It's pretty much commonly agreed that boots, or more accurately, footwear is the most important piece of equipment a walker should posses. Even the naked rambler had boots on! You can do without almost any other piece of equipment from the list on the left, but you will always want something on your feet.

Getting a good pair of boots is therefore very important and typically the ease of achieving a task is inversely proportional to its importance. Such has been my experience, at least, in finding a good pair of boots.

My first boots, back when I first started walking in 2004, were a pair of Lowa boots, bought mainly on the basis of their price and the fact that they seemed to fit okay in the outdoor superstore I was in at the time. No expert fitting advice from a bearded sales assistants with 20 years experience of backpacking and hiking for me! Oh no, I went to Decathlon and found the second cheapest set of size 11's I could find.

Surprisingly they were okay - obviously I had no benchmark to compare them to - but I never got a blister from them, they didn't leave my feet aching at the end of the day and I sort of expected them to last 10 years or so. As it was I managed to put a rip in the right boot, just back from the toe box on a walk one day and they started to let water in. They lasted me just over a year.

This was rather worrying, as at the time I had my Coast to Coast walk coming up in less than four months and needed to find something reliable and comfortable and break them in before I set out for St. Bees. As the choice of my first set of boots had been something of a lottery, I decided to listen to recommendations for this next pair. I looked in Trail and they had recently voted Scarpa's ZeroG 10 boot their best buy award. I also decided to seek professional advice in their fitting, so I went to Ellis Brigham in Chester.