This Week’s Walks
August 18th-24th 2024
This is going to be shorter than these have been, because while there’s been a decent amount of distance (and height) in this week’s walks, there haven’t been too many of them.
First walk, back at the start of the week was my trek up Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon, which I wrote about in a lot more detail here:
(That should be a Medium friend link, so non-members can read it for free)
It was a great walk to cap off three days of exploration, and looking at my stats I see I did over 90,000 steps over those three days including lots of ascending and descending, which explains why my calves were so sore for a lot of the week.
So, the start of the week featured me not venturing out too far with my walks, just heading to my volunteer shifts at the foodbank, and doing lots of stretching at home. I’d recovered enough by Wednesday to head out for a walk that evening, just heading out south from my home and seeing where it took me, which was down into Friday Woods, then across to the east and back home over the Wick and up Mersea Road. Another walk as the sun started setting — and I’m getting conscious of that now happening before 8pm again — and a good way to see how much my legs had recovered from the weekend.
I need to learn more country lore about when’s the usual times for things happening, but I noticed a lot of acorns are starting to drop from the oak trees. Don’t know if that’s a sign of an early autumn or just a result of a hot and wet summer meaning they’ve grown fast and plentiful. I collected a handful as I walked, bringing them back and putting them in pots in the back yard. I’ve got a couple of small oak saplings I managed to start off the same way after collecting some acorns in 2022, so we’ll wait and see if these end up joining them.
Another quiet couple of days after that. Got caught up with various other things and when I thought about going out for a walk what I was really craving was another hill. Didn’t have to be a full mountain, just two or three hundred metres above sea level, but there’s none of those round here. So I’m looking at OS Maps for plotting some future weekends away.
I was even having ideas about that last night, the forecast for here was heavy rain for most of the day, so I was looking to see if there were any ways to avoid the rain for this week’s Parkrun. Sadly, anywhere with the possibility of being dry would have been three or more hours drive away, which felt a bit much. Back to Colchester Castle Park it was, my 130th time running there, and the forecast rain wasn’t as bad as suggested. Well, not during the run itself, it got heavy later, but we were inside with tea and sausage sandwiches by then.
The forecast for tomorrow and the week ahead looks good, so I’m sure I will be out somewhere in the coming days just to finish the month strongly — and to keep preparing myself for Langdale, which is only a few weeks away now…
Until then, here’s another picture from Snowdon, this time on the way down, looking over the Pass of Llanberis.
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