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Lead photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash.

During our time in the Lake District in 2024, I did a lone hike to the top of the fell which I’ve been driving past ever since first visiting the region in the 1990s.

The road itself is appealing because it wiggles through the landscape pleasingly, and it takes a little courage and commitment as a driver to get through the narrow lanes and up and down one of the steepest and hair-raising road sections in England. Even though I’m very familiar with this route, the ever-deepening potholes, occasionally inclement weather and sudden appearances of Herdwick sheep in the middle of the road can provide varying challenges. These were minor inconveniences this time when compared to the experience of driving out on a beautiful, albeit windy, day.

I parked at the top of the Hardknott Pass, where there are a couple of small lay-bys where you can usually leave a car during off-season without blocking passing traffic. Belted Galloway cattle watched me as I wrapped myself in wind- and waterproof gear and began making my way up the slippery path towards the summit of the fell which gives the pass its name.

Despite having visited this area for around 30 years now, I’d never been to the top of this fell or seen the view from its summit. A YouTube video by English photographer Stuart McGlennon had inspired me to go and see the nearby “Eskdale Needle”: a rock stack set in a very photogenic spot, with the mass of Scafell Pike and the surrounding mountains behind it when viewed from this side.

The path was as squelchy and muddy as many Lakeland routes are in autumn and winter, so I was glad to be wearing my sturdy leather hiking boots and slightly thicker hiking socks than usual. As it turned out, it wasn’t the temperature that posed the biggest challenge, but the wind. Walking up the lee of the fell wasn’t too bad, but the higher I climbed, the stronger the wind surged. By the time I reached the summit, I was grateful for my walking pole to steady my steps, and for the fact that the felltop is comparatively flat and therefore safe.

Although I had my tripod with me, the wind was too strong to keep it steady, so I didn’t bother using it. Instead, I chose to handhold my camera and wait for the right moments as the scudding clouds alternately lit and cast the landscape into shade.

After reaching the summit via the path and getting my shots there, I headed away from the path and diagonally across the tufted landscape to find the view I’d come to see. Finding a suitably flat rock on which to sit, I took a range of photographs in the wind and enjoyed my lunch, capturing several images in different lighting conditions to make sure I got just the right shot.

From there, I headed back towards the pass road, but instead of returning directly to the car, I visited a nearby summit called Border End. Thankfully, I found a large rock several feet high with a flat side facing leeward, which sheltered me from the wind and allowed me to hunker down for a while and enjoy a calm, mindful, and deeply relaxing quarter of an hour. I did nothing but look out across the landscape to the Irish Sea and reflect on how lucky I am to keep returning to a region I’ve loved for so many years. Little did I know on one of my first visits, when I slept in the passenger seat of a friend’s parent’s car in the Langdale valley, that this place would speak to me so deeply so many years later.

As I eventually started to walk back to the car, with clouds scudding and the light gradually fading, I was blessed with an extremely fortunate gap in the clouds which briefly illuminated the felltop. I quickly unpacked my camera again and grabbed a photograph of the light in the gathering darkness.

Realising it wouldn’t get any better than that, I returned to the car, shooed away the cattle which had decided to gather around it for some reason, changed back into softer shoes, and headed back to the holiday cottage.

Footnote

Just before I published this post in early 2026, cinematographer Terry Abraham published a short film in which his friend and collaborator David Powell-Thompson walks to the summit and back from lower down the Eskdale valley.

Striking out across the back of the dunes, I was immediately reminded of how difficult it is to walk in trainers on shifting sand. Twenty-five years ago, these dunes were in danger of sliding away altogether; now they have been anchored by grasses and ferns. Spiky memories from childhood are now constrained to the lower slopes of the sandy hillocks bordering the beach — a great shame, but at least one that ensures the dunes will stand the test of winter tides.

As we schlepped up to the top of the highest dune, we came across a bright green moth caterpillar with yellow stripes, desperately making its way from one side of the path to the other. We stopped and watched its efforts for a few minutes and were pleased to see that it made it safely across — a minor marathon for such a small creature.

A little further on, I found the view I had come to photograph: looking down over a tufted hillock of grasses, across the beach with tiny stick-like people making their way back and forth, and across the bay to the distinctive rocky headland I remember so well. Having taken the photograph I wanted to capture, we carried on along the trail, part of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.

Passing through a leafy glade, on the left of which the remains of a ruin still sit, we reached the junction leading up to the cluster of houses and bungalows where I used to stay as a child. The path leads on towards Swanlake Bay, but short, rocky steps lead onto the beach here.

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I remember running all the way up from this beach to a family friend’s house to use the telephone, calling the Coast Guard when an older man slipped on the rocks, banged his head, and knocked himself unconscious. The great excitement of the big yellow helicopter landing on the beach was one of the highlights of my time in Freshwater East — albeit a slightly happier memory for me than for the man concerned. I sometimes wonder what became of him, whether he was okay in the end.

The intervening years have played many tricks on the distances and sizes of places from my youth. The tiny trickle of water running from the coast path down to the beach is smaller than I remember, yet the rocky elevation where my dad used to sit and keep an eye on us as we played in the surf remains unchanged. The next cluster of rocks along the coast, where we were allowed to sit when we were a little older — with more space to spread out and further from the steps down to the beach — is still the same.

I scrambled easily over the red sandstone rocks, finding a vantage point from which to take another photograph towards the headland. It’s strange that I didn’t feel as sad as I had expected. I had worried that being at the beach would make me unhappy, but in the end it was okay. Although I have so many memories here, the fact that Dad and Sarah are no longer with us didn’t weigh too heavily on my mind. Perhaps it was the beauty of the warm day, and the sense that they wouldn’t want me to be unhappy, that allowed me to focus on taking pictures and enjoying an hour or so by the sea.

I no longer have the expertise to judge exactly when the tide is coming in or going out, but it soon became clear that we weren’t going to reach the large cave this time, to which I’ve been returning since I was a kid. As I was photographing a large rock with my camera on its tripod, it became evident that the tide was indeed coming in, not going out. I took my shots and moved around the corner to the large rock pool I remember from my youth — one of the subjects I particularly wanted to photograph on this visit.

I had a quick and amusing chat with a young local family, reminiscing about playing in the giant rock pool in which I played as a child. Their dog entering the water made me joke that perhaps the sea wasn’t warmed by the sun, but by enthusiastic pets splashing around. As it turns out, the family father also remembers the days when the small cabins and the ugly houses down at Trewent Point were rental properties; now they are all privately owned holiday homes.

Having taken the photographs I’d hoped for, we walked back along the beach for twenty minutes or so, barefoot with our trousers rolled up. Jo searched for stones and found a couple of Pembrokeshire rocks with small holes in them. I took a few snaps of the water lapping over my feet and recorded a couple of short video sequences with sound, so I can replay them when I’m back home in the mountains.

After walking the full length of the beach — remembering how we used to call the Trewent end “the shitty end” because of an increased amount of litter nearer the beach cafe— I stood in the water for a few minutes, not caring about the base of my trousers, taking it all in. Looking up along the beach to the headland, across to Trewent Point, east along the coastline. I paused for breath before turning my back on the sea and walking back to the car.

After a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing while trying to decide what I wanted to do on my birthday back in January, I finally hit on the idea of going up to the Eigergletscher mountain station, high above Grindelwald and below the peaks of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau. Although there are plenty of summits to visit in this region, Eigergletscher is particularly special for historic reasons. It’s the point at which a tunnel begins, driving its way through the sheer rock of the cliffs above and ending up at the Jungfraujoch.

There have been buildings on this spot for more than a century—visiting the old train station building here was one of my first experiences of being completely alone in the Alps in temperatures below −20 °C, when I was there to photograph the winter landscape at sunset. Jo and I also visited several times over the years, including a visit to the old husky station in 2009. (The dogs are sadly long since gone.)

In 2020, a massive concrete complex of cable-car and more modern and capable train station, part of the project connecting Grindelwald directly with Männlichen and Eigergletscher with large and fast cable-cars, was completed and opened to the public. The construction has taken away some of the historic Alpine feeling, but it’s definitely a much better experience to be able to choose the Eiger Express over the train and get to the high mountain stations in 15 minutes from the valley. However, the original mountain restaurant—a small space in one of the old buildings—remains largely traditional, with a wood-panel interior and a wonderful smell of cooking cheese.

That’s just as it should be for me in the Alps, although I appreciate the fact that a terminus like this, which sees many thousands of people every year heading up and down the mountain, must be modern and able to accommodate so many visitors. It’s still incredibly sad when practicalities outweigh the traditional experience of being in a space that reflects the history of Alpine exploration.

This is a very long way of saying that I chose, for my birthday, to take the cable car up to the Eigergletscher restaurant to have a very fine cordon bleu followed with an Eigerspitzli (small chocolate mountain confection, filled with praline), while Jo enjoyed a Graubünden speciality: capuns. After enjoying both our lunch and the experience of being there, we put on our spikes and walked down the sledge track to Kleine Scheidegg.

For some reason there were very few people on the mountain that mid-afternoon, which made the experience even nicer for me. As we reached Kleine Scheidegg to catch the train back down to the valley, we arrived with the last of the sun, and Jo slid down the final section of path using the slipperiness of her winter hiking trousers instead of a sledge. I managed to fly the drone while we were on the mountain to capture some photographs and a short film sequence of both mountain stations.

This was a perfect day out for me: exercise, a little bit of Swiss Alpine history, wonderful company, and some photography to look at on grey days when I’m stuck in the office.

If you visit in September, as we did this time, many of the trees in this valley will be turning to autumn colour and you may well hear the red deer calling on the upper slopes of the surrounding mountains. We didn’t see any sign of them, but an occasional bellow echoing distantly amongst the high cliffs confirmed that they are up there, somewhere. We crossed paths with a woman carrying binoculars who had seen some animals near the tree line on the western side of the valley, but we, with our inferior non-amplified eyesight, weren’t so lucky.

After turning left and then immediately right when reaching the road and bridge at Broch, we took a short sandwich break to enjoy the views, before continuing along the river to Schwarzwaldalp. From here, which is the end of the public road and where there is a picturesque little hotel, restaurant and historic sawmill, we kept to the tree line and headed along the walking path through the woods. The path here quickly begins to gain altitude and there are some steeper sections, but we took our time and enjoyed the peace and quiet, stopping here and there for photos and to catch our breath.

The top end of the walk, near Schwandboden and Alpiglen, is pretty spectacular because it’s the northern run-off valley of the Wetterhorn; if you have a bit more energy than we did this time, you could push on to the saddle at Grosse Scheidegg and enjoy the panoramic views. Instead of getting the bus back down the valley, we chose to continue enjoying our walk and headed back down the path which criss-crosses the road a couple of times. We rejoined the tarmac for a while because of tired legs and a more easy-going return to Schwarzwaldalp. From there, we returned the way we’d come, along the forest track, and enjoyed the views across to the cliffs above the Rosenlaui gorge once more.

Its popularity and ease of access doesn’t make this part of the island any less impressive. On the same day that we visited Talisker Bay, we stopped off at Sligachan to go for a short walk by the river Allt Dearg Mor and take some photographs.

A couple of days later and on our way back to the mainland, lighting conditions and a wonderful rain squall made me stop and put my drone up to take an incredibly dramatic panoramic photograph before we headed on to the next stop on our autumn road trip.

It’s a breathtaking landscape to spend time in, and these slopes have become one of my favourite places in the whole country. In more recent years, we’ve visited in winter, when there are fewer people around, as well as in summer, when the area is busier and especially popular with cyclists.

The village of Rivaz, in particular, always draws me in with my camera — not only because there’s a convenient parking garage hidden amongst the historic buildings, but also because of how wonderfully photogenic it is.

I’ve been wanting to do something with my video files for a long time now and continue adding to my YouTube channel. This year is hopefully the one when I finally dig out more of my drone footage from the past six years and put it to use. I’m currently working on a video covering the whole of 2020, but I wanted to share this shorter piece showing the beautiful vineyards in the late winter afternoon sun a few weeks before COVID-19 hit and we were all locked down. Even though the vines are bare and the landscape feels cold and unfruitful at this time of year, it is no less beautiful than at any other time of year.

Discovering an alternative band co-formed by Stereophonics singer Kelly Jones.

I got into listening to music properly during my time in sixth form, when I fell in with a group of friends who greatly influenced me and brought me out of myself. One friend in particular had a huge cassette collection and introduced me to countless new bands. When CDs became widely available, my own collection began to grow too—more or less in line with what my bank account could tolerate.

When I moved to Switzerland, those CDs came with me but much more exposure to Swiss bands—some of which I like, others less so—meant that my interest in new music tailed off for a few years.

Getting to know Jo in 2004, and especially during the first couple of years we were together, reintroduced me to bands I hadn’t listened to for quite some time, or which hadn’t yet crossed my radar. One of those was Stereophonics: I liked them straight away and as time went on and memories became associated with their music, they became a firm favourite.

Since signing up to Spotify around a decade ago, music for me has largely been about streaming, although I’ve taken to buying CDs again over the past few years. The subscription costs a bit every month, of course, but it gives me the freedom to wander off in completely random directions whenever I feel like it. Because of that, I sometimes discover bands that have been around for years but had somehow passed me by, or new collaborations involving artists I already know.

One band I came across in the past few days is Far From Saints. Stereophonics frontman Kelly Jones has teamed up with Patty Lynn and Dwight Baker from The Wind and The Wave to release music that clearly connects to the Stereophonics sound, but which has a stronger country influence. I particularly like the Americana guitar tones and the addition of a fresh female voice, which blends really well with Kelly’s voice—one I’ve been listening to for so many years now.

Although the path and the benches here are fairly busy on a sunny day, only comparatively few tourists make it this far. Most of them stick to the lakeside restaurants, the park and the sports facilities, or content themselves with taking snapshots with their phones from the terrace opposite the train station. I certainly have nothing against the people who come here to enjoy the region I call home, but it’s nice not to have to be in a melée with them when I’m taking an important, peaceful lunchtime break from work. Add in the various paths to and throughout the 1.5 square kilometre woods on top of the hill and through the vineyards, and it’s easy to see why this is one of my favourite places to go and decompress.

I moved back to work in Spiez when I joined Say Hello in 2019. It was a great decision to no longer commute up and down the motorway every day to Bern. Working in offices in the city meant that I didn’t really have the opportunity to enjoy the countryside much during my breaks—the best I could do was a little square of rose garden outside the local school, which, whilst pleasant enough, was a far cry from the kind of peace I get in Spiez.

Having a little dedicated office nearby means that even when I get drawn into focusing on work quite heavily, I’m often prompted to walk up onto the hill and above the vineyards to stretch my legs and get some much-needed exercise. As a middle-aged man, I have come to understand how important this is. Although I can’t go hiking every day or every week I realise that even the comparatively short couple of kilometres to the lake and back is better than nothing. 

I’ve taken a lot of time this summer and autumn to walk the familiar paths and although they’re routes I’ve walked countless times—particularly given that we used to live nearby—the views and moods change according to the weather. In summer, the ranks of green vines lead down to the castle and the sounds of families splashing in the lake and lido. The warm weather and beautiful sounds of birds and bees all around remind me why I have chosen to live here for so many years. 

In autumn, the leaves change and the beech, oak, sycamore and Norwegian maple trees all change to various shades of yellow. The vines turn orange and provide a beautiful spectacle, before the first snows dust the tops of the Niesen, which stands tall above the town and which dominates the view.

An alternative route up a steep path near my office means that even if time is short, like today, I get the chance for a 15 to 20 minute walk which is suitably strenuous. Having an iPhone with me means that I take a lot of photos of the various views and every now and again I remember to take my proper camera with me.

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of these views and the nature here. It’s when walking along these paths or sitting on one of the benches looking out across the water that I count myself lucky to have been able to live here for so many years.  Long may that continue.

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy watching Winter Walks on the BBC (for example with Selina Scott), where the scenery is nice and very English. I subscribe to fellow Fujifilm photographer Nigel Cooke’s website and his latest video, embedded in this blog post, is a nice sequence of a walk in snowy Cambridgeshire which is a great example of what I enjoy about random walks. For me, walking isn’t about expansive vistas and big mountains, but the intricacies and moments of the place in which you find yourself.

After an online search for somewhere new, and preferably away from the tourist traps, Talisker Bay seemed to be a place worth visiting: primarily because of the sea stack there and for the potential of some nice light coming in off the Atlantic. 

We drove past one of the more popular destinations on the island, which we’ve heard is a nightmare to visit because of the amount of cars parked on the side of the road, and ended up finding our way to one of the few remaining parking spaces at the end of a narrow and very badly potholed road. We weren’t quite sure where everybody was, as there was no sign of any other visitors, but we paid no real heed and began the 20 minute walk out to the coastline. Passing a number of signs insisting strongly that there is no vehicular access to the beach, we passed a very nice house at Sleadale Burn, then headed along a well-made track to the edge of the wild meadow, dotted with soft rush grasses, which abuts a rocky foreshore and the dark, sandy expanse of the beach. The dark granite boulders were somewhat slippery, but incredibly and dramatically photogenic.

As we were arriving, the clouds and haar rolled in, which made our visit very moody indeed. Both Jo and I entertained ourselves by photographing the patterns in the dark sand and after a while, a small group of young friends arrived to splash around in the somewhat intemperate water as a vaguely pink glow came through the fog.

The low cloud wasn’t thick enough to completely obscure the view of the beach from the air, so I sent up my drone and took a few short video clips and panoramic photographs before we stumbled our way back across the rocks and began making our way to the car. By then, the weather had closed in and there was a definite chill in the air. It was totally unexpected that such a lovely beach would be so sparsely visited, as we’d always heard how busy the Isle of Skye can be for much of the year. The dark green soft rush grasses among the little hillocks in the damp fields, populated by sheep and surrounded by old stone walls, hark strongly of the Lake District and North Wales, although the breeze that picked up as we headed back to the car reminded us sharply that we were by the coast.

As an avid photographer, I used to visit the Lake District back in the 1990s. I wasn’t anywhere near as active as I am these days, so I used to sit in the car and wait for the weather to break before taking photographs as close to the roadside as possible.

For some reason, Jo and I decided to try and walk up a ridiculously steep slope to get to a better view in 2010 and as it turned out, we ended up making our way right to the top of that hill. It was our first Wainwright Fell in the Lake District, and we’ve been avid walkers ever since.

The more time that I spend walking, the more details that I see. Even in the city where I worked for many years and now in the town where I’ve been living since moving here, there is always another corner to see or another view to photograph. Returning to the same place repeatedly at different times of year is great, because it means you get to enjoy it in all sorts of weather conditions.

We particularly like watching the BBC series Winter Walks, because it shows that walking around the British countryside and through small villages can be just as fascinating as hiking here in the Alps. There’s something so incredibly refreshing about stepping away from a digital career to let the wind blow through the gap between my ears and coming home with ruddy cheeks and a calmed soul.

I love that we get real seasons here, instead of just a varying amount of warmth and cold. Proper winter is on the way, but there is still a little warmth to be had from the sun. There are still a couple of brave lizards to be seen, weighing up their brumation.

The forests on the slopes and cliffs of the Niederhorn are covered in a dusting of fresh snow which looks like the little fake trees which Mum used to put on the Christmas cake every year when I was a kid.

I can’t always remember the exact order of the landmarks, but many are now very familiar. I know where the TGV bridges appear, the flyover bridges which have their own speed limits posted over just a few hundred metres, and which service stations are worth stopping at. Jo and I have worked out the best ones, which the French call “aires”, over the years. The best place for lunch, being about two hours from home, is Aire de service du Haut-Koenigsbourg in the Alsace region, which we re-christened “stork services” because of the birds which nest there on specially-erected poles in the car park.

Four hours from home, there’s a forested rest area on a hill, to which I’ve often pushed through with a packed lunch when travelling alone, but the name of “the four winds” (Aire de Quatre-Vents) belies the fact that it is just a view-less toilet block and car park in the woods next to the motorway.

In recent years the most definite “must-stop” point on our way to England is the Aire de Reims Champagne Nord. That’s the afternoon coffee and loo break and one of the most attractive stops of the entire journey, with views across miles of vineyards. At this time of year, that’s usually where the light begins to fade — from Reims to the Channel in winter is dark because there are so few towns close to the motorway.

There are only two petrol stations along that stretch of the A4 and it’s always a challenge to see whether I can reach the tunnel without refuelling. Perhaps one day, with minimal luggage, I might manage it. I used to get much further in my old Volkswagen Golf – the Audis I’ve driven for the last ten years are thirstier. It’s a sign of the times that the last couple of rest stops before the Channel have been closed to the public for several years because of people trying to smuggle themselves onto lorries bound for Britain.

The giant slag heaps at Lens, which I’m passing as I dictate this second part of the blog post, are a sign that I’m not all that far from the end of the long cruise through the surprisingly hilly countryside. It’s perhaps an hour to the Channel Tunnel terminal at Coquelles from here. It’s easy to estimate timings accurately thanks to the low volume of traffic and constant speeds, and the m.p.g. on this section seems to climb because of the many ascents and descents across the hilly landscape. Christmas on this section is much busier, with British cars heading home after trips to the European Christmas markets, but this autumn evening there are only lorries and the occasional British SUV heading home.

The landscape throughout the day isn’t all that exciting once I get away from Alsace and the Vosges mountains a quarter of the way into my journey, but the familiarity is reassuring. I can always tell how far along I am. Once in a while I get to see a TGV passing alongside the motorway at high speed, although that’s happened fewer than half a dozen times in all these years.

The trip to England usually feels much quicker than the return journey, and I rarely need to stop for a proper break. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it better to take a break every couple of hours for a walking lap of the service station’s lorry park, helping to avoid joint pain and potential circulatory issues and making the overall journey much easier. The weather on this trip hasn’t been great, but the damp autumn leaves which have recently fallen have made the rest areas quite photogenic.

Despite driving this route for so many years, I’ve hardly taken any photos of it, apart from the occasional drone shot above a service station. There are empty-looking villages and silent fields with barely a tractor. Huge skies and endless clouds reaching into the distance are a welcome change from the narrow corridors of sky we get at home.

With a nicely mathematical direct journey of 888 km from home to Coquelles, we always get to see differing weather conditions. Smooth motorway in patchy sunshine is a blessing; heavy rain, fog or darkness can make the journey much more taxing. I had to pull onto the hard shoulder once during a torrential downpour, when it was unsafe to continue, and one memorable foggy storm added a great deal of time to the journey because of how slow we had to travel between Strasbourg and Colmar.

We used to stay over in France en route — at Reims, Arras, Lille, Saint-Omer and Châlons-en-Champagne to name a few — but with more experience and a more comfortable and modern car these days, it’s become possible to make the whole journey in one go. Although it sounds like a nice little get-away, the chances of ending up mid-journey in a gloomy Ibis budget hotel with a creaky bed, noisy neighbours and a faint smell of damp is comparatively high. We once stayed in quite a nice hotel in Reims with a view of the cathedral, having “steak frites” for dinner and crêpes for breakfast, but the cost outweighed us considering doing that again. A particularly memorable stopover in Reims when Jo moved to Switzerland was one of the greatest highlights of these trips, though the hotel wasn’t .

This time, it isn’t a photographic trip or a holiday in France, so I won’t see the sights again. Maybe one day it would be nice to take two or three days for the journey, stay in decent hotels or gîtes, visit the places we always speed past, and finally explore the landscape we’ve criss-crossed so many times over the years.