Essential Guide to Walking Kit

Gareth    General Outdoor, Planning     advice, essential kit, guides, Hiking, how to, Walking

We had fun earlier in the year meeting up with Andy from Walks around Britain and Dave from MyOutdoors whilst up in the Peak District. We were already shooting a short video on a walk around Coombs Dale, whilst we were there, we had a chance to shoot the following short video on what sort of gear you might need when starting walking.

For those of you new to walking, the video gives a great intro to the sort of kit you will need to take when heading out for a days strolling, whether that be in the hills or valleys. We would recommend at least the following gear, as weather conditions can change rapidly when you are out and about.

- Small rucksack of between 15 & 25 litres in size
- Good pair of walking boots, spend the lions share of your budget on this.
- Baselayer to push or wick sweat away from your body, it should be synthetic or merino wool (not cotton!)
- A Midlayer, generally fleece, either heavy or light depending on the weather and a spare one in case of emergency.
- An outerlayer, usually a waterproof jacket, but can be a soft shell which is a water resistant and wind proof layer.
- Good pair of walking trousers and a pair of waterproof trousers if the weather looks bad. Don#’t wear jeans, if they get wet, they are rather uncomfortable, again stick to synthetic options which are hard wearing, water resistant and dry quickly.
- Compass.
- Map (great guide from Ordanance Survey here on choosing the right map).
- First aid kit.
- Food & Drink as you burn a lot of calories out strolling.
- Hat & Gloves (make it a sun hat for summer along with some sun cream).

This is just a basic list, so take in to account if you are doing anything more strenuous, or if you are heading in to the mountains, you may well need more equipment.

What would you consider essential for your rucksack or clothing when heading outside?

A Bike of Many Parts

Helen Lloyd    Helen Lloyd, Planning     cycling, gear, Helen, maintenance, repair, take on africa

It’s a few weeks since I arrived back in the UK. The short cycle from the airport was the least smooth of the whole journey. Nothing to do with the roads this time though. When it came to re-assembling the bike, having been packed in a big box for the flight, the pieces just didn’t seem to fit together. The gear cables wouldn’t connect to the hub so I couldn’t change gear, the brakes barely worked (although that had been an increasing problem over the final weeks) and the forks didn’t fit in quite right into the frame so I had to leave a few of the spacers out. And then there was the wobbly back wheel which nine months after I first noticed it, was now, well, very wobbly. Never mind, I could still cycle. And it wasn’t far.

So for the last few weeks I’ve been without the use of the bike (although fortunately I have a moutain bike too, which is getting well-used instead). Time to get it fixed. First I took the back wheel over to SJS Cycles, where Dave had a quick look at it and said he could have the hubb all fixed up in half an hour. And sure enough, after half an hour, I walked out of the shop with a replacement hubb, and new sprocket fitted too. Very impressed. I also stocked up on three Schwalbe Marathon XR tyres.

Yes I know a bike only has two wheels! In any case the tyres that took me through Africa still have some life in them. But Schwalbe no longer manufacture these tyres and there’s just no other tyre that will stand the test of touring time. These should keep me on the road for a while longer. My legs are bound to give up before the tyres give out.

But the rest wasn’t going to be quite so simple. Simply because I’ve decided to fix the rest of the bike myself.

I thought I had the spare parts I needed. And so on Sunday morning, with multi-tool, pliers and a good supply of WD40, I set about taking off the old parts that needed replacing. On closer inspection, this turned out to be most of the bike bar the frame, wheels and new hubb.

My touring bike - mid-repair

Having removed several layers of bike oil and grease from my hands and body, the afternoon was mostly spent on the internet searching out the replacement parts I need… brake cable set, gear cables, headset bearings, chain, chainring, a new twistshifter assembly and the only part that sounded remotely interesting which was the ‘noodles and boots’ (and they’re nothing but small bent metal tubes that the brake cables fit through).

So until I get the new parts through, the rack is on my mountain bike so I can head off to the hills at the weekends. In the meantime, my trusty tourer is scattered about my room in several rusty or dirty pieces.

I think I forgot to mention – the next tour I’ll be cycling the Great Divide from Canada, through the USA, to Mexico. You can read more about it on my new website, Helen’s Take On…

And over the coming weeks I’ll be posting more on the Togblog about how the preparations for the trip are going.

Get outdoors over the bank holiday

sian    General Outdoor, Planning     bank holiday ideas, bluebells, caring for gear, find bluebells, long weekend ideas, national trust, royal wedding outdoors, Walking

Take advantage of Kate and Will’s kind gift of a free day off and get outdoors! If you’re not into sitting inside, glued to live footage of someone else’s shindig, the day of the Royal Wedding is the perfect time to escape, as beauty spots will be empty as would-be ramblers stay shackled to the TV. Here’s our list of where to go and what to do.

Catch the bluebells. Countryfile have a list of the best bluebell woods in the UK, 
whilst Visit Woods lets you type in your postcode and find the carpet of bluebells nearest to you.

The National Trust’s top 10 places to visit over easter are all stunners, from castles to rocky islands.

In need of inspiration? Live for the Outdoors have a fantastic destination guide. Click on the place nearest to you for walks on and off the beaten path.

If you feel more like celebrating than avoiding the big party, check out my list at Countryfileon the best ways to celebrate being British.

And if the weather doesn’t stay fine, you can always hang out indoors and prep your gear with LFTO’s handy guide to caring for boots, waterproofs and sleeping bags.

The Girl Outdoors

Wincanton win the league

Keith    Planning    

Wincanton RFC are a great bunch and really good fun to run out with so it has been my privilege to be part of the team that saw them win the league and get promoted. The best place to be on a rugby field is part of the tight five and for me the best place in the tight five is in the front row but countless scrums, line outs, rucks , and mauls have taken their toll and I am certainly looking forward to not aching so much.

beautiful boots

sian    Footwear, Planning     boots review, cheap winter boots, fair isle boots, keen boots, outdoor boots, sian, webtogs

I’m a little bit in love with these gorgeous Keen Auburn boots – they somehow manage to be both pretty, functional, warm and durable, which doesn’t happen a lot in the world of women’s outdoor gear. They are perfect for country pubs now and they’ll still be going strong in the summer as brilliant festival footwear.

The fair isle print is really current and will brighten up jeans and a woolly jumper (which, to be honest, is pretty much my uniform when it’s cold). You might want to invest in some suede-saving spray though, given that we don’t live in the sunniest climate in the world. Sigh.

The Girl Outdoors

Good news for quality Websites

Keith    Planning    

I am really pleased to read this on the Google Blog

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.

So, we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer

This will come to the UK in time and is great news for ecommerce. There are a lot of poor websites out there that have used Key words and link building to improve their Google ranking when they should have been concentrating on building a good website with interesting and engaging content. These sites invariably offer a poor experience for the consumer and overall devalue the ecommerce experience.