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Reviews - Islandeering - Adventures Around The edge Of Britain's Hidden Islands - Heason Events

Islandeering - Adventures Around The edge Of Britain's Hidden Islands

29th Nov 2019

 

I do love the fact that new sports, hobbies and pastimes are regularly thrown into my world. I saw this book and was immediately enchanted by both the cover image and the word - ISLANDEERING.

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A fan of sea kayaking and a regular visitor to the west coast of Scotland I was very taken with the idea of a book full of future trip ideas. However I soon learned that Islandeering is actually the act of following the coastline of an island until you arrive back where you started. On the face of it this sounds like a cool thing to do, but it does somewhat miss the mark from a kayaking perspective. Clearly one should never judge a book by its cover!

So what of Islandeering? My immediate thought was that an island like Lundy would take a full day to walk around and it's not really that big. Have we got enough islands around our mainland to fill a guidebook? It turns out we have! This book covers 50 walks that can be completed in a day or less. The map on page 6 reveals them to be spread relatively evenly from south to north, but with just a handful on the east coast. Wales and Scotland take the lion's share, but the south west and channel islands also feature strongly. Northern Ireland and Ireland don't feature.

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Each island walk features its own chapter with a map, plenty of detailed information about the walk, a nice write-up and some images to give you a flavour of the outing. There is also a website: www.islandeering.com which has downloadable GPX files for each walk.

There is a grading scale (1-5) detailed on page 20 which is useful, but would have been more so had there been a grid of all walks indicating their grade and length by area. Fortunately there are a series of categorised tick lists on pages 25-31 listing such things as 'epic tidal crossings', 'trail running', 'glorious beaches' and 'families'. Though these lists are a useful tool for perusing the guide I suspect the reality for most will be that the guide accompanies them on a trip and those walks that are accessible whilst on the trip form the focus of what is actually done.

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It retails at £16.99 and I will re-iterate what I always write when justifying the cost of any well researched and well written guidebook: if you have just one good day based on a walk in the book then this will represent outstanding value for money…

Published by Wild Things Publishing