorious Taff Trail. One turn from a busy road of delivery lorries and the path in front makes the supermarket feel like a thankfully…
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Walking Diary*Spring* Hazy sun and cockerels herald the season
The weather feels relatively mild for March, and there is a soft haze in the air, not quite sunshine, but that pre-sun light, where the sun sits behind the thinnest layer of cloud – strong enough to cast faint shadows on the green banks of the roadside – but not yet completely revealed.
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