We woke in the forest to the sounds of nature.

And joggers. And then a dog walker. And then some cyclists. Eventually the curious attention from passers by got the best of us and we hauled ourselves out of our sleeping bags. Normally on a solo trip I’d be very much of the “arrive late, leave early” school of wild camping, but on the 7th morning of a hike I challenge you to get up early.

Flicking a tick off of me before it had the chance to dig its head in (yes, there are deer ticks in this forest – watch yourself), we got packed and headed out on our way.

Continue reading “A week on the Fife Coastal Path – Day 7 – The End!” →

Day 6 was a day I’d been looking forward to for the entire trip. From the early planning stages the sight on the map of 4 miles or so of walking through a big flat forest had my attention.

One of my dream bucket list trips would be a multi-day walk which takes place entirely within deciduous forest. Sadly, this is a dream which  can never be fulfilled within the UK due to thousands of years of chopping trees down to build big boats so we could go oppress foreign lands. My fantasies of days of practicing bushcraft skills, trekking along rustling paths of beech leaves, catching sight of woodland life roaming around the brush will have to remain just that, fantasies. I do have some long term designs on a bikepacking adventure around either Ettrick or Kielder forests, but those are both managed coniferous monocultures for the most part – and that just isn’t the same.

Tentsmuir forest isn’t a bad option for a walk though, about 14km² of mixed woodland (much of it boring old pine forest, but a fair amount of others to be fair), a whole load of wildlife (we saw red squirrels and deer, and we weren’t even looking), a whole load of archaeology, and some coastal terrain as well with broad sand dunes and beaches.

Continue reading “A week on the Fife Coastal Path – Day 6” →

Day 4 of the trip started with an absolutely thrilling adventure – a bus ride through the Fife countryside. A bit of a late start after another cracking breakfast in the B&B (this time porridge instead of the Full Scottish, though I was tempted by the offer of a dram of Whisky in said porridge). We were well into the morning by the time we hopped off the X60 (which, by the way, stops in almost every town on the Fife Coastal Path – a fact which would prove useful on Day 5)

This was mostly a pretty easy day to be honest, clocking in at only 11 miles, and to be honest I actually don’t remember all that much of it! Some of that was down to familiarity, this was a stretch of coastline which I spent a lot of time wandering back and forth along during my mapping project. I do remember that Elie to St. Monan’s was a pretty amazing stretch of sandy path along the top of grassy dunes – rather beautiful in the sunshine which poked out from the behind the clouds a lot more regularly than the photos below would seem to suggest.

Continue reading “A week on the Fife Coastal Path – Day 4” →

May of this year was a little bit special. I took my first real holiday in 5 years (and technically that was an academic conference which I tacked on some tourism to, so it’s probably longer). I’ve been wanting to do a decent long distance hike for a while, having bailed on a couple of attempts over the last few years due to blisters and weather.

So all that was left to do was to pick a route!

Requirements:

• Somewhere between 1-2 weeks maximum (Lauren had a maximum of two weeks off left).
• Somewhere reasonably flat (Lauren hates hills)
• Somewhere we could be reasonably confident of good weather (Bob hates rain)
• Somewhere with decent geology to look at (I didn’t tell Lauren this one in advance)
• Somewhere we could camp easily, and resupply easily (these latter two proved trickier than you would expect)

After having a look around at walks in the 80-150 mile length I settled on the Fife Coastal Path. I’ve done parts of it before, given that it was my undergraduate mapping area and that I’d returned as part of an industry facing PhD field trip that I’d been on (which I, as a climate researcher gleefully crashed). It’s also variable and interesting enough to be an exciting trip with lots to see and do.

Continue reading “A week on the Fife Coastal Path – Day 1” →