Local

Thank you for all your support this year! I hope you'll get out and explore your own map too... For more ideas and info: www.alastairhumphreys.com/local I am proud to know these familiar little spots, for they have helped me learn to appreciate where I live and feel more attached to it, despite Thoreau’s insistence that a landscape can ‘never become quite familiar to you’, no matter how long you l...

I cycled to a small town that I knew as a motorway junction and a monstrous snarl of a roundabout. And yet I was riding towards it down pretty lanes fringed with red and yellow leaves that swirled and spun in the wind. It was disorientating not to have thought of this place in this way before. What would I discover on the last of my fifty-two grid squares?  I had spent an entire year on a small ma...

I began today’s grid square outside the Duke of Wellington pub, which dated from 1516, two and a half centuries before Old Nosey was born. I thought about all the brawls and laughs it had seen, and the tall tales told by 500 years of drinkers. I pondered also when they’d installed a petanque court in the garden, a game surely more suited to Napoleon than Wellington.  The Duke of Wellington was one...

It was a morning of fresh sunshine and a chilly breeze, that day defined in The Meaning of Liff as ‘Brithdir – The first day of the winter on which your breath condenses in the air.’ There had been the first faint frost as I pedalled out this morning, pulling on thick gloves and feeling the pinch of cold on my nose. The year was drawing down. The season’s early fieldfares flew over the fields, a f...

As autumn approached, I was particularly looking forward to find- ing conkers. Horse chestnut trees and their appealing, polished seeds are a surefire declaration of the season. The trees were introduced into Britain from the Balkans in the 16th century. They’re not common in wild woodland, but are staples of towns, parks and villages. Insects gorge on their flamboyant candelabra flowers, and cate...

An episode on rewilding. Walking always feels very different from the running and cycling I usually do for exercise. I’m generally too impatient to walk somewhere if I could run or ride instead. But the way I think changes depending on my mode of transport. Slow my legs and my mind starts to slow too. When you walk, you can stop at any time to poke something with a stick, make a note or take a pho...

A long row of black poplar trees escorted my road towards the low horizon. I passed a row of small industrial units, then a house offering rosy windfall apples and pears in a chipped, white ceramic bowl on the doorstep. Voices carried from an open upstairs window, engrossed in a Zoom call about something or other.  A cluster of beehives stood in the corner of a field. The coming cool weather would...

Though the silver birch trees were turning to autumnal gold, sum- mer was back this week with a fury, despite me writing it off, but it was probably too early to speak of an Indian summer. The earliest known use of the phrase comes from a Frenchman called John de Crevecoeur in the eastern United States in 1778. It perhaps referred to a spell of warm weather that allowed the Native Americans to con...

Today’s grid square was a rare outing to the far side of the river, to the very edge of the map itself. It felt like a new country. Over that next hill lay lands unknown, and maybe even dragons. I cycled up a stony bridleway through a wood, making sure to savour the greenness before the leaves fell for another year, to store away the memories as nourish- ment to get me through the winter. The year...

The gate’s clang startled a buzzard who lumbered off the ground and flew into the sanctuary of the trees. I stood still in the field, feeling myself beginning to slow down and unwind. I breathed in the smell of hay, blinked at the sunshine, and reminded myself that things couldn’t be too bad if I got to call this ‘work’.  Riding here had been a confusing maze of winding lanes and high hedges, so I...

A good old chunter about access rights, the right to roam, and Scandinavia's approach to  allemansrätten. My hopes were high. It was a perfect sunny day and the grid square looked enticing on paper. It was mostly woodland, with some contour lines, a small lake and the site of a Roman villa thrown in for luck. There was only one building on the whole square. A motorway and railway sliced through th...

I cycled to today’s grid square with Test Match Special playing in my headphones. Listening to the ebb and flow of a cricket match arcing towards its conclusion is one of my greatest pleasures. I turned it off reluctantly when I arrived so that I could concentrate on what I was exploring.  I began outside a working man’s club with a fluttering Union Jack, then rode among Victorian terraces, street...

It seemed to me, walking and cycling through this year on my map, that the seasons move in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. No change, no change, no change... and then one morning the new season is well on its way, overlapping the previous one in its eagerness to get going. I caught the first embryonic smells of autumn today, along with heavy dew and a noticeably later sunrise.  I always enjoy...

I had waited for the rain showers to pass before heading out today, but I was forced to shelter from a fresh cloudburst beneath a bowed old horse chestnut tree. Sheets of water slid down the road and dampened my enthusiasm. I had, however, spotted the map symbol for a pub on today’s grid square, and I had little to do later.  ‘Go for a look around the square, and after that you can go to the pub,’...

I filled my bottles with ice before heading out this morning. It was the hottest day of the year, and Britain was parched by an unusually severe drought. As I got ready, I heard on the radio that 20cm of rain had fallen in an hour in Germany, causing floods that killed almost 200 people.  The last of the morning dew felt cool on my toes as I cycled down a grassy path in my flip- flops. In the cris...

Includes a polite argument about land access and the right to roam. I sat down on an overgrown, underused bench outside a derelict timber-framed pub to squeeze out my socks. The men in hi-vis jackets from the water board had warned of a deep flood on the road, but I thought, ‘Come on, lads, how deep can it be?’ and pedalled on.  ‘Pretty deep,’ was the answer.  Now I had wet shoes and socks for squ...

There was a humid, jungle feel to the day after heavy overnight rain. Plants shone, the ground steamed, a thrush sang a persistent tune that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the tropics, and pink rosebay willowherb flowers gave off their strong, sweet fragrance. The plant is known as fireweed in North America, and its scent always reminds me of it growing on blackened land following forest fi...

To reach today’s square, I needed to make a short crossing on a small ferry, which I knew would be fun but also added the tiniest frac- tion of hassle to proceedings, which is all I ever need to be tempt- ed to procrastinate. That quibble aside, I always enjoy ferry crossings. The only thing that beats them are cable ferries across rivers, with a bonus point for those you have to hail by shouting,...

I removed my bike helmet and wiped my sweaty face. It was hot. I was at a memorial to a pilot shot down by German Messerschmitts in the skies overhead during the Second World War. Appropriately, the fields around were filled with poppies. Scattered at the base of the memorial was the rubbish from a KFC takeaway. The ten-piece Wicked Variety bucket contained 4,790 calories, the large fries had 1,44...

A bonus round. A little something extra. Have a look at what you could have won...  I didn’t go out today to explore a grid square as usual, but to see the squares between the squares. I’d found myself with the rare but joyous occurrence of a weekend afternoon all to myself, so decided to go for a bike ride to calm my nerves before the big football match in the evening. I wasn’t playing and was me...

This kingdom of mine might cover only twenty kilometres squared, but it seemed at times to span a thousand worlds. From winter to sum- mer, welcoming smiles to grumpy shouts, and from last week’s jaded streets to this long grass, busy with butterflies, where I lay on my back, alone and undisturbed, and enjoyed the warm sun on my face.  Down in the distance I could see the city’s gleaming towers, s...

Each week I arrived in my grid square with little idea what might capture my interest, but an increased certainty that something would. As with all good exploration, there were hints and hopes about what I’d find, but each square also surprised me.  This meant that if I found a square underwhelming, with little to interest me, the responsibility was likely to be mine. Was how much I saw dependent...

I sheltered beneath a large field maple tree, reframing my atti- tude to rain. Parking the grumbles and persuading myself instead how gleaming clean all the trees looked. Appreciating the gun-barrel-gran- ite skies. Remembering that a day in the rain is better than a day in the office. That kind of thing.  One of my favourite smells is the air after a storm, the earthy scent of petrichor, from the...

I had a free morning and my latest grid square lay before me, begin- ning with the rare pleasure of a segregated cycle lane, safe from the busy road that sliced the square in half. I rode fast and free, blasting away the day’s earlier frustrations of waiting on the phone for an hour to speak to my electricity provider. Free at last! (Me, not the electric- ity.) North of the road, wheat fields ripe...

The map promised waterfalls. I was not expecting the 979 metres of Venezuela’s Angel Falls (named after the American explorer and pilot Jimmy Angel, whose plane crashed on Auyán-Tepuí in 1937), the volume of Inga Falls in the DRC (more than 46 million litres per second), or even the Denmark Strait cataract (an undersea waterfall plummeting unseen for 3,500 metres beneath the Atlantic Ocean). But...