Climb the hill you can see from your window
The shoes were wrong for it, some flat-soled office things, and the mud took the left one clean off on the first stile. You'd picked a church spire on the map to walk towards, a good clean line across three fields, swearing at the sky when the path vanished into a hedge that wasn't marked anywhere. You slipped once on the wet grass and didn't notice the graze until you were in the pub. And then the spire, when you finally reached it, turned out to be shorter than the water tower behind it — the thing you'd been squinting past for two hours without once looking properly.
Practical
- Cost
- Free
- Best time
- Any time of year, though clear evenings give the best light for the view down
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time it takes
- Under two hours round trip, often under one
- What people get wrong
- People wait for a special occasion or the right boots and never go; the wrong shoes on a wet slope are the main hazard, not the distance. Many also leave it too late in the evening and lose the view to dusk.
- With
- Alone