Walking is good for you. As long as it’s away from the city, argues guest blogger, Peer Lawther (@peerlawther), a social media manager for a debt charity in central Leeds who always looks to escape the city for the open air. So when he saw Phil Kirby’s recent article on walking he took a keen interest. But then he discovered all was not as it seemed… . . .
I read with interest Phil Kirby’s recent paean to city walking on these pages. As he says, “[Walking is] an art, done for no other reason than the pure pleasure of perambulation itself.” I envy his walking; “Seven or eight miles a day easily” sounds a wonderful, carefree use of one’s time.
However, I have to disagree with the main thrust of his argument. He makes the case for walking being “essentially an urban activity”. Oh Phil. You were doing so well.
Walking is essentially a rural activity. Walking in urban areas is a pointless exercise in frustration and despair. The streets are filled with the clueless and the interminably slow. These are living breathing antonyms of Usain Bolt. And even if you escape these snails realised in human form, car and bus fumes fill the air and ears ring with noise and clamour.
Concrete and tarmacadamed, painted in grayscale, The city is flat and I want SCALE. I lust after those hachured sections of the map where vehicle tyres fear to tread.
I want to find the escape hatch and climb through. I want to discover the places where I can go at my own pace, where no one’s in the way and where I can walk for miles. I’m confined in a city; break free of the metropolis and the landscape opens out around you.
Unconfinement is a joy; no stressed women with pushchairs running over my feet and no men with an attitude barging past. The freedom to stride out for 10, 15, 20 miles is revelatory. What a feeling it is to actually stretch the legs and use the muscles you were blessed with for something other than browsing pound shops.
I go walking most weekends; some would call me a hiker, some a fellwalker, and some, God forbid, a rambler (I don’t ramble).
And some, to be fair, would call me deranged. I’d probably agree. I’m on a quest to scale every mountain in England; perhaps a folly, but oh God, a beguiling one. This follows my successful attempt to summit (yes, it’s also a verb) all 214 Lake District fells in less than two years. As I said, deranged.
As one commenter to the original article correctly stated, it does sometime seem as though ramblers (there’s that word again) are walking adverts for Gore-Tex and The North Face (that superfluous ‘The’ grates even me). I’m not especially proud that I’m sometimes clad in Berghaus from head to toe.
But at the same time I wear it because it works. It keeps you dry, it keeps your feet from being damaged, and it keeps you hot when it’s cool and cool when it’s hot. It’s clothing made for the environment you’re in and it means that you can get into and enjoy the environment more. Even if you look like a bit of a spod.
The High Places
We don’t explore our wild or our high places as much as we should. A few years ago I made the commitment to investigate our maps’ open spaces, partly to a gain an insight into our region’s vast rural and industrial history, partly to understand more about the geography and geology of this wondrous land we call The North, but also to free my mind from the mental strain of modern living. It works sublimely.
It’s amazing to think that all but two of the 253 mountains of England are in the north; places to stand and witness some of the most stunning views of best region in the country, from the toppermost points of the country, and all within a few hours of Leeds.
We have this spectacular scenery, if not right on our doorstep, bloody close by. The nearest mountain summit to Leeds is Great Whernside, overlooking beautiful upper Wharfedale. It’s only 35 miles due north-west (and 2,310 feet up) as the mangy pigeon flies from the choking bus fumes of Park Row and the pile ’em high sell ’em cheap chain stores of Briggate.
A walk up even a fairly undistinguished fell like Great Whernside or, if the clouds are down, along the banks of the infant River Wharfe below, is not an exercise in madness but a chance to clear one’s mind and let the stresses of city life seep away.
Yes, you need a map and a compass, but we all need some direction in our lives; it’s always better to know where True North lies. I think that’s what walking is all about for me – it lets me find my direction again.
No one has the goal of walking along every street in Leeds. No one wants to visit every shop in the city centre before they die. Too often in a city you end up in a loop ( orworse still, in Leeds you end up on The Loop). Like Phil my aim is to walk, but away from the city, not towards it.
It’s an ambition, and as the late, great Alfred Wainwright said in the preface to his masterpiece of northern cross-country hiking, A Coast to Coast Walk;
“One should always have a definite objective, in a walk as in life – it is so much more satisfying to reach a target by personal effort than to wander aimlessly. An objective is an ambition, and life without ambition is…well, aimless wandering.”
This man knew a thing or two about walking in the countryside, so I’ll go with his advice.