30th Anniversary
Join in and celebrate Contours Holidays' 30th anniversary! Discover the walks that brought us to today - and a new discount and loyalty tier for the future!
30th Anniversary
https://www.contours.co.uk/30th-anniversary
Here on our pearl anniversary, we’re a hugely friendly and professional team with a big open office; time-tested relationships with all sorts of hoteliers, accommodation providers, luggage carriers and taxi firms; some seriously well-honed tour pack materials; and oodles of experience arranging astoundingly good long-distance holidays in the UK.
But our drive, resilience and love of the Great British countryside has been with us right from the start, responsible for our success every step of the way.
On this milestone anniversary, we invite you on a wander through time to discover just what Contours (and our customers!) have achieved over the years.
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Our managing director, Karen Simons, first founded Contours Holidays in 1996 as a guided tour provider, personally leading groups up into the fells of Cumbria, the foothills of Wales, around the Isle of Wight and more, aided by four-legged friends Pip and Wooster.
We still offer several of those routes as self-guided adventures to this day.
Our evolution from guided to self-guided tours sprung from a nationwide disaster. Things changed for Contours when the Foot and Mouth crisis struck, blocking off the countryside and almost shuttering the early business.
But our customers loved our holidays too much to let that happen and returned in droves when the countryside reopened, booking not only our guided tours but the self-guided adventures we’d diversified into while cooped up inside...
Providing self-guided holidays proved to be spectacular. In person, we could only guide a handful of people at a time. Arranging self-guided breaks, we serve a great many more walkers.
We’ve enjoyed working for large numbers of varied wanderers ever since, including watercolour artists, comic book artists and multiple veteran hikers.
Our customers really are incredible. It’s not uncommon for a Contours holidayer to rack up five or more adventures, with many reaching double-digits and several taking in over thirty trails!
In our early days, running a holiday business was all about word of mouth and ads in newspapers — but the world has changed a lot in 30 years! Contours Holidays first took to the internet in the early noughties, and our website has evolved quite a lot since.
We wonder how many versions some of our walkers might have witnessed…
Do you have a favourite rendition?
Our printed and digital materials, too, have changed over the years. A self-guided tour requires directions beyond a simple “follow me”, of course! But we’ve honed our holiday packs even more than that, with new glossy information booklets, a slimmed-down printed pack that’s easier to carry on the trail, and useful digital additions like our downloadable GPX files.
Do you recognise these Contours prints throughout the years?
Contours Holidays sprung to life in Cumbria, inspired by the fabulous landscapes of the Lake District National Park. But this wouldn't be our home forever: we soon needed a bit more space...
In 2011 we moved to a snug terraced office in the middle of pretty Wirksworth, right on the edge of the Peak District.
Contours grew hugely from this new base, where your holidays were booked on the top floor by our booking team, migrated down to our database team on the first floor for bespoke directions, and finally reached our tour pack team on the ground floor, where the physical materials were pulled together and posted.
It was while based in this office that we completed the Dovedale Dipper and the Moonwalk — and enjoyed the company of Contours office dogs Tia and Ralph!
Soon the sheer number of holidays had our little terraced office straining at the seams. Fortunately the Derbyshire Dales host the famous Arkwright Mills, and in 2015, Contours moved into one of the big old factory buildings just up the road from the World Heritage Site in Cromford.
We've been here ever since. Our office is big and bright, with plenty of space for our office dogs, a vast library of maps and guidebooks, and our whole busy team. Contours have worked hard to help our now-established local area, too, with litter-picking initiatives and trail conservation work locally, around the Peaks and even up on the Pennine Way! We're an active part of our Peak District community.
With space to grow in our new office, we launched a host of new holidays – including a brand-new set of adventures for trail runners.
These new trails follow the routes we know so well and allow runners to pick itineraries that suit their pace just like our walking customers. We had great fun launching these routes, with expert input from trail-runner Damian Hall (whose name walkers may recognise – he wrote the National Trails guidebook for the Pennine Way!)
Some of our more vigorous walking customers may enjoy giving these fast-paced itineraries a try… while our trail-runners might consider the lower daily mileages of our walking-oriented holidays to bake in a bit more time for congratulatory tea and cake along the way.
In our thirtieth year, we're excited for the future. We've added a host of new holidays for 2026, welcoming the Pilgrims' Way to our roster and pioneering two new shapes of self-guided walking holiday: our two-night break and our twin-centre holidays. And with thirty years of experience behind us, you know those new trails have been expertly devised!
Why not get acquainted with the Contours team who'll plan your trip on our About Us page, or catch up on our on-trail exploits through our regular staff blog posts and home-brewed videos across the routes we have on offer?
Longstanding customers should take a look at our new pearl tier loyalty discount: 10% off from your twentieth walk onwards!
£30 per person, to be exact! We'd love for you to join us in celebrating this major milestone for Contours Holidays, so we're offering £30 per person off any walking holiday in 2026 booked before the end of February.
Discover all the details and get in touch to find the right holiday for you!
