I've just added a new Walks Database to the website. This will allow you to search all the walks I've done, it also groups all my walks into areas of the country; like the Lakes, Yorkshire Dales and so on. You can look for walks by area.

As time goes on, and I become more adept at the scripting this requires, I will add more search capabilities so you can search for trig points and hill names etc. In the meantime, have a look and see what you think. I'd love to hear comments, thoughts and suggestions.

I've had a website of sorts on Walking Places for a few years now and so far it's been quite a static affair, updated every few months when I've completed a long distance path, or the planning for a future long distance walk.

I would like to make this latest incarnation of the website a little more dynamic and start to include more frequently updated material. This may include gear reviews, day walks I have recently completed and other thoughts I've had.

If you continue to read these pages I hope you enjoy them and find something of interest among them. By all means let me know what you think. You can post comments on all the diary entries. The diary is here. 

I spent a few weeks at the back end of 2009 walking some wonderful paths in the Yorkshire Dales, many of them were walked as part of the research for my first guide book. I say first – probably only guide book – but only time will tell on that one.

I then spent many dark evenings tapping away on the keyboard – and one or two weekends when it was just too awful to walk and about four weekends when I was laid up after my knee operation.

The guide book is for a little known, but utterly brilliant, four day walk called "The Herriot Way" It is perhaps the best short long distance path in the UK, perfect for the first time multi-day walker and indeed great as a leg stretcher for those of us who love our long walks.

The guide book is available either as a download in PDF format, or in a pocket-sized printed format for anyone wanting to walk it in a clockwise direction. You can buy it from it's dedicated website: www.herriotway.com

Every now and again I take a really good photograph and quite often it ends up on my desktop for a few weeks until I take another great photo. I thought I'd share some of these with you, so you can add them to your desktop if you wish.

I've included a number of different resolutions for each photo, so you can choose the one that best fits your desktop. Click the picture to the left to jump to the wallpaper page.

There won't be many of them left now, if any, but some of the pictures on this site may be small thumbnail images, which when you hover your mouse over them will expand to full size without the need to click on them. This does mean that some pages take slightly longer to load than usual, simply because the browser is loading both the thumbnail image and the full-size image when the page opens.

I have tested the system on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, at screen resolutions of 1024x768 upwards, without any problems. However, if you experience any problems with these images then please drop me an email. Including details of your browser and screen resolution

When I think about it, I actually feel quite deprived. I only discovered the joys of the outdoors in my 40's, many years beyond what most people would agree is my prime. My parents took us on day trips to places I now consider prime walking areas like the Peak District and North Wales, but we never ventured far from the car and although we were all quite trim and fit, it never crossed our minds to walk any further than we needed to.

I joined the cubs for a short period, but like many of the activities undertaken in my formative years, including the trombone and the air cadets, the cubs lasted only a few short weeks before I was bored and dropped out. This meant I never went on any of the camping or hiking expeditions that people of my age did at the time. I'm not sure I would have appreciated them at the time either. Although many of my friends spoke excitedly on a Monday morning in school of walks they had enjoyed across Kinder Scout and Mam Tor the previous weekend. I just thought "daft sods, fancy tramping across hills all weekend when you could be enjoying yourself".

All this inactivity, however, inevitably led to middle age spread. My sporting activities may have included a good deal of local league football, in which I excelled, but the social side of the game (i.e. post match drinks and post training drinks) more than made up for any benefit the exercise may have been doing me. Mid-week I was to be found playing snooker, another "sport" that was surrounded by a healthy drinking culture. Long before the responsibilities of a mortgage and a job enforced an early night and sober outlook, I would be spending anything up to 16 hours at a time in the snooker hall playing "a pint a game, best of 19".

College turned an "amateur" drinking habit into an almost full-time professional one. I was not an alcoholic by any means, but I don't suppose that I went more than 24 hours in those three years at Preston Polytechnic without a drink of some kind or another. The drinking abated significantly once I was married, but was quickly replaced by food as Christine carried out what she felt were her wifely duties by having my tea on the table promptly each evening.

By the time I reached 40, I was about 25 stone and well on the way to diabetes, coronary heart disease and all sorts of other wonderful weigh-related illnesses. My three children were nearly all grown, the youngest was 13, the oldest 18 and I decided that if I ever were to see my grandchildren I better start to do something to turn my life around. The real catalyst for this was a photo my Mum took at my 40th birthday party.

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