DISCOVER Week-long trails
If the idea of walking a long trail tugs at your heart, don’t let the idea that an impossible amount of time or ambition are required for an adventure you’ll remember forever – as these 100(ish)-mile heroes are here to prove.
WE’VE PROBABLY ALL daydreamed about walking the South West Coast Path or the Appalachian trail – but for most of us such long walks remain perpetually out of reach purely for practical reasons. But that doesn’t mean your dreams of having a great adventure need to stay in the misty land of oneday- maybe. A trail of around 100 miles is still a mighty quest – an eminently quotable Big Achievement, with the full portion of picaresque potential, and all the satisfactions of the planning, the horizon-hunting and sheer heroism of crossing a section of Britain big enough to look meaningful pointed to on a globe.
A week off work or away from home isn’t too much to ask of the universe – and the memories you’ll bring back will be a bigger haul than it seems possible a mere seven days can yield. In the time the rest of the world has watched a bit of TV and put the bins out once, you’ll have become the central character in an epic adventure story. And not just one of those commonplace adventures everyone’s heard about, but a connoisseur’s quest to call your own – like one of these lesser-known trails crying out to make the last of summer forever memorable…
Dales High Way 90 miles
IF YOU WANTED to devour the whole of the Yorkshire Dales National Park in a single sitting, you might think walking the 80-mile Dales Way would be the way to do it – but you’d be wrong. Sticking mostly to the valleys on its way from Ilkley to a hardly fitting end at Bowness in the Lake District, the Dales Way could be accused as being inattentive to its brief. There’s much more to the Yorkshire Dales – indeed literally much more since the park expanded in 2016 to take in the whole of the lovely Howgills, the wilds of Mallerstang Common and the vast limestone pavements of Great Asby Scar. These are developments of which the Dales Way is oblivious, yet accommodated by the far-sighted Dales High Way, created in 2007 by husband and wife Tony and Chris Grogan. Their path, marked with the reassuring diamond pattern on OS Maps since 2014, is longer, higher and more varied and tethers its southern end to social history in the industrial model village of Saltaire.
Across 90 miles it stretches to the furthest and fullest reaches of the National Park, ending in the Eden Valley at Appleby-in-Westmorland – a fitting climax and line of demarcation between the pretty Dales and austere North Pennines. En route, after setting the Dales in an industrial context which only heightens their beauty and sense of freedom, the High Way climbs clear of civilisation on Ilkley Moor and never misses its
