The Great Outdoors – March 2024
English | 100 pages | pdf | 45.79 MB
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 – sowe 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 Walksteam who guided my first for ay sin to 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 livesin urban areas. So, please permit me to pay it forward to those city-dwelling readers who may sometimes feel ast hough 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 herthoughts on finding contentment out doors wherever you lay your hatra ther than wishing you were
somewhere else (p11). Mean while, Right to Roam campaigner Jon
Ǘ ê Moses examines the government’s promise to provide green or blue space within a 15-minutewalk 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 culture, we invited Nadir Khan and Tom McNally to share an extract from their new book, Extreme Lake land, which offers an insight into our climbing history and reveals a Lake District icon, Napes Needle, as you’ve never seen it before (p44). For more wild walking inspiration, discover ten mapped routes along our fine stridges and horse shoes. And if you’re looking further afield, Alice Morrison is your guide to the Saudi Arabia’s dramatic AlUla region (p50). As I humbly step up to fill Carey Davies’ big hiking boots, I’m honoured to continue learning from the new Deputy Editor, David Lintern (whose beautiful prose on living better whilst backpacking on a 10-Munro Mounth epic can be read on page 36), our inimitable and expert contributors, and you – the readers.
I think we’re all looking for a little bit of escape when we venture out of doors. Whe ther the cold of a winter high-altitude wild camp freezes fretfulness, you leave your to-do list behind as you trudge up 3000m, or you simply stop and smell the ram sons on a ramble through wood land, what escape actually looks like is different for all of us. But for those days when only the indoors will do ,I hope you’ll continue to find it in these pages.
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