Looking Back at 20 years of Walks Writing

Sometimes you have to make your own luck in life. I wasn’t to know it at the time, but 25 years ago I made what seemed to be a fairly inconsequential decision while hiking high on the moors, and it changed my entire career. 

I was at a crossroads - flogging a bit of a dead horse running a media-based business - and on my wife’s birthday I was so broke I couldn’t afford to do anything special, so offered to take her on a nice scenic Exmoor walk. Walking in beautiful places is one of the few really pleasurable things that’s completely free of charge, and luckily my wife enjoys them as much as me. 

While we were crossing the hills to Countisbury, above Lynmouth, she said: “Why don’t you write about walks? More and more people love country walking - and, as you’ve been a feature writer for a national newspaper, you could surely find someone who’d publish a weekly article. They could call it Hesp’s Hikes.”

That is exactly what happened. I wrote up that particular walk - from Rockford, in the East Lyn valley, up to Countisbury and back down across the moors - and along, with half-a-dozen others, I took them to the Western Morning News suggesting they might like to publish the whole lot, along with the photographs I’d taken. My idea was that the paper could have the first selection for free and, if the articles proved popular, they could start paying me for an ongoing series. 

It was a gamble, but someone somewhere obviously approved because I ended up writing a regular walks feature for 20 years. In fact, I was Britain’s longest running walks writer - if you can be such a thing. The success wasn’t anything to do with me, but a simple winning formula… Take readers to wonderful, interesting, or beautiful places (ideally a combination of all three), describe some kind of walking route and include anecdotes, a few facts and figures (you don’t want to bore anyone) and one or two tall-tales. And don’t forget to snap a few nice piccies while you’re traipsing around. 

Soon the paper started asking for other articles alongside the walks pieces, and before I knew it I was taken onto the staff. 25 years later, here I am still putting pen to paper. 

“Not a bad way to earn a living,” I hear you say. And I’d agree, although it’s not always quite as easy as it looks, partly because there’s always the matter of a strict deadline.

I walked, and wrote about, getting on towards 1000 different hikes. I would have done more but there were a couple of periods when illness got in the way, along with some really bad weather when I was forced to rewrite a few old walks. Even so, I have worked out (with admittedly hopeless mathematics) that I walked between 4000 and 6000 miles and climbed and descended the equivalent of half-a-dozen Mount Everests. 

Leading a walk in the Scillies

And just once in 20 years I got lost. We were in the middle of Dartmoor when a sudden fog descended. This was in pre-mobile-phone days so we had no satellite positioning aid and, I’m sorry to admit, no compass. You don’t really need one for 999 out of a 1000 West Country walks, if you have a good sense of direction. Anyway, I knew we were slightly west of the main watershed, so reasoned that any stream we could pick up would flow more-or-less in the direction towards the place where we’d parked. By listening hard and then stumbling towards the sound of moving water, we found and followed a brook that eventually joined the River Tavy, which in turn took us back to within 50 metres of our car. 

But something far more serious nearly put an end to my walks-writing career not so long after it had started. It came in the form of a terrible thing which had serious ramifications for a great many careers and businesses. Nearly mine, but not quite. When the foot and mouth outbreak hit in 2001, the editor called and said: “That’s put the kibosh on that! The countryside is closed so we dare not even reprint some of your previous walks. We don’t want to frustrate readers by suggesting things they can’t do - so, for the time being, your goose is cooked.”

I don’t often think fast on my feet (not successfully anyway) but on this occasion I managed a career-saving: “On the contrary… Now the countryside is closed, people need places to walk more than ever. Let’s do town and city walks.”

And so I continued putting one foot in front of the other. During 20-years, I was attacked by dogs, choked by the stench of a dead whale rotting on a remote Devon beach and almost overcome by an incredibly thick cloud of flying ants atop Cornwall’s Brown Willy. I dodged pheasant shot and ducked flying golf balls. I once made my elderly parents wade through an icy Dartmoor stream having discovered a footbridge had collapsed. On another occasion, I had to ask beach lifeguards to call the inshore lifeboat as there was no way a friend who’d had a major heart operation could make it back along a lengthy stretch of Cornish beach. And once two of us flirted with pneumonia after rescuing a drowning ewe from a raging Exmoor river.

People often used to ask if they could join me on the hikes and so I have walked with international business consultants, out-of-work printers, blacksmiths, computer analysts, airline pursers, writers, farmers, surfing-instructors, acorn pickers, famous actors, housewives, professors, WI members, drug addicts, alcoholics, CEOs, PR people, TV executives, national park bosses, rangers of various kinds, teachers and poets.   

I must have had more than a dozen enquiries from publishers asking if I’d consider making the walks into a book - and I keep saying one day I will, but for some reason haven’t yet. 

I have lost count of the times people have asked me to name my favourite walk, or the equal number of times I’ve had to say something about it being mission impossible. Walks are like music or food. One day you’ll be in the mood for a particular dish or tune - the next you might want something more spicy or perhaps more calming.

If I had to go for a shortlist of, say, five great West Country hikes I’d divide the west of the region up and go for the splendour of the Woody Bay to Hunter’s Inn and Heddon’s Mouth hike on the Exmoor coast; the glories of the Otterton, Budleigh, Ladram Bay, High Peak circular on the east Devon coast; the Dr Blackall’s Drive hike in a fabulous part of Dartmoor; the Fowey, Hall Walk, Lantic Bay circular on the south Cornish coast; and the grand circumnavigation of St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly. 

But if someone came up with a list of better walks I’d probably agree with most of them. My ideas are hardly written in soft Exmoor sandstone, let alone in hard Dartmoor granite. 

The important thing is to be enthusiastic - and as an old hack I’d say that goes for  absolutely anything you end up writing about.