Welcome to my website
Welcome
to my website. I’m Brian, a retired civil servant and I’ll be
celebrating my 60th birthday on 30 June 2011; the planned completion
date of my C2C walk. Although I spent my first 44 years living in
Harrogate, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, I didn’t really take
up walking until I was faced with the prospect of relocating with my
job to Cambridgeshire. Having been given about 18 months notice of
my impending relocation, I decided that I’d better try to become
more familiar with the Dales that I’d only seem from behind the
steering wheel of my car. Luckily, the Yorkshire Dales National Park
has a programme of Ranger led walks and it was these that gave me a
taste for the great outdoors.
Having walked with the Park Rangers and undertaken some basic map & compass tuition, I felt sufficiently confident to head out into the hills on my own and to further explore the beauty of the Dales. This I did on many a Sunday morning and my love for my home county was only enhanced, particularly Swaledale which must be the best place on earth.
At about the same time, I had a Flight Lieutenant working with me who was preparing to take part in an RAF expedition on Mount Kilimanjaro. He and a few other work colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to tackle Scafell Pike and being up for a challenge I agreed to tag along. If our first attempt to summit Scafell Pike was anything to go by, my RAF colleague clearly needed to polish his navigational skills before venturing out to Africa. Instead of taking us to Seathwaite to start our climb, he mistakenly took us to Stonethwaite from where we climbed alongside Greenup Gill to Greenup Edge and then on to High Raise. We didn’t know this at the time but it was obvious that we were no where near Scafell Pike! A number of lessons were learned from this first venture to the Lake District. The first being that you are never really lost – it’s more a case of not knowing where you are. The second is don’t rely on others for your navigation and where possible always have two people assigned to this task. The third, and possibly best, is whatever happens enjoy yourself. We returned at a later date to make a successful summit of Scafell Pike and I’ve since led members from my Ramblers Association group on this particular route.
It is odd that my first venture to the Lakes should take me to part of the C2C route and I look forward to retracing some of my steps when I make the climb up Greenup Edge on Day 3 of my C2C epic.