The Great Outdoors Spring 2022

“THE WILDEST, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even Wales itself.” This is how Daniel Defoe described the landscape we now know as the Lake District, visiting mountainous Westmorland in 1724. Wild, barren, frightful; as bad as Wales. This opinion was shaped by the intellectual attitude of the time, which held that mountains were fundamentally ugly. Unlike the fertile flatlands and rolling hills of ‘civilised’ parts of the world – south-east England, say – the steep and intractable realm of the mountains, so resistant to ploughing and planting, was repellent, savage, Celtic, even slightly obscene. Mountains were, as author Robert Macfarlane memorably observed in Mountains of the Mind, “castigated as ‘boils’ on the Earth’s complexion, ‘warts’, ‘wens’, ‘excrescences’ and even, with their labial…

Daniel Toal Daniel is an outdoor photographer from south Cumbria who loves spending time in nature, whether it be hiking and wild camping in the Lakeland fells, an early-morning woodland wander or just a local walk close to home – if he’s outside he’s happy. Dan has several personal photographic projects in the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales on the go, and he plans to make up for lost Covid time this year. Matilda Welin Ever since she was tucked under blankets in a wooden sledge as an infant, to be pulled along behind her dad on family ski touring excursions in Sweden, Matilda has felt at home in the forest. After living briefly in Costa Rica, she has settled in London where she enjoys lake and river swimming, cycling, and all…

“Atmospheric light and dramatic conditions finally came together as I photographed the Cuillin mountains across Loch Scavaig on the Isle of Skye. “With its dramatic outlook, Elgol is rightly a popular location with photographers. An afternoon of watching and waiting was key to capturing the drama of this particular day, and the stormy weather provided me with a very short window of opportunity. “Leaning heavily on my tripod for additional stability against the howling wind, I tripped the shutter as a rainbow arched across the loch. Just 30 seconds after this image was captured, a ferocious squally ‘wall of hail’ hit me full on, forcing a retreat to the safety of a nearby cave.”…

IN 2018, journalist Liv Bolton thru-hiked 1300km across the South Island of New Zealand. It was a life-changing journey that sparked the idea for a new passion project – The Outdoors Fix podcast, a show dedicated to helping everyday people make outdoor adventures a bigger part of their lives. Launched in February 2019, the show has with six series, 42 episodes, hundreds of thousands of streams, and the kudos of achieving number one in the ‘GB Wilderness’ category on Apple Podcasts. Each new episode features an interview with an inspiring individual who has – in a variety of different ways – embraced an adventurous lifestyle. Liv, who lives in the Chilterns and works as a BBC broadcast journalist, says: “I speak to fantastic people who have changed their lives to get…

Postal address The Editor, The Great Outdoors, Kelsey Publishing Ltd, The Granary, Downs Court, Yalding Hill, Yalding, Kent ME18 6AL. Please include a phone number and postal address. Mountains mistakes and lessons learnt I was very interested in the article (March 2022 issue, above) about your contributors’ mistakes made when out on the hills and the lessons they have learned. I think we have all made some errors during our expeditions, which fortunately mostly result in a salutary lesson. Although I am in my late 70s, I am still learning. One of my earliest ‘situations’ occurred when I was in my early teens, and I was walking to The Whangie in the Kilpatrick Hills outside Glasgow. As it is only a few miles I decided to go via the nearby Auchineden Hill and…

Start/finish: Layby off A82 at Altnafeadh, north of Lagangarbh GR: NN220563 Maps: OS Explorer 384 (1:25,000), OS Landranger 41 (1:50,000), Harvey British Mountain Map Ben Nevis & Glen Coe (1:40,000) Distance: 13.4km/8.3 miles Ascent: 1126m/3694ft Duration: 6 hours BUACHAILLE ETIVE MOR is a colossal sentinel watching over the head of Glen Coe, a deservedly iconic peak with a handsome pyramidal profile. Its domineering mass of knobbly outcrops and precipitous rock faces, gashed by vertical gullies, are a sight to behold for visitors of all stripes. From some angles it looks like a child’s drawing of a perfectly triangular mountain; from others it’s a brutally built leviathan with a sinister, impenetrable aura. However, the Big Herdsman of Etive (as translated from the Gaelic) is well within the reach of the averagely adventurous hillwalker. From the idyllic, much-photographed Lagangarbh…