The Rossendale Rambler

Do you carry a camera with you when going for a ramble ? It can be quite good fun. The urge is there to capture a magnificent view or a cluster of smiling faces of your friends around a mountain top trig point. The trouble is the results can be somewhat disappointing. Where has gone that exhilarating sense of achievement you felt on reaching the top ? That marvellous top-of-the-world feeling of vast space and distance and the wind in your hair. Then pictures of your fellow walkers, once passed round and briefly admired, are too easily consigned to some dusty drawer and never looked at again.

It would be better to be very methodical. Stick the pictures in an album and write alongside each one a few notes to help remind you where it was and what else happened on that day. But the notes can be more interesting than the pictures, as I discovered several years ago. I abandoned my camera and just wrote the notes ! I made an effort to keep a written account of each day out in a ‘Walks Journal’.

This started out as merely a record of routes, distances, and maybe a mention of who else was on the walk. Then later as months went by I started to include more information - the weather, descriptions of things or places I found interesting, or beautiful (or otherwise). You can convey so much with words that a photo can’t record; one’s feelings, sounds and smells, amusing incidents, what people said, things that made the day memorable.

My journals are written by hand in school-type exercise books, which after seventeen years now occupy quite a large box. Some days have only merited a brief account. At other times I feel quite lyrical. I can sit in front of my fire on a winter’s evening and browse through these note books and the memories come flooding back as if they were yesterday. Far better than any photograph. For example here is an extract from my journal written after a solo walk last June in the rolling hills south of Loch Tay, Perthshire.

      ....What wildlife I have seen today ! - Roe Deer
      in twos and threes, and lots of mountain hares,
      who would pause, ears erect, then dart away
      to watch me once again from further off;
      A buzzard, then a grouse flushed from its nest
      revealed a clutch of eight brown speckled eggs,
      The call of curlews gliding down the wind,
      And as I ate my lunch a wheatear cried,
      "chack-chack,chack-chack",perched on a nearby stone
      And taunting me, the meadow pipit’s song:-
      I sometimes think when I am miles from home
      and friends on some remote dark heather hill,
      and maybe feeling just a little tired,
      - then does the pipit’s oft repeated call
      become a mocking and a tiresome sound.
      And strangely so, for when I get back home
      amongst the city’s bustle and its noise,
      these are the moments which most strongly come
      to haunt me, and to urge me ever back
      to heather, sighing wind, and moorland grass....

-OK, so I’ve rewritten it slightly to look nice in this article (having been influenced by John Betjeman’s autobiography!) But it’s all there for me to enjoy again over the years. Also as a bonus these accounts have helped me, as a walk leader of our group, to choose walks that I have particularly enjoyed , so that I can show them to you.

So why not try writing your own walks diary ? The rewards are well worth the effort, and eventually you also might like to share some of them with us in the ‘Rossendale Rambler".

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