For obvious reasons, I didn't get to do any of the kind of walking in 2020 that I'd normally do. We were due to go to the Yorkshire Dales on 20 March, but deferred the booking a couple of days before that, once it became clear that we were heading for a full lockdown, and even though restrictions were eased we didn't feel that it would be sensible to do the Birmingham-Worcester walk we'd been planning for early July, or to think about a long-distance walk in September. T and I even stopped going for local walks together in March, because the advice was to avoid towpaths where there were moored boats and all the other paths were too busy at the weekends, and never ended up starting again (at least partly because I found myself spending all of my weekends swimming and sewing).

Instead, after an abortive attempt at Couch to 5k, in April I started going for solitary walks before work. First thing in the morning it was quiet enough that it was easy to keep my distance from other people; I walked south along the canal to the nature reserve, or across the fields to the west and up the hill on the other side of the main road. Once restrictions eased a bit, I also walked north along the canal, or through the centre of the village to the church and then across the fields there to meet the canal north of the village and back home along the towpath. Until the clocks went back, I went out at about half-past six; after they changed, I started having a shower and breakfast first and going out around quarter past seven. By the start of December, the only walks I could still do were the ones that started with walking through the village to the church, as without that first twenty minutes on lit roads it was just too dark. My walks are normally around three and a half miles, and take a bit over an hour.

I've really enjoyed the walks. I love the peace and stillness of early mornings. I love being able to watch the seasons change and feel connected to nature in a way I wasn't when I was only walking in the Parks (lovely as they are). I've been able to draw on half-forgotten memories of my Flower Fairies books to try to identify flowers in the hedgerows. I've seen deer and hares and herons and even, on one incredible morning, two otters frolicking in the canal. And somehow, I managed to clock up 500 miles over the year, almost all of them within a three-mile radius of my front door.

The weather has finally turned bright and cold (the frost in our garden today still hasn't melted) rather than mild and wet, and while we had more heavy rain in the week and I knew that there was no chance things would have dried out a crisp, sunny Sunday is far too much of a treat to pass up the chance of even a very short walk, so I put on my wellies and we headed down the canal and through the nature reserve to buy dinner at Sainsbury's.



I was a bit unsure about the wellies, as they aren't nearly as comfortable as my walking boots, and as a lot of the mud along the towpath was frozen I found myself wondering whether walking boots would have been a better choice as I walked along feeling my socks slipping down inside the wellies and working their way off my feet. And then we crossed the canal into the nature reserve and discovered that the bit of path that was really squelchy last time, and which was the main reason I'd opted for wellies, was ankle-deep in water and the wellies really had been the best idea after all. (T had worn walking boots, and just managed to get through without the water going over the tops, but his boots are taller than mine and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have managed it. I'm not actually sure I'd even have tried.) I definitely wouldn't have wanted to walk more than two and a half miles in them, but it was good to get outside briefly at least.

I'd hoped to get a few walks in over the Christmas and New Year break, but the weather was mostly grey and dreary at best and often damp and drizzly (the few brighter days all turned out to be days when pre-existing plans meant that we couldn't go out for a walk), so walking didn't seem all that appealling. I did want to get at least a bit of fresh air and daylight before going back to work tomorrow, though, so we made the effort to go to Wytham for a walk round the woods, hoping the going wouldn't be too bad.



Sadly, although the main paths were OK, once we ventured off onto the side-paths the going became very muddy underfoot and quite slippery. After a difficult climb up a muddy slope to return to the path running from the car park to Eynsham we decided to head back rather than pressing on, so in the end we only walked just over three miles (and the fact that it took nearly an hour and a half to do that says at lot about just how hard the going was). It was good to get out, but I think I need to recalibrate my expectations for winter walks after last year's dry winter, which made it a lot easier to keep walking all winter than it's turning out to be this year.