A good day's work

Rade de Brest

I spent today checking out and writing up a walk for the new volume of Walking in Finistere (out in spring 2016). When I saw the weather forecast, this public holiday was immediately earmarked for a working day in pleasant surroundings. No amount of poring over maps and researching interesting points along the way can guarantee that a walk will turn out to be suitable for the book, and many days of trial and error are to be expected. Good but not good enough on the ground is a common problem. Today I was lucky. Despite one or two tricky points and some short alternatives needing to be mapped for the highest tides, this one is definitely going in the book.
I deliberately chose a peninsula which has no coastal path, and therefore is inevitably far less walked than the many others on offer in Finistere. It also had a merit of a culminating point in the Rade de Brest which is inaccessible by road - indeed the complete absence of cars and mechnical noise was a major advantage of the whole circuit. Apart from a few family walkers in the hamlets, I saw no-one else on the route. It was three and a half hours of blissful peace and spectacular views. I still feel excited about it now, sitting at my desk in the calm of the evening.