Leg 1 - Golden Acre Park to Lofthouse Gates - 13th January

The weather for our first venture on the Leeds Country Way (LCW from hereon for ease of typing!) was bright, sunny and crisp. We had decided to walk the route as it's written in the leaflets, going clockwise from Golden Acre Park. This is in part because that's the way that the leaflets are written, so we figured that the instructions would be easy to follow. In part it's also because Golden Acre is the closest park to me, and it's where I've taken Jake on lots of walks so far. In fact, it was there that I first saw the LCW owl and went home to research what the route was.

As mentioned before, this series of walks is all about getting into the great outdoors with my son Jake, along with getting in some good walking with my friend Matt. Matt is a keen photographer and always has a top of the range model with him. I've got his permission to share some of the pictures on here to show interesting parts of the route, but firstly, I want to give you a sense of what we look like walking along:

The route starts off in the car park of Golden Acre Park, goes around the pond and follows the Meanwood Valley Trail (a wonderful 7 mile walk from Golden Acre through Scotland Wood and Meanwood Park right down onto Woodhouse Moor) out of the park. The thing that always strikes me about living in North Leeds is just how easy it is to forget that you live in one of the biggest cities in the UK. Within a couple of minutes of leaving the park, all you can see is fields and trees for miles:

After leaving the park, the route takes you along a road for a short while before entering some of the best woodland that I've seen. It may be due to the fact that I find woods in the winter when you can see interesting shapes fascinating, but as you walk along the edge between the wood and the fields, you get a sense of the quietness of the place:

The woods sadly soon drop away and after joining a main road for a short while, you clamber over a stile and into the first of many fields. Fortunately, we did this walk before all the snow arrived so the going was fairly easy. The first field we came to respected the rights of the walker to such an extent that the farmer had avoided ploughing the public access path making for an easy walk. The path then goes through a series of hedgerows, where we weren't as lucky with the going underfoot:

Fortunately, we were both well equipped with a decent pair of hiking boots (yet another purchase to help me be outside with Jake as much as possible!) and after helping Jake fight off some low hanging branches, we reached one of the more confusing parts of the walk. This part revolves around following boundary lines between fields, but with little signage and plenty of walking tracks to be seen, we spent a while following the wrong route that eventually petered off into a field. It was around this time that Jake decided he was starving, so we decided to take stock, drink some coffee and feed him. This allowed us to re-read the instructions, pin point our wrong turn and head back into the fields:

It was this time that we discovered one of the vagaries of the instruction leaflets for the LCW. Whilst it's great at telling you when and where to turn and what you should be looking out for, it fails to omit fairly major landmarks or points of interest (for more on this, see the next post about the Bingley Arms). The leaflet tells you to walk past Stubb Farm on your left, but forgets to mention that you'll walk past this on your right:

You can't help but feel that more people would do the LCW if it mentioned interesting facts like the fact that you'll be able see right into the Emmerdale set! We spent a while trying to work out if the buildings were real (we decided in the end that they were), before heading in the grounds of Harewood House and making our way to our lift (thank you, kind wife!) at the Lofthouse Gates. 

Total distance - 5 miles

Total time - 3 hours (includes 30 minutes for coffee/baby time!)

Cumulative distance - 5 miles

Cumulative walking time - 2.5 hours

In the beginning...

A warning to new readers - I am a 30 year old male living in Leeds, England and became a father for the first time in May 2012 (for more of those adventures, go to justjaking.blogspot.com). My blogs are written part as a diary of things that have happened, part as reflections on things that I'm thinking about. With this in mind, there is a certain amount of rambling and thought hopping that you may find charming or irksome. In either case, the warning is that I write these posts for me and if by happy coincidence you enjoy them too, that's an added bonus.


My baby is in love with being outside, and those who know him will testify to the fact that he can be in the middle of a full blown melt down and will stop crying immediately as you take him over the front door threshold. He's an all weather kid and is equally happy in the sweltering sun as he is in a blizzard (believe me, we've been outside in both!). To this end, I'm always on the lookout for ways to spend more time outside with him.


I've always been a keen hiker and enjoy going walking, especially when there's a good view from up high to be had. My friend Matt is also a big walker and regularly spends holidays with his family in the Lake District. We also see a lot of him and his girlfriend Vicky so it was natural to talk to him about a walking project to do with Jake, my son.


I had seen signposts for the Leeds Country Way in parts of Golden Acre Park (I will say here that I will be making references to places in Leeds, if you want more information about where they are, Google them) and had been intrigued to find out more. On the Leeds City Council website, I discovered exactly the project I was looking for. The Leeds Country Way is a 62 mile loop all around Leeds and the kind folks at the city council have broken it up into 12 5 mile sections, each complete with a little map and walking instructions.


This idea appealed to me for many reasons. Firstly, Jake naps around every 3 hours or so, so a long hike up Scarfell is out of the question (for now) but a five mile walk allows for a couple of hours of walking and a coffee break (essential for Matt and I). Secondly, as my wife comes from America, we're planning on emigrating there in a couple of years, so I want to see as much of England, in particular Leeds as possible. Thirdly, and quite closely tied into secondly, is that my son is half English but will grow up in America. I want him to have a connection to the country of his birth and by taking pictures as we go round (Matt is an ace photographer!) and blogging about each leg of the journey, I'll hopefully be able to provide him with a feeling for what the mother land is like. Finally, the idea of exploring new parts of Leeds and seeing how it all connects up excites me. My years of wandering the world are on hold for a while until Jake grows up so any time that I can indulge my wanderlust is always going to be good.


The format for this blog will be fairly simple. 12 stages, 12 posts, 12 series of pictures, 12 lots of thought and comments about the walk. We've set ourselves a very relaxed target of finishing the loop before the end of 2013 but with the first two legs already completed, we should be done way before then.


P.S. If this sounds like your idea of fun, give me a shout and we'll let you know when we're next hitting the trail.