Chico and I are about to be on BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings!
We recorded on a truly filthy February day, and stood on our viewpoint with thick cloud in every direction, but it was great. Getting out with Chico is always great, and with Clare Balding and producer Karen Gregor, who are such total professionals, it was extra enjoyable.
Still, below for your enjoyment is what the landscape looked like the week before when we recce’d the four-mile route.
So what is Slow Ways?
It’s a section of the Slow Ways route Maccar one, from Machynlleth to Carno (Mac and Car, you see?). I work for Slow Ways these days and am so much enjoying our ambitious – audacious! – mission to create a national walking network that links every town to its neighbours across the whole of Great Britain. We are really getting there too – the whole network has been drafted (we’re not the sort of bunch to start with some little pilot trial area, oh no!), and it amounts to over 130,000km of route. We estimate that 99% of the population of GB live within 5km of a Slow Way – there is one near you!
They’re all existing rights of way, that have been suggested as the best, most direct, safest, most enjoyable way to get between a town and its neighbour.
By giving people information about how to walk from one place to another, including survey details on path surface, obstacles, gradients etc, people with all sorts of accessibility limitations (including non-standard choices of companion, in the future!) will have the confidence to walk places they never would have considered walkable-to. We’re changing what is possible. It’s really exciting.
We need your help! Each route needs checking, reviewing and if necessary making better, and hundreds of people are out walking all the time. We have a new person sign up to the site every two hours, for heaven’s sake! You can too, right here. We’d love you to.
And how is Chico after all this time?
He is AWESOME, thanks for asking. This wee blog has been a bit neglected, but Chico’s lives and our lives remain intertwined. He’s just recently turned 16, which is a very sensible age for a walking donkey, and he’s being a real hero in giving our kids rides (which I swore would never ever happen). Our littlest Taliesin is five and showing signs of being a keen animal lover and maybe rider if we ever get around to taking her to a stables.
I got allergic to Chico for years and Rhys took over all donkey duties and then stripped off at the door so as not to make me come out in itches and snot. But that seems to be over, thankfully! (I suspect a reaction to the memory of the exhaustion of the end of the walk maybe?) And we went on a little adventure last autumn, so that is being edited together and will be ready to shout about soon. And I did an after-dinner speaker thing last month in Snowdonia for a really lovely group who’d come across me, so that was very good fun, and gave me an excuse to get the life-size cardboard cut-out of Chico out of the attic. (Contact me if you need a Chico talk!)
Oh! And I just reprinted the book – the third reprint – which is amazing. People all over the world have carried on being interested in our journey. So that’s available on the shop here, and I’ll sign them all and send them with much love and gratitude.
