2024 was a very special year for me in terms of reaching walking goals. In June I ‘compleated’ the Scottish Munros, a difficult enough challenge even without factoring in being based in Oxfordshire. It took me a little more than 20 years to reach the 282 tally and I don’t expect that I shall ever feel more proud of a walking achievement. I started the year with 23 3000+ft Scottish hills still to reach and dealt with all but a pair during a fortnight of good weather in late April/early May. To be able to walk up the final two (Bidean nam Bian and Stob Coire Sgreamhach, in Glencoe) with my son - on a balmy June day - was off-the-scale wonderful.

But that wasn’t it for ‘finishing the job’ in 2024'. When my Dad died suddenly in 2008 - in Grasmere, having become ill on a walk up a Lakeland fell, I made a promise that I would visit the 24 Wainwrights that he and Mum had planned to reach together. I finally got round to doing this during September 2024, not as a piecemeal collection of walks but as a woven route that linked up the 24 summits (plus a few that lay on the route) and gave me 10 days of visiting just bout every corner of the Lakes. I started and finished at the very spot where Dad breathed his last.

Is it really two years since I submitted the Portfolio element for my MA Travel & Nature Writing degree?

In the two years since graduating my walking has taken me to all parts of Britain but my writing focus has stayed fairly local. This included putting together my monthly nature pieces for Radley News, which carried on until July 2025, reaching a grand total of 60 contributions and around 40,000 words. I also initiated some nature writing activities within a local primary school. This started with a collaborative writing project with a school in Kenya that led to publication of Cosmic Cats. My series of nature writing programmes for the school saw children in Years 4-6 creating imaginative short-form pieces from ‘found’ objects.

I have kept up collaborative writing and study as part of a quartet of my MA cohort. This has helped all of us to extend our writing range and press on with the bigger projects that we hope to bring to fruition. In my case that’s the whole-of-life memoir (the title stays under wraps for now) that sees the ups and downs of my 63 years through the prism of my walking.

I hope to continue to give talks to local groups and lead some more nature wanders, whether that’s sharing my passion for walking, birds or butterflies or talking about and reading from the books that inspire me. Coming up soon on World Poetry Day I’ll be joining other poets in sharing my words at an Abingdon Library event - I’m much looking forward to that.

What remains clear to me is the realisation that I find most fulfilment from fusing together personal reminiscence with focus on the places where I’ve travelled (which really means walked), and the wildlife I’ve seen there. Achieving that fusion, always with a nod to the literary influences that have found their way into different stages of my life, is where the focus of my thinking and creativity is directed. This started in the MA course and grew through contributions to Tanya Shadrick’s The Cure for Sleep project. From those beginnings and with greater confidence with each passing month the body of words that is my walking memoir continues to grow.