I think that we all have a predisposition to look in a certain direction. Mine is just west of north.
Not fjord north, walrus north or even iceberg north, but puffin north. You know, some rocky islet off the very north-western coast of Scotland.
So in the spring of 2022, I’m going to walk from here to there, starting with my size 10 feet in the Solent, and finishing with their rather blistered version in the Pentland Firth, forty or so days later.
Looking at it from 120 days or so out, it all looks laughably easy, perhaps excepting the last five days or so, where the roads and houses seem to run out rather sooner than the remaining miles. Waking up at three in the morning is when the little travel demons strike: carrying the weight of a heavy backpack, for example, or walking through torrential and cold rain on crocked and creaking knees. The biggest fear of all, of course, is failure, but then we all cope with that.
There’s stuff I’m going to see on the way. Mainly biodiversity restoration projects in a dozen different places, just to try to remind myself that, however fast we lost all that wildlife in this most denatured of all developed countries, we can gain it back even quicker if we just remove the harm.
But then there are the endless miles. About eight hundred of them when I last looked. Miles that my slightly OCD brain will contrive to count out one step at a time, 880 double paces per mile, whether I discourage it from doing it or not. And there will be the people, the pies and the pints; the beds, the birds and the burns. Tomorrow is never promised, and I want to do this whilst my mind thinks that I -theoretically- still can. My body may have a different view altogether.
There’s various reasons why I am doing this, one of which is to try my very best to raise the whole year’s running costs- £75,000- for our little charity, Curlew Action. With a mainly volunteer team that you can still number on the fingers of one hand, we are starting to make a real difference to the survival of Britain’s most iconic, and most threatened, wader, and we won’t give up until the graph is going upwards again. If I can help cover off our running costs, then our future fundraising efforts can be directed at specific projects, which would be really helpful. You can check out what we do at http://www.curlewaction.org
So, about two hundred and sixty beautifully free blogs in, this is where you come in, if you wish to. Not for your money, unless you really want to do something now, but for your support. If you can just spare a minute or two to draw a line on a map of the UK between Lymington and Cape Wrath, and, if you live anywhere near it, offer to put me up for a night (which probably also means collecting me from the end point of my day’s walk and taking me back there again in the morning to start again). Salisbury, Swindon, Stow-on-the-Wold, Solihull, Matlock, Buxton, Sheffield, Bradford, Skipton, Hawes, Brough, Haltwhistle, Hawick, Peebles, Edinburgh, Auchterarder, Aberfeldy, Newtonmore, Inverness, Oykel Bridge, Inchnadamph, Kinlochbervie. That kind of line. Or, failing that, if you have friends who might be willing to help.
Then, there is the delicate matter of corporate sponsorship. If you work in a company that might want to help, please message me, and let’s talk. If you might feel able to organise a small get-together for me to be able to tell others about the trip, maybe in late January or early February, that would be brilliant. If you think you know someone I can go and see, please ask them: they can always say ‘no’. Finally, if you are a trustee of a grant giving trust that might be interested in supporting, I can give you, or them, lots of information.
Obviously, I will pay all my own costs, so every penny of support, grant or sponsorship goes directly to one of our curlew projects.
I start on March 18th, so anything I can sort now helps.
And if you want to come on a particular section, I’ll have the programme ready in a few weeks, so that you will know roughly where I will be and when.
Between now and then, I am excited and hopeful, both for me and the curlews. And if I’ve learned anything, it’s the power of hope.
Coupled with a sublime sense of the ridiculous.
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