The man inspiring thousands to take a Northamptonshire walk
Dave Askew's Northamptonshire Walks blog has become a major hit
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By Sarah Ward
“I always say to people that if you come out for a walk with me, the challenge is to work out which bits I say are true and what’s a load of rubbish.”
Not what you’d usually hear while on a guided history walk through a picturesque Northamptonshire village, but Dave Askew is not your typical walking tour guide. He’s the man behind the phenomenon, Northamptonshire Walks, a blog, which has now exploded into a 30,000 strong walking community, trekking in groups or alone through the county’s towns and villages, documenting where they go and adding to Dave’s series of pictorial walking routes that now number almost 200.
Last week along with six other women (all but one of us first time Northamptonshire Walkers) I joined Dave for a group ramble of Walk 58 (also titled Off with her head!), a six mile circular walk from Fotheringhay, Mary, Queen of Scots’ place of execution through the nearby villages of Elton and Warmington and back to the former castle site where Elizabeth I’s cousin met her death.
Across ancestral piles, fields of sheep, water meadows and past abandoned mills we trekked, led by Dave, imparting his knowledge of and passion for the county’s history and geography, over the two-hour course.
Along the way we saw fairy rings, a heron, a tree mounted fungi we discovered was an artist’s bracket (aided by an app on Dave’s phone) and after climbing the mount of the former Fotheringhay Castle and listening to a particularly brutal story of how the former Scottish Queen was killed in 1587, we ended up at the 15th century Church of St Mary and All Saints, the burial place of the 2nd and 3rd Dukes of York.
It is here that regular walker Becky Pope told me just what a great bloke Dave is and how it's his energy and altruism that has made Northamptonshire Walks what it has become.
“You meet Dave and you realise that the world is good,” she says. “He is basically an amazing guy who is driven to share his passion, but who has also lived life. And he does it all voluntarily. There are those who do, and those who don’t and he’s a doer.”
Beginnings
The walking group has its origins in the blog Dave started in 2012 after he had taken up walking to recover from a breakdown caused by stress at work. One of his daughters suggested that as he liked walking he should use it as a pastime to help him recover. He enjoyed it so much he started to write about his walks - using photographs and descriptions to share his discoveries with others.
He was blogging happily for several years, growing his readers steadily, gaining about 100 views a day and chatting with his 500 like minded social media followers. But then in March 2020 the pandemic hit and things took a surreal turn as a locked down county whose residents were only permitted to leave their homes for one hour of daily exercise, began to get out and walk.
Dave’s Northamptonshire Walks blog provided the perfect manual for novice walkers keen to find fresh routes after exhausting the tracks close to home.
And his facebook page became a place for unsettled and often anxious people to chat about where they’d been and what they’d seen during a time when there was little else to do or talk about. At one point he was receiving 1,000 requests to join his facebook group each week - there are now just under 30,000 members. A mark of how important his group became during those troubled times was when ‘thanks Dave Askew’ was put up in light’s on Northampton’s famous lift tower.
“When covid hit, it changed from having just a walking focus to a support group’ he tells me. “Radio Northampton featured us really early on and that really helped with people knowing about us.
“We said to people ‘we want you to post your walk from your doorsteps’, and they did - as of today there are 195 walks in Northamptonshire on the website.”
His Facebook members wanted a way to be able to recognise each other when they were out on their walks, so they designed and sold a hoodie quickly followed by a t-shirt. As no-one knew what he looked like there was often a ‘try and spot Dave’ competition held among the walkers.
Last May, the first group walks started. It began with five a month, taking a maximum of 20 people and has now become 25 guided walks a month, led by his team of volunteers who have a passion for walking and the county as much as Dave does.
“I love it,” he says of the Northamptonshire landscape. “It is so varied and so beautiful. People say we are not a hilly county, but I can show you hills. We also have wonderful canal walks and wonderful towns and villages.
“The whole idea of the guided walks is you can get away for a couple of hours and not have a care in the world - you don’t need to worry about getting lost. You don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to, you can just do it as you wish.
“Usually nobody knows each other, but within five minutes of starting it’s chat, chat, chat.”
Having more knowledge of the county’s scenery than most, I ask him what is his favourite walk - a question he says he gets all the time - but unable to offer up one he points to the circular walk which takes in the Harringworth viaduct in the North of the county (Walk 21) as a particular favourite and the 3.5 mile walk around Brockhall (walk 96) in the south of the county as another.
A walker’s story
While rambling and chatting to the other walkers, it soon becomes clear that Dave’s group can change lives. It’s been a cathartic and rejuvenating experience for Becky Pope, a mother of two who was widowed eight years ago in her 40s and began her walking journey during 2020’s lockdown. Dave’s blog provided inspiration for many of her walks.
Since then she has lost five stone and sets off on a solo 150 mile walk along the final section of Spain’s famous Camino de Santiago pilgrimage this week. Having just dropped off her youngest son at university she says that she is now going to put herself first.
“I have jacked my job in and I’m going to walk and walk and do what I want to do,” she tells me.
“I’m going to re-prioritise myself - I’m calling it phase me. It’s my time for me and for me to challenge myself. You can get so stuck in normal life and I think it is very healthy to step outside your comfort zone and just challenge yourself.”
She says she will also use the long walk - which she thinks will take three weeks- to think about her late husband, who died when he was just 44 from cancer. She walks without any distractions, no playlist on the headphones or podcasts.
It was the pandemic that kickstarted Becky into action. Having put on weight (“I never shed my baby weight and then ate my way through my husband’s illness”) and working within the NHS as an occupational therapist, she was keenly aware that if she contracted the virus in those early months she might have been at severe risk.
“It was the sheer panic of covid,” she remembers. “I was the only parent left to my kids and I thought I cant succumb.”
She doesn’t remember how she came across Dave’s blog, but thinks she googled walks in Northamptonshire, after exhausting the loop close to her home in Naseby. Having done a few she then set herself a challenge of doing as many as she could. She’s now a regular on the guided walks, fitting them in when she can and walking with a group of girlfriends each Friday.
“It is just so friendly and inclusive,” she says of the walking community Dave has grown.
“One thing it has taught me is about the beauty that is on our own doorsteps and the ease of being able to walk.”
Along the way I chat with each of the walkers and hear a bit about their lives. One woman had just been down to London to meet with family and pay her respects to the Queen while another told me about her alternative education business and passion for homeschooling. All along the course people were in constant conversation with strangers, broken up with nuggets of local knowledge from Dave and some of his anecdotes, which I can only kindly describe as ‘dad jokes’ in style.
As to what Dave gets out of Northamptonshire Walks, he says he is keen to share his love of the local history and geography with others. Born in Lincolnshire he moved to Northampton in the 1970s.
“I am the fittest I have ever been and the happiest I have ever been,” he tells me. “I have stress like all people, but it is a stress that I now can manage.
“I don’t know where it is going next,” he says of the sensation that is Northamptonshire Walks. “it evolves all the time”.
If you fancy trying one of Dave’s walks either on your own or as part of a group visit Northamptonshire Walks.
Why do the new historians write Richard 111 off.? Still in hock to the Tudors. ?
He was born at Fotheringhay, unless that was fake news.
Sounds brilliant