Trek26 Cotswolds

Saturday 6 July

I think it was Hai who found out about the Alzheimer’s Society’s ‘Trek26’ walks – since we did the walk for the British Heart Foundation in 2017 she has been keen to do another similar event, but we have both been slightly put off by most charity walking challenges now setting a minimum fundraising target. As indeed this one did, though if you didn’t raise the fundraising target it didn’t mean that you couldn’t participate (though it did mean that you weren’t entitled to a trek T-shirt, which I thought was slightly mean – on the BHF walk they had been given out to everyone who took part).

I did manage to raise £130 thanks to a handful of generous people, plus a donation I made myself. But I’m not really comfortable with fundraising and didn’t push it particularly hard beyond posting the JustGiving link on my Facebook page. As it happens, my worries about feeling a bit conspicuous if we were among the few not wearing trek T-shirts were groundless because the weather on the day was so awful everyone was wearing waterproofs.

I can't now remember why we chose Trek26 Cotswolds over the other Trek26 events - I think it was a combination of Hai wanting a country route and me not wanting to travel too far to do it. Trek26 offers two walk lengths, a 26-mile route (hence the name) and a 13-mile route. We signed up for the 26 mile route back in October, in that glow of optimism that happens when something seems a good way off. In late May, we both downgraded ourselves to the 13-mile route, less for fitness reasons than because after having actually thought about the logistics of getting to the rural start point a few miles outside Cheltenham by 06:30 in the morning AND having to pick Hai up first, the whole thing started to seem impossible; I also wouldn’t have wanted to do the two-hour drive home after that length of walk so would have had to stump up for an extra night in a hotel. Selecting the 13-miler enabled us to select a more relaxed 08:30am start. As it happens, the 13-miler was amply strenuous enough thanks to the hilly terrain and the poor ground conditions.

I stayed the previous night at the Premier Inn Cheltenham North West, which I’d selected as it was half the price of the town centre Premier Inn and had a free car park.¹ It’s a somewhat dejected building of I’d guess 80s-era vintage, attached to a Beefeater and located by the side of a dual carriageway opposite a retail park. As you’d expect in an older building, it does not have air con, which I’d infer they’ve had some complaints about judging by the note in the room below. Thankfully on the night I stayed it hadn’t been an excessively hot day and I didn’t feel the need to bathe in a jug of ice. The room was fine and it did at least have a window that opened (a bit). Here I am showing the fan provided, and also showing off the haircut I’d had done earlier that day (courtesy of Oksana of TJ's Hair Designs) that was then battered by the weather on the Saturday.

The ”event hub” – where the walk started and finished – was at Postlip Farm, about seven miles NE of Cheltenham. On the morning, I got up early and snaffled a couple of cheeky pastries from a conveniently-placed Greggs at the Gallagher Retail Park across the road (how wondrous is Greggs, opening at 6:30am on a Saturday) and made coffee in my trusty mini-cafetière, as waiting for the Beefeater to open for breakfast would have been too late (also, judging by recent TripAdvisor reviews of this hotel, it’s not clear whether it would in fact have opened at all). I picked Hai up from her Travelodge and we arrived at the event hub just after 8am. Hai hadn’t received her walker number so we had to make for the information desk, which didn’t leave us much time to spare before gathering at the start so it was just as well we’d both had our breakfast as we had to pass up the hot baps on offer.

Wet people waiting to start the walk

Me attempting some high spirits as we started off

Brief summary of the walk: good points: pleasant and supportive atmosphere – people patiently waiting their turn at stiles, pulling you up if you fell over etc. I did, in fact, fall over twice, and witnessed plenty of other people also sliding on their arses. Which leads on to the bad points: due to a lot of rain over the previous few days, including the previous night, the route was a mudbath, made worse by hundreds of people having tramped over the route before our start wave got to it. There were also quite a lot of stiles on the route, not all in very good condition, though again, they would have been getting much heavier use than usual, and consequently were muddy and slippery in addition to being wobbly in some cases.  

Walking through one of several very muddy fields

At the lunch stop at Gotherington, about 8 miles in

A pleasant viewpoint

Us approaching the finish

The route: on a nicer day I’m sure the countryside would have been quite scenic, but it was difficult to appreciate it given the necessity of spending much of the time looking where we were putting our feet in order to avoid falling over. We passed under two tunnels carrying the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway and did see a couple of steam trains chugging through the landscape. The weather improved in the second half of the walk and we did get some good views, including one across to a distant church that might well have been Gloucester Cathedral as per the note below. If we’d done the 26 mile route we’d apparently have passed through the grounds of Sudeley Castle. 

According to the website, there were 1184 walkers on the day and the event raised over £400,000.

¹ Not for much longer, according to this note that's currently on their website. You expect parking charges at city centre hotels; as the free parking was part of the reason for my booking this somewhat bleak edge-of-town establishment, I'm not sure how thrilled I'd have been at this.