I think it’s time for the Polar Bear Winter Festival to veer sharply from the wistful (“I miss Iceland and Svalbard and still can’t travel!”) to the everyday. I try to be outdoorsy and walking in winter is definitely a thing you can do.
Enjoying the great outdoors is fine in summer. Everyone wants to go to the beach, swim in the sea, hike the mountains and all that when the sun is out and the temperature is somewhere pleasant. But when the temperature drops, getting outdoors in winter looks a lot less appealing, especially when you could be huddled up in front of a crackling fire with a mug of hot chocolate and a book. Or the central heating and Strictly, because most of us don’t actually live in a cottagecore Pinterest board.
But you can still get outdoors in winter and I think you should. For one thing, it feels good to get a few lungfuls of cold crisp air, to see the world at the other end of the seasons and to come home with the red cheeks that you only get with a bit of stinging cold.
I admit, I’m not going out as much as I did earlier in the year but my winter activities so far have featured a sailing lesson (in which I was the pupil), an archery lesson (in which I was the instructor) during Storm Arwen and an outdoor Brownies session which featured me playing the victim for a First Aid session, which meant rolling around on the cold concrete being put into the recovery position by three girls, two of whom developed COVID within the next three days, not to mention the daily walks that I haven’t missed once in eighteen months and fifteen days (I haven’t done today’s yet, probably. I wrote this last Thursday. Then again, I’m on holiday today so I have the option to go out before 5pm, so I might have been out already.)
Winter sailing is surely a thing, but it’s not really a thing for people like me. Falling into the sea unexpectedly can be an unpleasant experience. Falling into a freezing cold sea is horrendous. The higher likelihood of storms and high winds can probably make it quite entertaining for an experienced sailor but not for a beginner, says the person whose sailing lesson was cancelled twice because of autumn winds.
On the other hand, a stroll along a deserted beach on a cold clear day is a delight. Speaking as someone who lives near a very touristy bit of beach, winter’s the only time I can actually get to the coast. Paddling in November or December is… well, it’s bracing. You do need a towel and some thick socks for afterwards, you can’t just air-dry your feet in sandals like you might in the summer. Winter is also the optimum time for fossil-hunting, when storms have battered the cliffs and released the secrets they’ve been holding for millions of years. Of course, after a storm is when that cliff is mostly likely to collapse on top of you but cliffs can and do collapse in beautiful weather in the summer too. Just beware of cliffs, is what I guess I’m saying.
Archery in high winds in an open field isn’t a great idea – we lost three arrows in the long grass, the curtain blew over before we’d even started and we had to invade the Guide camp to seek out hot drinks because no one could feel their fingers by the end of the lesson. But winter doesn’t mean outdoor activities have to stop altogether. I’d do a December archery session at my local Scout camp in a heartbeat. It has a wooden shelter, a floodlight and the entire range is surrounded by wooden fence panels and hanging curtains, it’s almost impossible to entirely lose an arrow and because it’s so hemmed-in, it’s so sheltered that the wind really doesn’t affect shooting at all. I might draw the line at high ropes because the wind is less reliable in the winter and it’s no fun arranging an event, sorting out payments and forms and then cancelling it because the weather is uncooperative. But you don’t have to abandon outdoor adventurous activities just because it’s a bit chilly. In fact, if you need to book facilities, winter is when they’re likely to have availability because no one else wants to do it.
But one thing you absolutely can do in winter, come hell or high water – or high winds – is walk. Eighteen months, fifteen days, I’ve walked 2km every single day. Perhaps it’s best to leave mountains and moors and other open, exposed places to the experts. Unless you’ve got the relevant skills, experience and equipment, it’s probably best not to start your Monroe-bagging career or taking to hiking across Dartmoor in winter. Get your experience in the summer, go on a winter skills course if that seems relevant but for now, stick to somewhere safer. This country has squillions of miles of trails that are suitable for snowy, icy, maybe even foggy weather, on which you can satisfy your urge to put a few kilometres under your feet. Or you can do what I do, which is just 2km, takes about half an hour, around the local streets straight from my front door.
A lot of my walks these days are in the dark because it’s dark by the time I finish work at 5pm and it’s even darker by the time I’ve convinced myself to layer up and get out there. I don’t mind it so much once I’m out. In fact, the sky has been so clear lately that I’ve taken to stargazing. Jupiter is right ahead of me on the first half of my regular walk lately. Saturn is a bit harder to spot and if I get out early enough, I can see Venus low on the horizon. I even caught the ISS the other day. I’ve always been kind of interested in the stars but I used to go out in the dark so rarely that it’s not something I’ve ever really got into. I have an app which projects the night sky onto your camera so you can point it at bright things and it’ll identify them and I now nod knowingly at Vega, Altair and Capella, which are three stars that stand out quite visibly on a clear night. I’ve even found Polaris from the Plough. The app is called SkyView Lite – I won’t link it because I don’t know if you want to the Android version or the Apple version. It’s free but it’ll nag you to upgrade to the paid version and as ever, it’ll make it difficult to find the cross to close the ad, but once you’ve got rid of that on opening, it’s ad-free and I have no idea what more I could want from the paid version that I don’t get from the free version.
I took my camera out a few times, in an attempt to capture my local streets by night. My camera can do night photos really well, but mostly only when it’s on a tripod using the right setting. Handheld, I get a lot of blur. All the same, it was an interesting little project, to try to look at places and things in a different way, look at the way the light hits them, look at the hints of frost, see how mad a tree can look with a streetlight behind it in the fog. Selfies – do you know how hard it is to take selfies in the dark?
By day, I like to walk by the allotments and see how they’ve changed throughout the year. There’s still a healthy-looking patch of leeks and the passion flowers are coming back most unexpectedly but other than that, there’s not a lot going on at the moment. Some of them have been dug over in preparation for the spring, some have had their summer stuff cut down and some are just being left to go wild for a few months. Someone grew a giant pumpkin – and by giant, I mean huge. You don’t need any fairy godmother to turn this thing into a coach, you just need to stick some wheels on it. I expected it to go at Halloween but it’s still there. Not looking at its best but still there and at least now you don’t have to peer through masses of leaves to catch a glimpse of it.
Down in the woods, I have to go in broad daylight because there are so many leaves on the ground that at twilight, it’s impossible to tell where down ends and up begins and I come out of the woods too dizzy to walk home for a few minutes. It’s fine during the day. My eyes can make sense of it all when they’ve got enough light to deal with this world with blurred axes and I don’t go in the woods at night. But in that half-light, it just confuses my brain.
The creatures are all preparing for a cold winter now. We have a hedge out the front that’s just full of juicy red berries and in the morning, it’s full of blackbirds, pigeons and the occasional sparrow, all gobbling down as many berries as possible. In summer, it used to be full of bees until everyone in town starting planting lavender, which the bees prefer to the hedge. Which is nice for the bees, but I used to enjoy going outside in my socks to watch hundreds of bees buzzing. The hedgehogs are no longer coming for the food my dad puts out – it’s specialist hedgehog biscuit and a bowl of water, no bread and milk – but I see them scuttling around occasionally on my walk, so they’re still up for the time being. Won’t be much longer. Last year, they returned in late December after their winter nap so if they’re going to be back up for New Year, they’d better get to sleep soon.
Not that cats count as wildlife, but I used to see a lot of the local cats when I was out on my walks. I know Lulu, Max, Poppy, Benji, Oreo and Panda by name and I know RoofCat, Grey Kitten, Cuddly Cat, The Long Cinnamon Roll Shy Cat and The Horrified Cat by face. Some of them will run over for attention. Some will look horrified and flee. Some will look down their furry noses at me and swipe if I reach out a friendly hand. I don’t see nearly as many these days. They’re all outdoors cats but it seems they go inside at night, which means most of them are in before I head out at 5pm and I rarely see them at the moment.
I see a few dogs. I really enjoy this time of year, when dogs start to appear in LED collars. A pink ring bobbing along in the distance that turns out to be a husky or a golden retriever is one of my favourite winter sights. Speaking of LEDs, there used to be a couple who went out running in his-and-hers colour-coded high-viz shirts and LED ankle bands. I haven’t seen them yet.
Christmas lights have been appearing since mid-November and there are more to see every day. That’s another favourite winter sight. It’s going to be dark and depressing doing my daily walks in January but for now, it’s my own personal Christmas illuminations trail. There are a few that stay up year round. There’s one just up the road that’s been up and on for the last year. There’s a house with several strings of coloured lights in the back garden that always makes me think of a Mediterranean bistro – actually, those lights haven’t been on this winter. I think they’re their general-purpose lights. The blue Christmas lights are up and on, though. There’s a house with a string of oversized lantern fairylights along the gutter – it’s only switched on in winter but I suspect it’s too much of a pain to put up and take down every year, like the lights around the ceiling of my office. There are a few houses that have gone all out – well, no. The ones that really go all out are the ones that star in local papers and end up with queues of cars coming to look at them. There are a few houses that have put tasteful strings of lights up in quantities that go a little beyond “subtle and delicate” and in most cases, those are a joy to behold.
You can go out in daylight in winter too! I tend to use my days off to do other stuff, which results in my daily walks being in the dark even at the weekends at the moment but there’s nothing stopping me going for a longer walk in daylight. My dad is a bit like having a badly-trained golden retriever – makes a mess, eats anything he sees and needs a good walk. He’s declined to take a ball out to chase on our longer walks so far, though. We did some longer walks last winter on my Single Map and found that a lot of winter walks are a bit muddy. He’s finally invested in some proper walking boots so the mud may bother him a bit less this year.
Next week – from my point of view – or earlier in this week – from yours – I’m going to/I went to a cottage in a little village. I’ve made a custom OS map to give me some country walks, although whether I actually do them depends on the weather and what else I plan.
At some point, maybe I’ll do a longer walk in the country. Probably when I go for my little cottage break in a couple of weeks, since I don’t think the village is big enough to do 2km around. Anyway, I shouldn’t want to spend the whole two and a half days sitting in the cottage, so a country walk should definitely be on the agenda – weather permitting. I’ll go out and do my 2km whatever the weather but there’s no fun in a long country walk in driving rain and wind. But a longer country walk in nice winter weather is a delight – when the grass is crunchy underfoot, when the fallen leaves are bordered in silver, when the sky is blue and the cold makes your eyes water. When you put on your winter boots and your thermals and your padded coat and the hat and scarf that Tom made for you, that’s when a winter walk is a delight.
Yes, walking in the winter, even a boring mundane walk around your local streets, is definitely worth doing if you’d like to see the world in a different set of colours and I recommend you go out and appreciate it at least once this winter. Unless you’re up a mountain, there’s very little the winter can throw at you in the UK that you can’t handle in warm clothes for twenty minutes.