More Than 20 Years of Walks

It being New Year and all that, I have been looking back at the 20 year stint I did as a professional walks writer working for a large regional daily newspaper… It meant going for a scenic country walk and getting paid for it, which can’t have been a bad gig.

Enjoying the classic Cornish walk around Loe Pool

My wife thought I’d lost my last remaining marbles when I posed the question 20 years ago in a bid to come up with some plan for, what then, was a faltering career. 

After some years working as a freelance radio reporter and producer for the BBC, I’d had a bash at running my own video production company - a crazy move which saw me both make and lose money. Unfortunately, my being almost dyslexic when it comes to numbers and accounts caused me to lose more than make, so I needed to change tack before I managed to get myself into financial difficulty. 

Dodging the razor rocks at Morte Point

Hence the seemingly bizarre idea to walk and get paid for it. Not quite as crazy as it sounds when, for long periods of your working life, you’ve made a good living out of being a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines. I had done just that for more than a decade in my younger years. 

Indeed, for the best part of five years I’d worked almost exclusively for one of the major national newspapers as a freelance feature writer - and it was a collection of my yellowing Guardian articles that I took with me to the WMN HQ in Plymouth in 1999.

“What a regional daily paper needs is a weekly country walk, illustrated with some nice photos,” is what I said to Philip Bowern, who is still my friend and colleague to this day.

On one of my first newspaper walks in Cornwall

Amazingly - and much to my wife’s surprise - Philip agreed, and I have produced a weekly walk for the WMN ever since. I’d like to be able to say that this totals over 1100 different hikes, but it wouldn’t quite be true. Firstly because I picked up a dangerous illness in a jungle some years ago and spent time in hospital where the medics had to think and work hard to save my life. That six-week gap was followed almost ten years later by a major heart operation to fix the heart valve which the jungle bacteria nearly wrecked. That resulted in another 10 weeks away from the long and winding road. 

Beaten up by gulls -walking through St Ives

It’s also true to say that things like long periods of really bad weather, alongside a few other factors outside my control, have occasionally forced me to revisit and rewrite old walks done years ago.

Interviewing my dear old friend, the late Kester Webb, on an exciting hike-scramble around the North Devon Foreland

Having said that, I’ve put some miles in to the WMN walks pages - perhaps 4000 to 6000 miles by my (admittedly hopeless) calculations. I’ve climbed and descended the equivalent of half a dozen Mount Everests and I’ve been baked, soaked, boiled and frozen. 

And just once in 20 years have I got lost on a hike. I was in the middle of northern Dartmoor when a sudden fog made everything further than the tips of my fingers disappear. This was in pre-mobile-phone days so I 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 Westcountry walks, if you have a good sense of direction.

On top of Brent Knoll

I knew we were slightly to the west of the main watershed, so reasoned that any stream we could pick up would flow in the general direction towards the place where we’d parked. So 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 my car. 

The first real hitch in my walks-writing career 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, WMN editor Barrie Williams called me in and said: “That’s put the kibosh on that then, Hespie. The countryside is closed so we can’t even reprint some of your previous walks. We don’t want to frustrate readers by suggesting walks they can’t do - so for the time being your goose is cooked.”

Through the Gull’s Hole - one of the first walks I wrote about after Foot and Mouth closed the countryside

I don’t often think fast on my feet - not successfully anyway - but on this occasion I managed a career-saving: “On the contrary Barrie… People need places to walk more than ever, now the countryside is closed. I’ll do town and city walks. There are plenty of town trails and both the readers and the good burghers of such places will be chuffed.”

They were. Or so it seemed. I believe that to be true because eventually Mr Williams presented me with an offer I couldn’t refuse. By then the WMN was paying me a freelance rate to write all manner of news features and columns and Barrie suddenly announced that he was fed up with “haemorrhaging money like water” in my direction.  The choice was to either quit freelancing for the paper altogether, or become a fully-fledged staff member. 

Following in dad’s footsteps: journalist Peter Hesp explores the Graves of the 40 Doones on Exmoor

I took the latter option and still have the official letter of employment in which Barrie said he was pleased “to make an honest man” of me. It also states that I would never be expected to work from a company office - which explains why I only darken the WMN doors about once in every two years. 

“No good newspaper story was ever found inside a newspaper office,” is what Barrie said, when I pointed out that I lived (and still live) 96 miles from WMN HQ.

Walking on the isle of Steep Holm

And so the walks continued - and still do all these years later. During the 20-years I have been attacked by dogs just three times, I have been almost overwhelmed by the stench of a dead whale rotting on a remote Devon beach, almost choked by a vast thick cloud of flying ants on the very top of Brown Willy, dodged pheasant shot several times, avoided ranting nutters on at least four occasions and ducked to escape flying golf balls twice. 

I once made my elderly mother and father wade through an icy Dartmoor stream having discovered a footbridge was down on a rapidly darkening winter’s afternoon. On another occasion I watched with alarm as a friend who’d just had a heart operation turned white on the slopes of Golden Cap. A friend and I once flirted with pneumonia after we’d rescued a drowning ewe from a raging Exmoor river. And, also on Exmoor, I once came face to face with a rutting stag in the gloaming. As he galloped at me I thought my end had come, until he suddenly veered away and shot off through the woods.

Walking through Whiddon Deer Park

People often ask if they can join me on my newspaper hikes and so I’ve walked with international business consultants, out-of-work printers, blacksmiths, computer analysts, airline pursers, writers, farmers, surfing-instructors, acorn pickers, famous actors, housewives, WI members, drug addicts, alcoholics, CEOs, PR people, TV executives, teachers, male poets and one very beautiful female poet.   

I must have had more than a dozen enquiries from publishers asking if I’d consider making the walks into a book, and one day I will. 

I have lost count of the times people have asked me to name my favourite Westcountry walk, or the equal number of times I’ve had to say something about that being mission impossible.

Up in the famous Dunster Deer Park

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 Westcountry hikes I’d divide the region up and go for the splendour of the multi-level 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 circumnavigation of St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly. 

Walking boots looking way way down in the Alps

But if you came back to me with suggestions for better walks I’d probably agree with you. My lists are hardly written in soft Exmoor shale, let alone in hard Dartmoor granite. The thing is to be enthusiastic about all the walks which you end up following and writing about.

Which is sometimes tougher than you may think. People often say they’d like my job - and some even occasionally tell the editor they could do a better job. I’m sure they could. But for how long? Writing any series of articles without a break, week-in, week-out for 20 years, is a proper job of work. Doing a couple of dozen, then running out of steam is not what a newspaper editor wants. What they need is for correspondents to have consistency - and a rapport with the readers.

Remaining upright and walking through beautiful countryside is as good as life gets - and to be paid for doing it is a lottery-winning ticket if ever I heard of one.

Walking with brother Dom and John H nearly 25 years ago when I started writing about hikes