Walking

Walk – Waun y Llyn – 2026-06-09

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A landscape of rocks, short grass, bushes and lots of trees.

It’s been a few years since I walked around Waun y Llyn country park, and as I’ve been building up my walking stamina again recently I thought I’d head over there earlier this week.

We used to occasionally go for walks there when we were younger; I always loved it, but even though I’ve been a few times in the intervening years, it’s not at all how I remember if from my younger days.  It seems quite a bit smaller now, presumably a result of me being a larger human being, but the biggest change is that I remember it being much more barren – I remember wide open areas of short grass, whereas now there is a lot more tall bracken, and many more trees.  It’s a good thing, let’s be honest, I just wonder whether it has changed that much, or if it was never actually the way I remember it.

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Walking Routes Update

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Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and never got round to; I’ve updated the Walking Routes page so that the routes are now displayed on a map, rather than the list I had previously.

As I have more time to spend walking now, I’ll be adding more routes in the near future.

New Walking Pages

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A number of years ago I wanted a better way to organise the growing collection of walking and cycling routes I had, and in the process of sorting that I decided to publish them on a separate website called OpenRoutes.  In an effort to simplify the organisation of things, and to save some money, I’ve now decided to close that website and have just finished importing the walking routes from there into a new section here.  Behold… Walking Routes.

A screenshot showing a map with a walking route marked in green.

I’ll be working on a better way to display the list of routes (most likely via a map), and adding more detail to each page shortly, and I will hopefully be adding more routes in the future.

I’ve also added a few pages from a previous iteration of this website, which show my progress towards ‘bagging’ various hill summits in the UK – although progress has stalled on them in the last few years, since the pandemic.

Walk – Springy Lane

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Yesterday I went for a lovely walk around the Alltami / Northop / Sychdyn area, taking in Springy Lane and stopping for lunch at Maes y Grug. I wanted to explore new routes for running, but thought it best to try the unknown footpaths out at a slower pace to begin with, to test their suitability for running, but I also just wanted to go for a long walk to try and build up my leg strength again after not doing longer activities for a while now.

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Withnail Weekender

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View over Haweswater

When I first watched the movie Withnail and I… I don’t remember when that was exactly, but several years ago… it was with great anticipation.  I’d heard it quoted many times and people had mentioned it as a great film, but when I saw it for the first time I was a little underwhelmed.  It was OK, but I didn’t really understand the fuss about it.  The next time I watched it I enjoyed it more, and the third time I began to understand why people liked it.  But then something strange happened the next time I watched it; I couldn’t make it all the way through and ended up switching it off.  Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood that time, but I started to think that maybe I actually don’t like it and I’d been trying too hard to enjoy it previously?  Anyway, I didn’t watch it again for a few years, but the next time I did… wow!  I finally “got” it.  I’ve watched it several times since and it just keeps getting better.

So when I booked an AirBnB apartment for a long weekend in the Lake District and included in the information was that the phone box right at the end of the access road had appeared in a scene in the movie, I started looking at where else they may have filmed locally and found that most of the Lake District scenes were within a few miles of where I was staying, so I began planning to visit as many as possible.

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