I'm afraid that my main site has suffered with malicious hacking and has thus become unusuable. I will recreate the site but this will take me some time (I have to earn a living, as well!). In the meantime, please continue to enjoy what you find here. (Updated 12 May 2009) I have been a recreational walker for many years, and have spent many happy hours wandering through my own county of Hampshire and the nearby counties of Dorset, the Isle of Wight and West Sussex. Usually I just have the sounds of nature to keep me company and I find this wonderful therapy after a hectic week either stuck in traffic jams or else in the office. Occasionally, I am joined by a friend or two but I am more than happy to go off on my own. My home county, Hampshire, may not be the most dramatic in terms of scenery but it does have many interesting areas such as the hills to the east and west of Winchester, the New Forest and some easy coastal stretches. It is the home of many splendid "named" walks, such as the Test Way, the Clarendon Way, Wayfarers Walk, the Solent Way, the Itchen Way and is the start/end of the South Downs Way. My walking is not just restricted to central southern England. At least once a year, I have a week in the Lake District and have also had weeks in North and South Wales, the North Yorkshire Moors, the Yorkshire Dales and Derbyshire. I've spent several long weekends in the Cotwolds. Abroad, Switzerland is my favourite, followed very closely by Austria and Majorca.
I have taken innumerable photographs on my travels and I hope to include those here to illustrate my favourite walks. However, I'm a great one for not cataloguing my collection and I fear that I may not do justice to the walks I have included.
Please send any comments to alan[at]bikesandboots.co.uk (remove the square brackets). Thanks! WebringsCreditsThe site was put togther using a variety of packages but usually with a text editor, Textpad (no restrictions of file sizes, unlike Notepad) and/or the dedicated HTML editors such as Ace Expert (upgraded several times from a version given away free with a magazine some time ago). A fre version is available from the visicommedia web site. For image editing and enhancement, I use Adobe's Photoshop CS, although I still have a lot of learning to do to get the best from it. I could probably achieve similar results with Photoshop Elements (now on version 3), but I had a copy of the main Photoshop 5 program as part of a bundle with one of my cameras and I've upgraded it each time. For photography, I did start off with a Canon Fn1000 SLR camera with which I was very happy. Negatives have been subsequently scanned using the Minolta Dimage Scan Dual scanner (excellent). I then moved into digital photography in its infancy (I was an "early adopter"!) with a Casio camera (about 640K pixels from memory!). This had me hooked on the benefits of digital camera, and I became a marketing man's dream, upgrading at every step change. The first digital camera that gave acceptable results froma print was the then state-of-the-art Konica QM100, followed by the the brilliant Nikon Coolpix 950 camera (which until fairly recently was still my preferred camera on a walk because of its compact size). I then used a Minolta Dimage 7 (winner of many awards in 2001) but now have the outstanding Canon EOS 10D . My photography site has more details of this camera and other examples of its capabilities. I have recently bought the super little Fujifilm F700 and use this for my walks photos.
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