The Next Big Walk

From Kent to Cape Wrath it is - or K2CW as I’m calling it for short.

The initial seed of a plan started to form when I was watching the weather forecast shortly after returning from John O’Groats last year. Whilst Mick was looking at the bottom left and top right and thinking “That’s a long way we just walked”, I was looking at the opposite two corners and cogs were starting to turn in my head.

For a while very little serious thought was given to the route, planning and logistics, other than to look at a map and try to decide where the bottom right hand corner lies (and if there’s an officially recognised answer which varies from our start point then I would rather not know!). With it proving a bit tricky to decide exactly where the south-east corner of Britain is, I decided it was our walk so it was our prerogative to pick the point that looked to be: (a) a reasonable contender for the ‘bottom right corner’ award; and (b) reasonably easy to get to; and (c) reasonably pleasant to walk from. The winner was St Margaret’s at Cliffe, just up the coast from Dover.

A few weeks back the planning finally began. As it had taken me a year to plan our LEJOG route, and with our planned start date only a handful of months away, it seemed like time was of the essence. As it turned out the planning was much simpler than LEJOG for various reasons (but that’s a subject for a different post). Last weekend I finished tweaking and declared that we have a route and an itinerary (which isn’t to say that there won’t be changes, but with one fifty-mile exception I’m reasonably happy with the route that we have).

Here’s a rough approximation of our route (very rough – I’ve sketched it without reference to a big map with place names on it, so it’s based on the version of Britain that’s in my head):

The route is coming out at a smidge over 1000 miles (1017 to be precise, but based on last year’s experience it will get slightly shorter when I print the maps and realise that I’ve plotted a long way round at some point) with around 150,000 feet of ascent. A significant chunk of that hilliness is in Scotland where (weather permitting) we’re planning a good handful of adventurous days over hills.

We’ve even picked a date out of the air on which to start: 2 April 2010*.

I’ll talk about the chosen route, and will publish the itinerary, separately.

(*usual disclaimer applies: I am female and thus at liberty to bring that forward).