How to Shorten a Day on Your Long-Distance Walk
Shorten a day on your long-distance walk to make time for sightseeing, bad weather or the simple urge to relax.
How to Shorten a Day on Your Long-Distance Walk
https://www.contours.co.uk/shorten-a-day
by Cass Jenks
How to shorten a day’s walk might seem an odd question for Contours Holidays to answer. A long-distance walking holiday is all about the walking, isn’t it? Of course you’d complete every last step of the trail; of course no-one’s looking to cut bits out.
But in reality, our tours are self-guided because they’re all about flexibility. It’s one of the great strengths of the format! You can skip whatever you want, for any reason great or small.
Sightseeing. Our trails are full of interesting places — museums, castles, little local cinemas and all sorts, including the likes of the unmissable Minack Theatre on the South West Coast Path — and if you want to carve out an extra two or three hours to get really involved with these, you may be pressed for time when it comes to reaching your overnight destination. Reducing a single day’s mileage offers a more targeted solution than choosing an itinerary with lower daily mileages throughout.
Terrain. Perhaps the steepest climb of the trail isn’t your kind of challenge, or there’s a stretch of road walking you’re just not fussed about. A quick skip forward can cut those out of your schedule.
Weather. If rain, snow, high winds, fog or — as some of us have experienced this year — too much sunshine deter you from a full day spent outside, don’t worry, you aren’t necessarily chained to your original itinerary.
Injury. Although injuries are a rarity on our walks, no-one can fully rule them out. An accident might necessitate an early departure from the trail. Reducing several daily mileages partway through your holiday to a level that suits your new post-injury pace could be a useful option, too.
Rest. Hey, sometimes you just want to put your feet up. We recommend pre-booking a rest day for this purpose, but if you find while out on your trip that you could do with a breather, shortening a day’s walk could be ideal.
Maybe you’re pre-planning a truncation now from the comfort of your home, or perhaps you just want to be prepared to be flexible after your holiday begins. Here are our top methods for slimming a day’s walk down to size.
It might surprise you to know that even our most rural trails tend to have a handful of buses you can use to modify your walk — although infrequent services can require careful planning. Train lines criss-cross the country, too, and can be invaluable resources.
Hadrian’s Wall and the AD122
Some trails are ridiculously well-served by local bus routes. Hadrian’s Wall Path is quite famous for this. Its fabulous AD122 bus service runs all along the wall, making frequent stops at the best sights and local villages.
To stitch buses and trains together, root out the right route names and stops, a standard internet search is pretty useful, but we recommend Traveline to make it even easier. Enter your start and end points and Traveline will explain how to get from one to the other on whatever sequence of buses, trains and walking is required.
Once you have the name of the local bus company from Traveline, you can go to that company’s website and pull up the full schedule for relevant routes, too.
How exactly you use this information to reduce your walk is largely up to you. You might want to catch the bus right at the start of the day, skip the morning and walk through the afternoon; or you could walk a bit, bus a bit, walk a bit more; or you could make a list of bus stops and times, keep them in your pocket as bailing points from the trail, and walk as little or as far as you desire that day.
A Holiday With Bus Options Baked In
Our home-grown Peak District Twin-Centre Walk includes a whole appendix of Short Walk Alternatives utilising local bus services to reduce your daily mileages. You don’t need to commit to these in advance, so they’re perfect for on-the-morning decisions. Just make sure to check the bus schedules and bring them with you!
Taxis are a great, flexible way to modify your day’s walk. You can have them collect you from your accommodation’s front door, or you can look for a place where the trail meets the road and request pickup or drop-off there.
Where possible, we recommend prioritising a pick-up spot with some kind of shelter, be it a local café or a nice bench under an awning. At the very least, there should be a safe place for the taxi to pull over.
Pre-booking is recommended to guarantee your plan works. Taxis are particularly busy during school run hours and in the evenings on Fridays and Saturdays, so try to avoid those periods if you can — but if you can’t, be absolutely sure to pre-book your journey far in advance.
Utilising Contours Holidays’ Pre-Booked Taxi Services
Our single-centre and two-night tours include taxi transfers by default. If you want to amend a day’s mileage, you could consider changing the pickup or drop-off points of these services. Get in touch to see what we advise.
Even on our standard, non-circular tours, you’ll probably find some of our favourite local taxis included in your holiday pack for existing transfers or luggage transport. Other options can be found online, and sometimes the hosts at your accommodation will be able to recommend their preferred services.
Whether a shorter option is available to you on foot depends entirely on the trail. Several of Contours’ exclusive holidays describe shorter alternative routes here and there along the trail, reducing the overall mileage or circumnavigating tricky sections like steep climbs.
To plan your own shortcuts, look for looping sections of the trail on the map and see if any other paths offer a straighter line across. Keep in mind that any alterations to your planned route won’t have been tested out by Contours. Make sure to check for any route closures on the relevant local council’s Rights of Way webpage.
On all our holidays, you have the option of booking several nights in a row at any stop on the trail. This method isn’t quite the same as reducing your overall mileage, but a day with your boots up can be a real treat and offer many of the same benefits.
We highly recommend this approach if you’d like to buy yourself some time to rest mid-holiday, properly explore a particular town, or just enjoy a day off from walking.
Find our recommended towns for extra nights in the Extra Nights? tab on our holiday pages. Extra nights are added during the online booking process as pictured or can be requested when booking over the phone.
We hope this has been a useful guide to modifying your standard itinerary to suit your pace, interests or the changing conditions mid-walk.
Contours Holidays are always on hand to advise the best ways to make these changes, so don’t hesitate to get in touch and see what we have to say!
We hope you enjoy getting out there to explore the Great British countryside at your own pace.
Marketing and Strategy Consultant
Writer, editor and Google-wrangler at Contours Holidays, Cass spends each weekend on the trails, walking the dog or plummeting downhill along Wales’ best mountain biking tracks.
