If you can spare five seconds I’ll tell you the story of my life. Or at least I can sum up this story: there are challenges and adventures at the very limit of your capabilities right here in Britain. You just need to go find them.
A mere 12km of walking on the hilltops of little old Britain. It doesn’t sound much. It looked impressive though; my first sight of the Cuillin Ridge was from many miles away, across the sea, looking over the water towards those far blue mountains. I was heading to Skye on a whim to climb dangerous mountains with a man I’d never met, who had read my books then emailed me after we both entered a stupid winter mountain bike race. (He won the race. I just about survived it.)
Alex’s idea appealed immediately: to mountain bike cross country to the sea, paddle over the sea to the mountains, and then attempt the formidable Cuillin Ridge. A triathlon of microadventures through some of the finest landscapes in Britain? I’m on my way, I replied.

So we began from ‘S’* (“Good pub there” is the guaranteed comment from those who know it), pedalling happily into the glen, excited to be on the move, delighted by the weather which appeared to be holding and which was crucial to our success.

The path was narrow singletrack, strewn with rocks and ditches. I quickly realised that the hills of Surrey are inadequate preparation for the skill levels needed for mountain biking through the Scottish highlands. However, in between my stumbles, foot-downs, and a comic straight-over-the-handlebars-into-a-bog it was beautiful, remote riding. On all sides barren peaks rose from the green glen into a warm blue sky. And silence. We passed a loch, perfect for a swim, but we had miles to go before nightfall so we pressed on, hurtling along an exhilarating sweeping descent down to the blue sea and a sweeping bay. Its isolation was accentuated by a single house, built bang in the middle of the curving bay far from electricity or running water.

We rode onwards, up a bugger of a hill and blasted wooping down the other side, down to a tight little bay and the beginning of the second phase of our Highland triathlon microadventure. We needed now to paddle out into the sea, across the bay to the base of the impressive mountain range before us. Whilst I inflated my beloved packraft Alex chatted with his friend Colin who’d met us here armed with a couple of sea-kayaks.

The day was hot and the paddle was a joy. It was a windy day with the white clouds flying. And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
Waves cooled my face and soaked my clothes as my blunt packraft battered the swell. I struggled to make headway against the headwind (the curse not only of cyclists but also, I have learned, the packrafter too). Packrafts are the jacks of all trades but the masters of none (I feel an affinity!) and as I watched the two sea kayaks pull easily away from me I knew that I was in for a long drag if we were to reach the other side before nightfall.

But it is a special thing, being in a boat. Your view is a privileged one, inaccessible to all those mere mortals left behind on the shore. Jellyfish pulsed and drifted, pretty pink and white, through the clear blue brine. The shore gradually receded behind us with each pull on the paddle. Blisters bubbled on my hands as the mountains ahead of us loomed a little larger with each small stroke. We were paddling westward into the dazzling evening sun. Liquid stars fell from our paddles and burst over the bows of my boat. At last, tired, wet, but happy we reached the lee of the mountains, sheltered from the headwind and I could lie back in my packraft and relax.

We were in the mouth of a secluded loch, tucked tight into a brooding cleft at the base of the mountains that thrust steeply straight up from the shore. The Cuillins are the ancient eroded remains of a vast volcano lip and they curved spectacularly high above us jagged and menacing like rotted black stumps of teeth.
It is hard to imagine a more beautiful sea paddle in Britain, and I grinned in smug delight once again at my decision to dedicate a year to searching for wildness and adventure here in my own country. Alex was thrilled as well. Although he knew Skye well and was a regular climber and mountain biker here, he had never experienced a paddle such as this. Even in your backyard there are new adventures, new sights, new perspectives: you just have to make the small effort to go and discover them.

Alex pointed behind me and I turned to look. A dozen seals were peering curiously at us from damp dark eyes. Two snorted and dived. The rest watched us quizzically as we paddled smoothly towards the shore past a couple of seal pups still in their juvenile white fur. Two terns, the whitest, sleekest of sea birds, shrieked low overhead, concerned for the young in their nests. We though were concerned only for food, for we had been long on the move and were ready for dinner. We pulled our boats up onto the shore beside a small river.

As Alex boiled a big pan of pasta I followed the course of the river – surely one of Britain’s shortest – from the sea up through just a couple of hundred gentle metres to its beginning at Loch C. I had wanted to visit this spot for years. I learned about it in the book Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane. He writes…

“We reached the entrance to C at dusk. Cliffs on one side, and a cut wall of rock, waterfall-seamed, on the other. As we passed between the cliffs I felt a strong sense of having crossed a portal, or stepped over a threshold.”

We slept on the shore and then – too soon – we woke up again. 3am. Time to begin the third phase of our adventure: to tackle the famous Cuillin Ridge back to the pub at S. We hoped to reach it in time for last orders. Only 12km stood between us and beer and yet we had allowed 20 hours to get there. That should give an indication of the difficulties that stood in our way.
We left Colin sleeping (he would paddle home towing the spare kayak when he woke) and began climbing through the darkness. By sunrise we were atop our first Munro (any Scottish mountain with a height over 3,000 ft (914.4 m)) enjoying a staggeringly beautiful view of mountains, sea and islands.

This summit (Gars-bheinn) serves as the start point of the ridge challenge and we began at a good speed and in high spirits. The weather was beautiful, we’d made a really early start: everything was looking good. We made good speed for a couple of hours hiking, jumping and scrambling our way along the ridge. On both sides was sky, a lot of sky, and a long, long way to fall on both sides. The views were as beautiful as from an aeroplane. But we could spare only a few glances for full attention was needed to concentrate on our footing and route finding at all times. It may seem strange that route finding is difficult high on an exposed ridge, but it’s a jumbled rocky chaos up there and progress was hellish hard. At one point Alex leaped across a gap then turned to watch me.
“I recommend you don’t look here – just jump.”
I jumped.
Then I looked down.
A long way down.
Deep
breath.
Push on.

My admiration for people who run the length of the ridge in just 3.5 hours turned to amazement as we reached the first climbing section. These mountain madmen scamper up and down cliffs which, to my wimpish eye, looked frankly terrifying. I was happy indeed to be roped up as we wriggled our way up very difficult (VD) and mildly severe (MS) rock faces and abseiled down the other side. These climbing sections, we felt, were the only likely things to stop us finishing our challenge so we were chuffed to be ticking them off.

I am no climber and I do not intend to become one. I enjoyed the puzzle and the challenge of solving the riddle of hand and feet holds to heave yourself up a vertical face. But I did so with very little enthusiasm for looking down between my feet to enjoy the views. The technical term for this yawning empty space is ‘Exposure’. I do not like Exposure one bit! But I found it fascinating to face it. I was tied securely to a rope. I was safe. But I did not feel safe. And that alone meant that this was a perfect microadventure: I was out of my comfort zone, I was pushing myself hard mentally and physically. I was learning about myself and peeling back my boundaries.

The most spectacular spot on the ridge is the marvellously named Inaccessible Pinnacle, described in Wild Places like this:

“a shark’s fin of black rock that jags hundreds of feet out of the ridge which had long been, to my mind, one of the wildest points in the world…
I felt a quick buzz of fear, remembering the description of the Pinnacle by one of its first ascensionists: ‘a knife-edge ridge with an overhanging and infinite drop on one side, and a drop on the other side even steeper and longer’.”

The Inaccesible Pinancle was the symbolic high point of the challenge. The view from the top was extraordinary, even if I was clinging to the rock with a vice-like grip. Unfortunately from here on things went downhill. My knee reacted badly to the terrain and, after eight hours up on the ridge I was moving like an old man. There was no way I would make it the whole way so we were forced to drop down from the ridge and concede defeat.
I was not happy to have failed, especially through something as random and uncontrollable as an injury. The triathlon microadventure challenge had been such a good one. I was disappointed to have let Alex down.
But I was also quite impressed to have failed. Britain is not a particularly wild place. You don’t tend to get beaten by the landscapes here. So I was impressed to have been humbled by these ancient, awesome mountains. I had underestimated them (the only other British challenge that I have underestimated is the Bob Graham Round). It eased one of my slight worries of this year of microadventure that, through trying to encourage others to challenge themselves, that I was not particularly challenging myself.
Mountains do not care how you fare on their slopes and summits. They were around for millions of years before your petty quest began, and they’ll still be standing beautiful yet uncaring when our grandchildren’s grandchildren feel the same restless urges to test themselves. Sure, you go and pit your wits, your skills, your guts, your luck against them. You might win, you might lose. But they don’t care either way. Maybe that’s part of their appeal. It’s certainly a good metaphor for doing big stuff in life:
Do it for the doing, not for the praise of others. And don’t be put off trying big stuff by the fear of failure.
The mountains don’t think any less of me because I failed. And they are far more impressive than the office jobs-worth whiner who loves to sneer at you if you fail something.
So I failed this microadventure. But I did far more than if I had not even begun. And I now have an excuse, should one be needed, to return soon to the wild places of Skye for some unfinished business.

* I’m not mentioning names here for the same reason I try to avoid placing maps of my trips on this site: the world is full of spectacular spots and it’s better to go find your own hidden gems rather than following someone else’s prescription. Plus, selfishly, I want to keep the ones I find to myself. On the other hand they are not particularly secret spots: anyone who knows Skye will know where I am referring to. And I am aware that even if 100% of my blog readers converged on Skye that there would be more than enough room for both of you.

Related posts:

1. What is the Most Beautiful Scottish Mountain?
2. Mountain Microadventure Video
3. Sea kayaking: a microadventure

Journeys are linear, chronological things. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. Books are exactly the same. It’s a perfect fit. Start at the start. Keep going till you get to the end. And this is one of the reasons why so many travel books are very boring. Because what actually strikes me out on the road is how cyclical life is. Even more than back in the routine real world that I sneer at, life on the road is a circle of repeating routines.

As I wrote earlier in the week, great expeditions are nothing more than a series of mundane single days, sprinkled with occasional bursts of terror or joy. Too many travel books ignore this, at their cost.

“I got up and I walked very far… I slept in a field. I got up and I walked very far… I slept in a field. I got up and I walked very far… I slept in a field. I got up and I walked very far… I slept in a field. I got up and I walked very far… I slept in a field…. ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz”

So I wanted to try to find a way to tell this story differently. I decided to write the entire book as though it was one day, one cycle. But I really wanted to find a non-linear way to tell the tale.

And I found it. I am so excited about the Foldedsheet “mappazine” version of my book.

Bear with me while I explain myself: Imagine a map. The huge, fold out, Ordnance Survey hiking maps. Open it right out and it’s as wide as you can stretch your arms. You can’t absorb it all at once (unless it’s laid out on the floor and you’re drinking tea and dreaming of adventure). So you unfold it bit by bit, section by section. Once you get the hang of it you can turn it round, flip it over, rotate it and yet still have an idea of how the point you are looking at fits in to the whole.

…Still with me..?

I took my book and distilled it down to about 9000 words. The more you delete the better a book gets. I picked about a hundred photos to tell the tale. And, with the design whizz assistance of Luce,  I told my tale across the “map”.

You can explore it how you wish. You can dip in and out. It’s up to you. It’s even got two totally different front covers depending on which way you pick it up.

One side of my “map” covers a single day on the road, from dawn until night. It’s all you really need to know about my adventures for all I do is repeat that cycle over and over…

The other side of the “map” explores my motivation for taking on these sorts of journeys: challenge, solitude, fun, curiosity…

This is the most excited I have been about the potential of a new project since I self-published my first book five years ago. I really believe you’ll agree this Foldedsheet is worth a fiver. (I’ll happily refund you if you don’t.) Better still, buy 10 and give them to everyone in your office. Buy 20 for every kid in your child’s class. Buy 100 for delegates at your next event. If I’ve piqued your curiosity you can have a preview of the look here, or watch this 25 second video.

I like this project so much that I really want to ship a lot of copies of it. That is why I have offered serious reductions for purchasing multiple copies. It’s a project I am really proud of and I want to spread it wide.

Buy your “mappazine” here, for just £5. Worldwide delivery.

What do you think? Did I explain it sufficiently? Do you think it sounds interesting or will you prefer a normal book? Please do have your say in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Make a living doing what you love
2. Why I Love the Kindle – by Someone Who Hates the Kindle
3. Mappazine explanation

My books are always rammed with quotations from other books I have read. I sprinkle lines from poems around, toss in some song lyrics, maybe an ironic TV catchphrase or two.

In the beginning I was fresh out of uni, fresh from writing accurately referenced scientific papers. And so my first book was very correctly referenced. In fact people found it a bit tiring.

As the poet Blah said, “blah, blah, blah” which reminded me of what Author Yuk once wrote, “yuk, yuk, YUK…”

Over time my writing has changed. I’m more relaxed now, more “poetic” and less literal. I sprinkled There Are Other Rivers (buy it here) with Shakespeare, The Streets, the Smiths, Joni Mitchell, Springsteen, the Bible, Dylan (Bob and Thomas), TS Eliot, Steinbeck and whoever else I was reading or listening to as I wrote those words.
I like doing this. I do it as a tribute. I love the thought of occasional readers picking up on occasional snippets and enjoying the book a little more because of that.

A reason that I definitely do not add quotes in this way is as a lazy way of cheating. It is consciously done so that some people will notice some of them some of the time and enjoy the reference to the Masters. It’s not cheating. It’s not plagiarism. Or is it..?

I was watching an online lecture recently (after my manuscript had gone to print, hence this post) from a conference I have always wanted to speak at. The talk was good. The guy really resonated with me. And then I realised why he resonated with me. The cheeky bastard was quoting verbatim from my website! And with no acknowledgement that this was what he was doing. I wasn’t angry; I was just amazed at the cheek of it.

And then I thought, perhaps he’s doing it as a “tribute” to me (Yes, I know that’s very unlikely!), perhaps he’s just being clever and subtle. No, he wasn’t. He was a cheeky bugger and he nicked my lines. (I emailed him. He denied it. I sighed and let it go. After all, it was a bloody good talk…)

It’s interesting to see things from a different perspective. I’ve learned a lesson for next time, that’s for sure.

(Bonus Point to anyone who finds the maudlin Joni Mitchell line…)

Please buy There Are Other Rivers now to help pay my court fees when I get sued.

Related posts:

1. Advice on Presentations
2. The fine line between foolishness and bravery
3. To succeed we need to rise above the greyness

The second commissioned but unpublished piece I wrote for the Sunday Times was this one about learning to fly a paramotor.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings
- John Magee

I am a little closer towards becoming a superhero. I have always wanted the special power of being able to fly. And now I find myself soaring high above the Catalan countryside. I came to Spain on a whim to spend a week learning to paramotor. Now I am piloting my maiden solo flight. I think to myself: “wow! I am hundreds of metres above the ground. I am all alone. I am flying!” The past days of hard work learning to safely handle the canopy and engine have been repaid handsomely. It is an extraordinary sensation.

Paragliders are a fairly common sight these days, soaring silently around their hilltop launch points on still summer evenings. Paramotors are much rarer. To the uninitiated the sport resembles strapping a lawnmower engine and propeller to your back and using it to fly with a paragliding wing. It’s not far from the truth. Practitioners resemble a cross between James Bond and a cartoon character. The engine on your back generates your own thrust, allowing you to take off from flat ground.

The theory of paramotoring is simple. Raise the canopy above your head, fire up the propellers and then run forward to generate sufficent lift to take off. Once you’re in the air things are even easier: steer left and right with the wing, squeeze the throttle to climb higher, ease it off to glide slowly downwards.

The reality is a little more daunting at first. I had rehearsed the techniques over and over along with the four other people on our course. My instructors were confident that I was ready to fly. Now came the time to sprint across a field whilst controlling an enormous swathe of canvas above my head. Then I had to squeeze the engine up to full power and try to keep up with it until take off. You must not stop running before lift off or you will nose-dive face first into the runaway, damaging your pride, your body, and the paramotor. A row of broken, autographed propellers on the wall of the SkySchool’s hangar -the wall of shame- are almost all the result of people not running enough. A wise debut pilot will still be running wildly like Tinkerbell even as he rises high up from the ground. It is better to be safe than sorry.

After take off there is a great surge of relief and exhiliration. The hardest part is over. I am actually flying! The world recedes beneath me and, to my surprise, the fact that I am only held in the sky by a handful of thin lines and a tiny sheet of flimsy canvas does not frighten me. I slide back into the canvas seat and the weight of the engine is no longer cumbersome. I feel light as a feather and the Spanish countryside below me is so beautiful as I dance through the skies on laughter-silvered wings. I gaze down at wheat fields and pretty stone farms. The Mediterranean shines blue to the east and the foothills of the Pyrennees are still dotted with snow.

Life is simple in the sky. You are doing somthing you love. You do it to the very best of your ability for to lapse is not an option. Nothing else matters. There is no past and no future. You have slipped the surly bonds of Earth. You are living in the present, really living. It is incredibly relaxing. I look down at the mere mortals on the ground. They are looking up at me. In this first flight I have felt a hundred things they have not even dreamed of. I raise my hand and give them a wave. I feel like the king of the world.

Safely back down again we while away the hot afternoons as you would on a normal holiday to Spain. You can swim in the centre’s pool that looks so blue and tempting as you fly over it. Nearby is Figueres, the birthplace of Salvador Dali. A short drive away is the Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park. Or you can sunbathe on the beach at Empuriabrava, plucking up the nerve to do a skydive at the renowned centre there.

However, once I had done my first flight I did not want to do anything but fly. I kept an eager eye on the windsock waiting for the afternoon breezes to die down. The evening flights were undoubtedly the highlight of the week. I flew at three different locations: over a beach, from a secluded airstrip surrounded by forested hills, and from SkySchool’s own grass strip fringed with poppies and wheat fields. Each time I revelled in the variety of the whole flying experience. The take off requires calm thought, a burst of physical exertion, and a healthy dollop of nerve. The flight itself is a period of quiet, wonderful delight. And the adrenalin rush of a successful landing leads onto an excited glow at having flown, all by yourself. A buzz that lingers all evening as you sit with your course companions swapping tall tales on the patio outside SkySchool’s wooden cabin, drinking a glass or two of wine over dinner in the warm Spanish night. I sit back in my chair and listen to the sound of the chirping cicadas. I look up at the moon and the sky. I cannot believe that I have learned to fly in just one week’s holiday. I feel like superman.

6 Day Beginners Course £745 : Designed for complete beginners, Paraglider pilots with less than 20 hours or Skydivers with less than 200 jumps. Students sit the first 6 days of the 12 day Foot Launched Microlight (FLM) syllabus. Training consists of ground handling practice, tandem trike flights, motor usage instruction, basic theory lectures and should culminate in at least one solo flight. The course fee includes all equipment hire and equipment insurance, instruction, fuel and transport on site. It does not include accommodation, transport to the site, food, drink or personal insurance. www.skyschooluk.com

RyanAir flies to Girona.

Related posts:

1. Learning to fly and the Canon 5D Mkii
2. Kicking them out of the nest and making them fly.
3. HD Video About Learning to Fly

The Sunday Times commissioned and paid for three pieces last year about my microadventures. They’ve paid me for them but I now think they’ll never see the light of day which seems a shame, so I’m going to put them up here and assume that News International have got bigger fish to fry than bothering about me publishing their stuff here…

If the critical ingredients of an adventure are to go somewhere new and be curious then a “microadventure” can be found anywhere, even in rural Britain with only a few days to spare. Long before the mesh of rolling English roads developed the Romans were striding in famously straight lines across our land. The Fosse Way was their longest, stretching from Isca Dumnoniorum to Lindum Colonia, or Exeter to Lincoln as we now know them. I decided to explore some of it, on foot, at the pace of a Roman soldier. I would carry little more than a cooking pan, a sleeping bag, and a few maps. Where the Fosse Way has evolved over 2000 years into large, modern roads I would follow my nose cross-country until I found another off-road segment.

I began outside Exeter cathedral. The sunny lawns were draped with pinking girls, pensioners gummily enjoying ice cream and boys with World Cup Fever playing football. Soon I was out of the city onto lanes so narrow that I stung my bottom on nettles as I squeezed in to allow a rare car to pass. I was on the Roman road now, walking straight and true. It was a pleasure to sense my life slowing down. For the next few days I would move no faster than my feet could carry me. I had only the possessions in my small pack. I felt myself relaxing with each metronomic mile. Rural Devon was so idyllic that it felt like escapism England, the life that many people must dream about as being perfect.

It’s hard to say whether you can be really lost if you don’t actually mind where you are going. At least that is what I decided when I accidentally found myself in Ottery St Mary, the birthplace of Samuel Coleridge. I found a village pub to watch a World Cup match on TV. Then I re-orientated myself on the map, wondered how it was possible to get lost on a Roman Road, and sat basking in the churchyard until kick off.
After the football I walked roughly east, moving away from the ebbing sun’s rosy glow on the western horizon. On the top of a hill I rolled out my sleeping bag and lay down to sleep beneath the stars. With the power of Google anyone doing a walk like this but not inclined to sleep outdoors could easily find a local B&B to stay in instead.

I woke at dawn and walked through woodland carpeted with bluebells and alive with birdsong. England is densely populated and access to the countryside generally limited to official footpaths. Yet throughout this walk I felt as though I had the land to myself. I saw barely anyone as I strolled happily through “my” woods and up and over the steep, beautiful hills of Devon.

By the time I reached Somerset my feet were hurting and my sweaty shirt clung to my back. A lady watering her flowers offered me a “cooling squirt from the hose”. The banks of the ancient road rose almost 20 feet high above me on both sides, heady with cow parsley and wild flowers. I pounced on excuses to rest, watching a ladies’ croquet match and chatting to an old man sitting outside his thatched home.
“You’ll pass right by the Dinnington Docks pub,” he advised me, his accent rolling through the vowels. “You’ve earned a cider or two.”
I did not intend to stop. But over the next hot miles my resolve ebbed and I flopped down in the cool pub.
Half drunk on two pints of cold, sharp cider, I left the pub an hour later and bounded on, singing merrily to myself. As night fell I snuggled down to sleep in another soft field.

The next day of my little adventure began perfectly. I arrived in the Roman town of Ilchester in time for the WI Coffee morning. Friendly old ladies clucked and fussed around me in the village hall.
“For £1, my lovely, you can have tea and a nice piece of cake.”
Correction, my dear lady: for £2.50 I can have two cups of tea, two pieces of cake, plus an extra cake for the road…

I marched on invigorated. A modern dual carriageway had superceded the Fosse Way which now lay deserted. Brambles encroached across it and grass pushed through its broken tarmac. Two fox cubs scampered away in surprise at my approach. Nature was reclaiming the route so rapidly that it seemed remarkable how much of the Fosse Way does live on after two thousand years.

I waded down narrow footpaths through dazzling yellow rape fields. Small puffs of white cloud dotted the deep blue sky. It was another hot day so I was grateful when the postmaster in Lydford-on-Fosse unlocked the Post Office during his lunch hour to allow me to buy an ice cream. He shrugged off my thanks. “You looked as though you needed it”.

Throughout the hike I scoured my map for streams that may be deep enough to swim in. The best one was a deep, wide pool on the river Brue. I rinsed my only shirt in the river and then put it back on to dry, imagining that the Romans would frown at my hygiene. Their stunning bathhouse in Bath is a World Heritage site.

North of Bath the Fosse Way marks the boundary between Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. Curious llamas grazing in a field of buttercups paused to watch me pass. The Fosse Way was a byway now, just a gravel track running through woods and fording streams until it intersected the Kemble airfield. I detoured round it as biplanes flew overhead and a deer bolted from a hedge beside me and bounded away across the fields.

My little trip was coming to an end. I followed a footpath through one last meadow to the plinth that marks the source of the River Thames. Being summertime no water was flowing. So I had actually walked for days to reach an empty field. But that did not matter. And neither did it matter that my starting point of Exeter Cathedral had not even been built during the Fosse Way’s heyday. It was my own trip and so I made up the rules. What mattered was that, in just a few free days, I had slept out of doors, swum in rivers, seen new places, and challenged myself to live frugally and walk hard. I had created a little adventure for myself.

—–
Four other ancient roads for lovely strolls.

1. The 120 mile Pilgrims’ Way running from Winchester to Canterbury is the apocryphal route taken by pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas Becket. The walk follows a 2500 year old track along the escarpment of the North Downs through rural Surrey and Kent.

2. Follow Hadrian’s Wall along an 84 mile, fully signposted path from coast to coast. Sufficient swathes of the ancient wall remain to fire the imagination along what has been called “the most important monument built by the Romans in Britain”.

3. 1200 years ago Offa, the King of Mercia, built the earth ditch and rampart known as Offa’s dyke. Running the length of the Welsh-English border a National Trail follows 70 miles of the dyke through beautiful, varied scenery including hill forts, forests and aqueducts.

4. Following the Rising of 1715 in Scotland, General Wade was tasked with building a huge network of military roads to counter the Jacobite threat. Explore from Fort William through the Leanachan Forest to the Commando Memorial at Spean Bridge and north to Loch Lochy.

Related posts:

1. Microadventure on Britain’s longest Roman Road
2. Roman Roads