L is for Landlady 

We arrived leg-weary, blistered, peat-smeared and hungry. For our modest fee we got a dinner of rubber chicken, a breakfast of rubber bacon, and a twin ‘room’ in the attic which was half of a DIY division of one of those Victorian skivvy’s bedrooms you couldn’t swing a rat round. The nether regions of our half bulged hardboardily out over a hairpin bend in the staircase, so that you had to bend into a hairpin yourself to manoeuvre into the apartment. The 30W bulb dangled shadeless from the ceiling of the other room, shedding a tenth of its sickly light into ours. All night came the drain-clearing snoring of a 20-stone (each) couple from Birmingham, with whom we’d shared the rubber chicken and the solace of a very loud TV, and whose offer of a good rub-down with oils Dad had regretfully declined.

The sheets? Pink, winceyette, slithered on to the floor. The beer? Unspeakable. The moral? Research before you leap. And be thankful it’s the 21st century next time you’re booking your stopovers.

The weather was warming up – and for one individual, it seemed as though things were getting too warm. As we descended the eastern side of the ridge, making for the National Trust car park, the main rendezvous point for walkers in this part of the world, a middle-aged man, wearing only his birthday suit and – ahem- a bumbag in his left hand, hove into view. You certainly couldn’t say he sprung himself upon us, and other walkers. We saw him from 100 yards away; first I blinked, thinking he must be wearing some new, if diaphanous, hi-tech, sweat-proof wicking gear. If he was, it was the Emperor’s New Clothes range.

A couple with a dog pondered – in jest, I add – whether to let their Alsatian off the leash, remarking that their pet, dribbling from his lolling tongue, was due for his lunch. A cyclist – again, not in any state of wild outrage – set off in pursuit to remind him he was breaking the law (technically, he wasn’t).We wandered onwards. He walked past us, slightly self conscious, a slight smile, neither affable nor smug, playing on his lips. Despite having had time to think of a witty comment, as doubtless Bill Bryson or Stephen Fry might, I merely raised a quizzical eyebrow as he went on his way. “Warm today isn’t it?” is the best I’ve been able to think of since. My wife beat me to it: “If he’s an exhibitionist, he doesn’t have much to exhibit,” she said cuttingly, her eyes narrowing.

I’d actually been too busy thinking of how to handle the whole thing with my children, aged five, four and two. I’d pathetically tried to point out a stonechat to them. (“Look! That bird’s just flown all the way from Africa!) In the end, as I’d guessed, the two younger boys didn’t even register; did my daughter, the oldest and her friend, also five, notice? As sure as hell they did. “He’s got no clothes on. That’s his wolly [sic],” Hannah pointed out helpfully. Personally, I wasn’t particularly bothered. The children were at no risk, and I had an intuitive sense that there wasn’t anything dark at play. I’m also someone who is keen to keep my kids free of self-conscious behaviour and to be at ease with the human body, in a vague, Scandinavian sort of way. Well, if I was going to be consistent, I’d shrug it off. Which I did.

The reaction of my wife and the other parents with us, and later my hairdresser, the local butcher and, yes, even a taxi driver, quickly I established I was in a minority of little more than one. Thanks to my daughter, the story also took about four minutes to get around her entire school the following Monday morning and by home time the school gate view was similarly positioned some distance to the right of Amnesty International. The more I thought about it, and the more people reacted by pulling up their petticoats in anger, the more I wondered if they had a point, and the more the man’s behaviour and action started to irk me. While I had (and continue to have) no issue with people who want to walk bare-cheeked and brave the attentions of any hungry, if over-ambitious peregrine falcon (they’re a breathtaking spectacle on the Stiperstones) I ruminated over some aspects of the encounter. It was a Thursday afternoon in half-term; he was walking along a conspicuous, popular ridgeline. Had he simply wanted to walk naked there were no shortage of more discreet paths in the area. Older children might well have been genuinely distressed. He must have been looking to make a point.

I spoke to Andrew Welch at British Naturism, who first pointed out that the man was breaking no law but admitted that naked walkers will tend to be judicious about where they walk. “Like life, like any organisation, we have our extremists, but the vast majority of naturists are tolerant and considerate and would probably chose to walk a little more off the beaten track,” he said. “We try to avoid situations where conflict might arise. On the other hand, he might argue he’s allowed by law to walk wherever he wants.”

So what was his game? Was he one toggle short of a cagoule? A stag-do bet (unlikely)? A hardcore nudist? Something altogether darker? Or simply someone who couldn’t quite answer why he was doing it, who felt he had overstepped the mark but gone beyond the point of no return? Answers on a postcard, please.

Image: A sign from a nudist beach in France –  just about the only safe image related to ‘naturism’ we could find on Wikipedia Commons.

I is for Islands

Essex and islands? Yes, indeed. A whole jigsaw scatter of them, out at the far end of causeways or short bridges. Each with its own grandstand of a seawall path, each exuding that very particular island magic of not quite being part of the humdrum world. Here’s a roll-call of my favourites… Canvey Island, lying tight against the north Thames shore, half grazing marsh and bird reserve, half housing, with a fantastical backdrop like a giant’s geometry set – the flare stacks of Shell Haven oil refinery. Huge wedge-shaped Foulness in the mouth of the Thames, sealed off by the military but open once a month for curious explorers to venture across. Wallasea Island in the crook of Foulness, where the sea walls have been breached to make a brilliant new bird marsh.

Swinging north, the islands of the Blackwater estuary. Hard up against Maldon and its sea salt works is Northey Island, a National Trust Reserve, where Danes once slaughtered Saxons. There’s Osea Island in the throat of the channel with its zigzag causeway over the mud. And big oval Mersea Island (pictured), where sailing boat halyards chink musically as you savour a dozen fresh oysters in the Company Shed.

Go east, young man and woman – you won’t regret it.

Image: Bob Jones via geograph.org.uk

Like all dearly loved companions, we’ve had our ups and downs, and fallen out from time to time. But now I’ve finally accepted what friends have been telling me for some time: things have, literally, fallen apart. After nearly 18 years, it’s time to buy a new pair of hiking boots. The first hole in our relationship appeared after just three years. I sent the boots off for repair and you were dispatched by return post with a note saying “nothing to repair, you’re just breaking them in”. Imagine a manufacturer today saying that, talking themselves out of an easy sale.

But when I took them off for the last time – or, more accurately, peeled them off, layer by layer – after a plod across heather moorland above Edale in the Peak District, I realised we’d clambered to our final halt. Over the years, holes and gaping cracks have emerged through which you could thread all five fingers; they’ve have been patched up, glued up, sewn up or just left to expand; the soles have been re-tracked and new laces added. My boots now resemble those vintage jumbo jets that, still in service after 25 years, retain almost nothing of their original fuselage.

These past few days I’ve found myself quietly agog about just how many memories these scruffy, knackered and disintegrating pieces of footwear could stir just by looking at them. In an unguarded moment, they made me wonder if our boots don’t reveal something about us, how we lead our life, where we are in that life, and how the world changes around us. They’ve taken me up the major peaks in the UK, large chunks of the British coastline, to the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea; the northernmost point of Europe and the southernmost point of New Zealand; I’ve been below sea level in them in the Somerset Levels and up to 5,400m in Chile and Nepal. They’ve disappeared along with my legs into bogs in Bowland, and just avoided stepping on military shells in Otterburn in Northumberland. They’ve walked my favourite footpath in the whole world, a stretch of coast near Zennor in Cornwall, and they’ve tracked a canal path under Spaghetti Junction.

It’s impossible to say just how far I’ve walked in them, but, averaging 30 or 40 miles a month, and throwing in a few long distance trails, it must be around 7,000 miles, and, who knows, 10,000 stiles. The logbook also records three cow attacks and one call for assistance to mountain rescue. They were there in the Lake District when my wife swore like a trooper on our first walking holiday and threatened never to go away with me again: which was reasonable enough as I had blatantly fibbed to her that it was just a hop, skip and a jump from the Hole in the Wall to the top of Helvellyn, omitting to mention Striding Edge.

The first test of our relationship (with the boots, not my wife) was a two-week, blister-free slog along the Pennine Way, which confirmed I had picked the right companions. Back then, I was a sullen and modestly rebellious student attracted to the idea of hardly seeing or talking to another human being for two weeks. Today, I’m reliably informed I can still be sullen, but I would no longer want to clear off for so long from the rest of the human race; and with a young family, I no longer wish to. The Pennine Way has changed too: it sees far fewer people nowadays, as the trend has moved to doing “bite-sized chunks” of long-distance trails.

The new boots will have different tales to tell. Climate change has made me more judicious about flying long haul, and like many others, I’ve come to realise that the UK is pretty hard to beat when it comes to walking and exploration. They’ll be doing many shorter walks as the kids join in; they’ll witness tantrums and stubborn refusals to walk, from their new owner as well as the children. The walks that await my new boots will just as likely be chosen or downloaded from the internet as picked after a joyful rummage in a bookshop. And – I’m being clutched in the stomach by a cold, skeletal hand as I write this – if they last as long as the last pair, and so do I, then I’ll be touching 60 when I need to buy the next ones.

My 10-year-old self lay back on the turf of Bulbarrow Hill in the shade of a beech spinney, book in hand, all alone in deepest Dorset. And I’ll never forget the cold pang of terror when I looked up from my book to see an evil little face, with goat-like eyes and the most cynical of smiles, staring out at me from among the tree trunks.

The hallucination (if that’s what it was) certainly had a lot to do with the story I was reading: The Music on the Hill by Saki, a Gothic fantasy in which a woman destroys an offering to Pan in the woods, and is herself gored to death by a stag driven wild by mysterious piping from a copse. I was a fanciful boy (and how the child has proved father to the man!), with a capacity for wild flights of imagination – easy prey for Saki’s baroque whimsies. I can remember running off, not daring to look back, in dread of eerie music and the hot breath of a stag on my neck.

Now, when I’m out walking and the path takes me deep into tanglewood, I’m occasionally conscious of a something or a someone there – a presence neither benign nor malign, but watchful and quietly amused. I think of it as a manifestation of whatever it was in the medieval psyche that gave rise to the Green Man, that enigmatic carved face sprouting leaves and fruit from its nostrils which we see in so many of our country churches. I’ve never again experienced anything like my childhood terror of the wildwood. But even if it isn’t the sort of thing a proper grown-up admits to, I’m quite pleased, if truth be told, that the Green Man hasn’t vanished from those psychic thickets quite yet.

walk: So how did the idea for a walking comedy come about?
Andy Riley: Well in comedy I think it’s been massively underserved – one of our personal bugbears in the past few years is the number comedies set ‘behind the scenes’ of television programmes, which I don’t really think connects with most people’s lives. But the actual business of going for a walk is universal. As soon as you decide to go for a walk and maybe take a slightly longer route to get a nicer view you become a rambler whether you know it or not. It’s got to be one of the most popular activities in the country but no one’s really written about in comedy – so we thought it was time to fix that!

On your ‘making of’ blog you mentioned that someone walked straight through the set because it was on their route – did real walks and walkers inspire a lot of the show?
Kevin Cecil: We’ve both done a fair bit of walking, though I have to say Mark’s better at the whole wild camping thing than me! A lot of it was inspired by real walks that we’ve done, and stories that we’ve heard. In episode three, for instance, the characters are eating sandwiches in a pub and they’re told they can only eat food that’s purchased on the premises – so they sell each other their sandwiches. And that apparently did happen.
AR: And a lot of our personal prejudices have found their way into the characters. I like to walk with paper – I don’t like to use GPS – and once got laughed at by a women who was in charge of a group of Scouts, since I was using ‘stone age’ technology.
KC: What we’ve realised in that walking as a hobby is at this cusp of technological change. It’s possible to never get lost again, or use maps or a compass. So we thought it would be interesting to have that kind of dynamic at the centre of the show – so someone who wants to keep things the same and someone who wants to embrace all the mods cons. I’ve got friends who do long-distance walking holidays and we talked to them. I hope it’s pretty clear when you watch the show that while we’ve got lots of jokes about walkers, we really are are on their side.

So have you shown it to any walkers or walking groups yet?
AR: No, we’ve only just finished editing it – we only stopped filming two weeks as go, so the editing process really has been tight because of BBC4′s outdoors season.
KC: Also, with filming the whole series outdoors we could only work during the summer months.
AR: But they will definitely see it tonight!

And what will they make of it?
AR: Well, walkers are such a diverse group that I’m sure there’ll have plenty to say! I think that a lot of people will recognise a part of themselves in the characters, like we have, and I imagine some people will say “how dare you, rambling’s not like this!” and other people who will think we’ve missed stuff out. So I hope they watch the next two, because there’s lots of jokes and stories about rambling that aren’t in the first one. But I wouldn’t want to presume – it will be great to see what people think!

Are there plans for more episodes after the first three?
AR: Well, we started with just the three for this season, but if it goes well, and if it’s well received, then we’d love to do some more.

So if people enjoy the show they should write to the BBC and let them know?
KC: They should walk to the BBC and let them know!

The Great Outdoors airs tonight at 9pm on BBC Four – let us know what you think on our Facebook discussion page or via the comments below. Click here to watch a clip and a behind-the-scenes teaser on the BBC website.

As a scowling teenager – and boy, could I scowl for England – I was once part of a group dragooned over Dartmoor by a walk leader like that. Needless to say, not a smile, song or utterance passed our lips. When our man fell in a bog we laughed, briefly. But that was the only jot or tittle of jollity in 48 hours of pure embarrassment, leavened with large helpings of hatred.

Now that I’m a big boy, and don’t basically give a damn what anyone thinks of me, I like a pinch of jollity with my walks. Or better still, after them, with a pint in the hand and another in the bush. Best of all is the Boxing Day ritual observed by jolly fools at the Seymour Arms, down a lane at the end of nowhere not too far from where I live. A post-Christmas-pudding hike up the hill for a tune and a dance on the Bronze Age chieftain’s tomb at the top. Then afterwards another dance and a tune in the public bar: all wooden benches, wooden tables, 1950s decorations and a coal fire. There’s a proper pint drawn from a barrel, ribbons and preposterous hats, music-hall songs and genial nonsense. What has that got to do with walking? Nothing. But the jollity wouldn’t be anything without the walk that special day, and vice versa, with knobs on. Big red ones, eh? Eh?

F is for Flora and Fauna

There are differences between them. You never hear a peep out of Flora. And she’s a down-to-earth kind of girl, very rooted. Whereas Fauna’s either all over the place, up in the air and gabbling fit to beat the band. Or she keeps herself to herself as quiet as, say, a mouse, and runs a mile if you make the wrong move.

Now when they first caught my eye, both Flora and Fauna used to be very reliable about turning up on time (give or take a week or two), and in the usual places, too. But recently they’ve been getting a bit flighty, a bit unpredictable. Flora’s retreated to the hilltops when she used to be a valley girl, while Fauna’s either much too early or doesn’t turn up at all. Springs have been especially funny. Flora’s started popping up when you just don’t expect her, and Fauna’s been making all sorts of saucy moves before I’ve even got my thermals off! This spring, though, they were both sulky and didn’t put in an appearance till I’d almost given up on them.

I hope they’re not thinking of leaving me. I’d really, really miss them.