Memories From Through Hikes Long Ago

This five-day trek across the Brecon Beacons followed an earlier five-day, 100-mile journey through the Pennines. Travelling as a group of five, strangers at the start, brothers in arms by the finish, we averaged around 20 miles a day on a point-to-point route, checking in each evening to collect a fresh 24-hour ration pack before pitching camp for the night.

The Pennine hike provided a memorable test of teamwork and determination. Just 10 miles into the third day, our medic broke his ankle. With no easy way out, we paired up and took turns, quite literally carrying him the remaining 10 miles to the rendezvous point.

They were demanding but unforgettable adventures, and they remain among my fondest outdoor memories from almost fifty years ago, proof that shared hardship often forges the strongest bonds.

There are moments in life that arrive quietly, almost by accident, and yet they carry with them a warmth that lingers long after. This story begins with one such moment.

Not long ago, I received a message on Facebook Messenger from a man named John. He told me he had been watching some of my YouTube videos and, though he had spent his entire life up north, he felt as though he knew me. There was something immediately familiar in his words, something that stirred a faint echo of the past.

We began, cautiously at first, to exchange fragments of our early lives, small details, half-remembered places, names that felt like they belonged to another lifetime. Then John sent me a photograph. It was of him taken back in 1973.

I had not recognised him from his Facebook profile picture, time, after all, reshapes us all, but that old photograph stopped me in my tracks. In an instant, it brightened my entire day. There he was, not just a stranger from the internet, but a face from my own distant past.

As it turned out, John and I had once been part of a five-man team on a through hike in the early 1970s. Just seven days together, five of them spent covering a hundred miles across vast, open moorland, through ancient woodlands, along narrow paths choked with ferns, and over the dramatic ridges of the mountains. A brief crossing of lives, yet somehow unforgettable.

I have very few photographs of myself from before 1990. Life took its turns: divorce, constant moving, the quiet scattering of possessions, and much of that visual history was lost along the way. The few images I do have from those early years have found their way back to me over time, like pieces of a puzzle returning home.

So you can imagine the feeling, something close to elation, of reconnecting with someone who shared such a vivid, if fleeting, chapter of my life. To be reminded not only of the journey we took, but of the person I was back then.

It truly is a small world. And thanks to social media, and the vast, invisible threads of the World Wide Web, sometimes the past reaches out and finds you when you least expect it, bringing with it a smile, a memory, and a sense that no moment is ever truly lost. See less