WELCOME
GREETINGS, TGO readers! It’s very nice to make your acquaintance as your new Acting Editor. I hope we’ll be firm friends. Before I joined the editorial team two years ago, I was a reader of this fine magazine – so we already have something in common.
In fact, it was these pages to which I turned about ten years ago, when I first ventured into the great outdoors after previously living a very indoor existence. I came to know the joys of hillwalking relatively late in life – and only a few years before hiking became a hashtag and a popular talking point across generations in the mainstream. With no reference points or interested friends and family members to ask for advice, it was this very magazine’s gear reviewers and Wild Walks team who guided my first forays into adventure. The wisdom and inspiration within it helped me – a woman who had never before lived more than a ten-minute walk from a city centre – find confidence and escape in the hills.
At present, 84% of the UK population lives in urban areas. So, please permit me to pay it forward to those city-dwelling readers who may sometimes feel as though the mountains are far away, with this issue’s lead feature. In City Breaks (p26), our contributors share their favourite big walks on which you can escape the noise within just a few hours of our major metropolises. Also, Sarah Irving (The Urban Wanderer) shares her thoughts on finding contentment outdoors wherever you lay your hat rather than wishing you were somewhere else (p11). Meanwhile, Right to Roam campaigner Jon Moses examines the government’s promise to provide green or blue space within a 15-minute walk of any home here in the UK – and finds it lacking – in his delightfully tongue-in-cheek opinion piece (p17).
For those of you already deeply immersed in Britain’s mountain cult
