Ramblings

David Falk is Green Access Manager on the Public Rights of Way Team for Suffolk County Council. He works hard to encourage people to enjoy walking in the beautiful Suffolk countryside. Along with fellow walker former local radio presenter Leslie Dolphin he takes Clare on a walk along part of the Icknield Way starting at Stow Country Park just north of Bury St Edmunds. . It is claimed to be the old...

Boff Whalley is best known for Tubthumping with the band Chumbawamba but now he’s a core member of the Leeds based Commoners Choir which he founded. They sing about the world around them, about inequality and injustice, and they also love to walk. Cath Long, a fellow member, wrote to Ramblings to ask Clare to join them on a hike in the South Pennines near Todmorden in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. S...

The final listener's walk of the series is with Harriet Thomas who wrote to the programme to invite Clare to share her regular walk to The Trundle near Goodwood Racecourse in West Sussex. When lockdown struck and Harriet decamped from London to be near her elderly father she began walking regularly. Sadly her father passed away in Spring 2020 and Harriet kept up the walking as a way of processing...

Clare goes to Halifax to walk with a group of Muslim men who came together to support each other to become mentally and physically fitter through walking in the countryside around Halifax. One of the things the group enjoys about their town is the ability to be out into beautiful countryside within ten minutes - albeit up some very steep hills! The group's leader is Zaheer Khalil. He is passionate...

Listener Jo Forrest got in touch inviting Clare to walk with her and a group of fellow walkers with T1 Diabetes who discovered the beautiful lush landscapes around Epsom Downs Racecourse during their lockdown walks. Jo, Chiara, Nicole and Denise are keen to share awareness of Type 1 Diabetes and how they manage it in their every day lives. Their walk takes them beyond the racecourse to Langley Val...

A sunny hike, with added party tricks, in the pretty countryside around East Worldham. Led ably by members of Walk Alton, Clare discovers the beauty of this part of east Hampshire. Every episode in this series has been suggested by a Ramblings listener. Helen Dudley and Ian Fleming from Walk Alton wrote to the programme and invited Clare to discover more about this very active organisation and the...

Clare walks with a listener known as Caravan, who spent six years living homeless in the Peak District, an area he knows well thanks to his love of outdoor pursuits. This series of Ramblings is being led by its listeners, people who have written to the programme with a story and a walk that they want to share. Caravan (not his real name) emailed to tell us about his experience of prolonged homeles...

Our listeners are taking over Ramblings and guiding Clare on every walk of this new series. Today’s adventure is led by three women who all qualified as mountain leaders in their 50s. Linda Moran, Angie Jaleel and Bev England explain why they wanted to take their love of the outdoors to a professional level by gaining qualifications later in life. Linda wrote to Ramblings and asked Clare to join t...

Mike Nelhams has recently retired as Head Gardener of the beautiful gardens on Tresco but remains very active and involved in island life. He meets Clare off the boat from St Marys and takes her on a tour of the island explaining the appeal of life on one of the most beautiful islands in Britain. They walk through the gardens observing the red squirrels which were introduced ten years ago on the r...

Starting her walk overlooking the harbour outside the Star Castle Hotel once a Civil War fortress Clare hikes around the largest of the Isles of Scilly in the company of Will Wagstaff and Lucy McRobert. Will came to the island in 1985 and began giving walking tours which he has done ever since pointing out the variety of flora and fauna encouraged by the mild climate. Lucy McRobert came to St Mary...

Today’s walk starts at Happy Valley in the Mourne Mountains about thirty minutes inland from the coast of County Down. Clare is walking with Kelly Hargie who, for very personal reasons, launched Wild Women Events as a way of encouraging female walkers to explore the countryside of Northern Ireland. Kelly has long understood that escaping into the wild helped her greatly with postnatal depression a...

In the first of two back-to-back hikes in the Mourne Mountains Clare walks from Bloody Bridge near Newcastle, on the coast of County Down, up into the hills. Led by Alex Rose of the Northern Ireland Young Walkers, they begin at a stone sculpture which – from a certain angle – look like a human face in profile. This is the Smuggler’s Head which helps to tell the story of the ‘Brandy Pad’ a local sm...

Having grown up in Cornwall Jane Johnson has a deep love of the landscape of the south west. She and her husband Abdel take Clare on a coastal walk along steep rocky footpaths that offer breathtaking views of the Cornish coastline around the Lizard to Lands End. It's a favourite walk for the couple who often see dolphins, whales and basking sharks along the way. They tell Clare the story of their...

In the first of a new series, Clare is in Derry-Londonderry to meet the celebrated children’s author and artist, Oliver Jeffers. As part of a free nationwide arts project called Unboxed, he’s created a 10 kilometre sculpture trail, designed as a scale model of the solar system. It starts at Bay Road Park and runs alongside the River Foyle. The trail, ‘Our Place in Space’, is there until 22 May 202...

Colleen Thirkell and her husband Richard have been walking stretches of the Saxon Shore Way with their friends Bev and John. In autumn 2020 Colleen fell seriously ill with a rare reaction to a flu jab. She was unable to walk and spent months in hospital. But she has slowly recovered and part of her rehabilitation has been to get out walking with her friends again. They invited Clare to walk one of...

The walk begins on the shingle at Winchelsea Beach - the possible site of the drowned city that was engulfed by waves in the 11th century. Crossing the marshy fields inland Clare and Matthew climb the steep hill to the gate of the rebuilt and fortified town of Winchelsea that was once a thriving wine port. They walk through the town passing open wine cellars as they go. The town was built on a gri...

Baroness Floella Benjamin DBE joins Clare for a walk around one of her favourite woodlands in London. Starting in Dulwich College where her mother worked in the laundry and later her son attended, Floella and husband Keith head off into the woods on a rainy March day. Their walk takes them up from the College past the Golf range and into the woods where parakeets dart among the trees shrieking and...

From the Redmires Reservoirs near Sheffield, Clare walks up to Stanage Edge ('stone edge') a gritstone escarpment in the Peak District. Angela Lawrence and Anna Jorgensen are Clare's guests and are retired fell-runners (an accident with a vacuum cleaner ended Angela's running career) but their passion for the hills of the Peak District, which they have run across many times, remains undimmed. They...

Clare explores a rural route near the Worcestershire village of Guarlford. Storm Eunice has just left, Franklin is underway and the River Severn is up so this is a last-minute change to the planned walk. Originally Clare and her guest, poet Catherine Swire, had planned to hike the first stretch of the Monarch's Way which runs along the banks of the Rivers Teme and Severn in Worcester but flooding...

Writer Melissa Harrison celebrates the joy of walking in every season of the year and in wet and dry weather. Given that we can count on it raining on many days of the year it's a good thing to learn to love being out in it. Melissa has written a book about rain and discovered that there are hundreds of different words and expressions for weather from around Britain. Clare and Melissa do a circula...

Clare hikes through the Eglwyseg Valley in north Wales with two very different characters: Guy Kennaway and Hussein Sharif. The two men became family when Guy’s son married Hussein’s sister. Guy wanted to get to know Hussein better and show him a different side of Britain, so he suggested they go on a long walk. A book followed, ‘Foot Notes’, which describes both the adventure they had attempting...

Clare explores part of a challenging route in the Preseli Hills taken by hardy cattle drovers who, over generations, would walk herds of two to three hundred animals from Pembrokeshire to livestock markets in London. With her is Nick Gammage who, in the summer of 2021, spent 17 arduous days completing the entire 250 mile trek. They begin their walk at Grid Ref SN075321 and head east along one of t...

Clare crosses the famous ‘Bridge over the Atlantic’ for a ramble on the island of Seil. Her guide is the writer, educator, and director of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, Norrie Bissell. Geopoetics is described as “creatively expressing the earth” and is critical of the western way of thinking which separates humans from the rest of the natural world. Norrie has also published a novel, ‘Barnhi...

Clare is walking on the beautiful island of Iona in today’s Ramblings. One of the Inner Hebrides, Iona is just three miles long by around a mile wide yet punches well above its weight both in terms of scenery and history. Her companion is David Allaway: a keen photographer, founding member of the island’s craft co-operative and a volunteer fire-fighter he also runs guided walking tours. Beginning...

Clare takes on a challenging coastal route from Lochbuie to Carsaig on the island of Mull. Her guide is Wendy Lloyd who – like most islanders – has several strings to her bow. As well as working for Christian Aid, farming pigs on her croft, and hosting visitors in a yurt, she is interested in helping people navigate pilgrimage walking routes across Mull and over to Iona. She tells Clare about all...