Another Update

It’s been a while since we spoke… It's time to catch up!

2025 is in full swing with February arriving quickly and departing even quicker! Having survived the January blues we're already seeing the first signs of Spring on the horizon. The days are slowly getting longer, the nights are getting shorter and we can even see the first green shoots of early daffodils poking through the grass and the white hanging heads of snowdrops in the hedgerows. It’s starting to feel exciting for the warmer weather ahead.

The coming of a new season brings the armchair critics out of their hibernation. People complaining about the rights and wrongs of astronomical vs meteorological seasons. I for one have always preferred the meteorological seasons. Packaging the seasons based on 3-month blocks keeps the seasons simple and defined. For the last few years however we haven't been concerned with such things, instead responding to the temperature, precipitation and wind on any given day, in real time. Responding like this feels natural and more in tune with the environment. The changing seasons are one of the most exciting natural phenomena that can be witnessed. Scotland is one of, if not the best, place on earth to see nature's natural clock ticking from winter to the energy and excitement of spring.

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A quick look back on 2024 and the challenges of stopping.

If there is one thing I can tell you with absolute conviction, it’s that attempting to convey the emotional, practical and psychological challenges of not being outdoors everyday and sleeping under the stars, is so much harder than I can tell you.

It is for this reason I have been slow in writing recently. It feels hard to speak to you from the heart when the heart is being pulled so dramatically in a direction that goes against every beat.

Hiking from March 2022 starting in Dunnet Head and walking nearly every day until the end of 2024 was a way of life that suited Eve and me down to the ground. Raising money for charity along the way was the cherry on top. Taking you along with us, made it truly special. We have you to thank for making it so, and we do thank you, deeply and profoundly, for all of your love and support over the months that slowly turned into years.

The difficulties of readjusting to a ‘normal’ way of life still elude us. Adjusting to this new normal is like walking up a hill of pure ice with no available traction. Try as we might, we keep slipping back down and landing with a harsh bump. In the end, you have little option but to wait for the ice to melt, in the hopes that whatever is underneath offers enough traction to make the climb. More importantly, the summit offers the reward that we have spent so much time and effort to reach.

I don’t want to dwell. I will, I am sure, have plenty more to say on this in the future. We are all anything, but finished!

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A new year. A new challenge. Looking ahead

One of the good things that has come from completing JOGLE and Scotland’s Great Trails, is being able to start something new, something different. As I’ve said before it’s a painful compromise between following the heart into the wild places we love so dearly and the emotional pull to be a family with Sarah at our side. But like everything in life, there is never a perfect solution, only the best compromise.

This year we will try to find a compromise that satisfies us as a family but also individuals.

Charity fundraising

We will not be doing any of the big charity fundraising adventures for a while. We will most likely attempt another charity adventure in the future though. All three of us feel you have given enough love and support to us, and to ask for more would be a big ask! From our perspective we need a break from the pressure and expectation that comes with it, and of course the toxicity and trolls of social media.

Of course, we are still loving the smaller acts that are so integral to us. Whether that be random acts of crochet kindness that Eve so loves to do, or baking for the elderly and lonely. Currently, we are trying to volunteer at a soup kitchen, but that's proving hard to do with an 11-year-old child!

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Getting outdoors

As you might have gathered by now, the outdoors is where we belong and we have no intention of withdrawing indoors for any reason! I don’t think Sarah could cope with us being at home every day, bouncing off the walls! So we have set ourselves a few little outdoor projects to keep ourselves busy, exploring and of course writing, journalling and vlogging!

With all of these ‘projects’ we will be taking them slower than we did with JOGLE and SGTs. There will not be a 100% focus on their completion at the earliest possibility. As Eve grows and develops her need for a wider and more diverse set of educational experiences becomes increasingly important to all of us. Despite all of our desires to live outdoors as much as is physically and financially possible!

Mountain bagging… not just Munro bagging!

Every Munro is a mountain, but not every mountain is a Munro! In the UK any peak above 600 metres (1,969 ft) is classified as a mountain. Often this is rounded up to 2000 feet or 610 metres but that's splitting hairs for this explanation. For clarification, a Munro is any Scottish mountain above 3000 feet.

Anyone with a passion for the outdoors will be aware of ‘Munro bagging’. This is where people try to ‘bag’ all 282 Munros by reaching the peak, usually by hiking to bag the Munro! Thousands of people have bagged all 282 Munros with many people making multiple rounds of the 282. Munro bagging is a common pastime in Scotland. Eve and I want to put our twist on this challenge.

We intend to ‘bag’ every mountain in Scotland, but not just every Munro!

In Scotland, there are 824 summits we intend to ‘bag’ These are made up of the following

• 282 Munros (3000 + ft)

• 222 Corbets (2500 - 3000 ft)

• 231 Grahams (2000 - 2500 ft)

• 89 Donalds (2000 ft + in the Scottish Lowlands)

I will write a post dedicated to the naming of mountain categories at a later date

If you are wondering where we get these figures from (I know you might be thinking there are more or less mountains depending on the list you are looking at) we are using the list compiled by Harvey Maps based in Doune.

This is the map we are using for reference.

Long Distance Hiking… a continuation

The completion of all of Scotland’s official long-distance trails, collectively known as Scotland’s Great Trails has not left us short of other popular long-distance trails to complete.

Staying with a focus on Scotland, this is just a short list of some of the trails we have our eyes set on completing;

• Cape Wrath Trail

• Skye Trail

• Affric Kintail Way

• Hebridean Way

• East Highland Way

• West Highland Way (winter)

Coastline… Scotland (England and Wales)

Saving the best for last, this is the big one and the challenge we are most excited about.

As you will probably be aware, coastal walking is our favourite type of hiking by a long way. The diversity of places, people and landscapes coastal walking takes you through is mind-blowing. One of the biggest and best outdoor resources in the UK is the coastline. Google anything to do with the coast, such as ‘the best beaches in the world’ and Scotland will have several beaches in the top ten on just about any list.

The distance is… debatable and extremely hard to pin down. Even the tide can affect the overall distance by thousands of miles! The entire UK coastline measures between 11000 to 16000 miles depending on how it’s measured. Our distance will depend on how close we can stay on the coastline and of course, any safety implications!

In addition to this, Scotland doesn’t have a defined coastal path. Although several specific coastal trails can be used such as;

• Aberdeenshire Coastal Trail

• St Duthac's Way

• Berwickshire Coastal Path (we have completed this)

For all the other areas without a ‘trail’ (most of Scotland) we will use existing paths or hiking across the open country remaining as close to the coast as we safely can. The entire Scottish coastline is approximately 11000 miles, including islands! This is going to be EPIC!

In contrast to Scotland, England and Wales both have defined coastal trails. This would make walking England and Wales simpler, albeit still a massive undertaking. These coastal paths are;

• The Welsh Coastal Path (1680 miles)

• King Charles III England Coast Path (2700 miles)

Home education and everything else…!

This in all honesty is the biggest category of all, but also the least defined. There are countless mini adventures and educational projects. Sarah is keen to try and develop open-water swimming and paddle boarding for example. These may well build into bigger projects, but we will have to see how this pans out over time.

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Book publishing

This is where I've been spending most of my time over the last few months. It’s a bigger undertaking than I had ever imagined. Being hyper-focused, I have become a little too engrossed, as a consequence of this website. my apologies!

Journal book publishing

We’re putting together all of the posts from JOGLE / End to End and Scotland’s Great Trails into two separate books, along with some images. Along with that, I’m planning on adding some additional information that we didn’t include at the time. To put into perspective the scale of this project, I have two pieces of information to offer you.

Photographs and videos

Throughout JOGLE / End to End and Scotland’s Great Trails, we have collected almost three terabytes of photographs and videos. If that doesn’t mean much to you, this might help… we have over 500,000 images and several thousand videos! Sifting through half a million photographs and whittling them down to just a handful is a big task!

Notes and journals

If sorting the photographs isn't a big enough task, the writing is even more challenging. Being dyslexic doesn’t help either! I am working through it, editing and making it readable as a book, not just social media posts and adding extra information and personal notes that I didn’t publish at the time.

To put into perspective, the amount of writing to be edited is between three to four thousand A4 sheets. It’s a truly epic challenge that is both fun and infuriating in equal measure.

However, the real challenge is editing it. Editing it to be concise, without changing the tone and context so that it can be printed. The more pages, the more expensive it will be, and nobody is going to buy that!

Guide books

I've been approached to write a couple of books, similar to guidebooks but more instructional. How to walk JOGLE and how to walk Scotland’s Great Trails. It’s an amazing project and I am excited to get stuck in. I have a structure in mind already and an idea of how to put it all together into a useful resource for people. I am, however, concentrating first on the journal books which is a personal project before I get started on writing the guidebooks.

A (very) steep learning curve

The journal books are a personal project, unlike the guide books and a steep learning curve. Having to learn how to self-publish, ISBNs and all the other technicalities is a lot to absorb, especially to do it well and properly! It’s also a great thing to work on while at home!

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And finally…!

I hope you found this interesting, I certainly enjoyed writing it. Bringing you up to speed on what we’re working on and some of the daily challenges we have set ourselves is exciting. I've made a point of keeping this post forward-looking, and not reminiscing. The challenges, emotionally and psychologically of adjusting to a different life after three years of hiking can’t be understated. But as much as we miss what was, we are equally excited and positive about what the future holds.

We all hope you have an amazing year planned and it’s got off to an equally great start.

There is a whole world out there waiting to be discovered and we have so much right on our doorsteps!

Keep safe and keep exploring.

Ian, Sarah & Eve