Not deliberately but unlike everybody else out that day I elected to walk counter clockwise. Back in the middle ages this would probably resulted in me being burnt at the stake as a wizard and certainly loads of the people I encountered looked like they thought this would be too soft a punishment. But you know what – it was a really enjoyable walk.

A new national park finally gets the green light from the government 60 years after it was first proposed.

Under the banner “Celebrating 60 Years of National Parks and Access to the Countryside,” Shepherds Walks has launched the first Rothbury & Coquetdale Midsummer Walking Festival…

England’s newest red squirrel reserve has been created among the 1,000 acres of conifer woodland that make up Greenfield Forest in the Yorkshire Dales…

Will Self balks at the crowded and ‘pre-packaged’ outdoors of Britain’s beauty spots, recommending the solitude of an ‘unlovely’ urban walk instead

A couple of years ago, the writer Nick Royle and I decided that we would undertake the Three Peaks Challenge. We’d get another rambling writer to join us, raise sponsorship and give the proceeds to charity. However, it transpired that there were grave environmental concerns about the peaks. The sheer numbers of sponsored walkers clambering up Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon were leading to catastrophic erosion, denudation of flora, scaring off of fauna – not to mention the large quantities of plastic water bottles that were left behind by these charitable folk.

In truth, I’ve never considered doing a sponsored walk since my age reached double digits, but I liked the idea of three writers/three peaks. I suppose it was naïve of me not to have realised the extent to which these eminences would’ve become a magnet for people who would never normally go walking. After all, I’ve been a walker all my life and I’ve noticed that the words ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’ attract Gore-tex the way sugar does wasps.