Croeso. Welcome. Bem-vindo

I’ve been blogging about hiking and running on various platforms since August 2011. For the first few years, my blogs focused mostly about hiking in Wales – and occasionally over the border in England. There was a lot of rain, mist and – my biggest bugbear – mud! Then, in November 2018, we left the UK to live in Portugal and I found myself blogging about hiking in warm and sunny climes, about keeping going in extreme heat and exploring a new country.

Blogging about hiking is much like keeping a modern-day diary or journal in that it provides a lasting memoir of your own life; it also means that on those grim days when it’s impossible to venture outside, Harri and I can log onto my blog and reminisce about the seventeen years of hiking adventures we’ve shared.

Somewhere along the way I decided to dip my toe into the field of travelogue writing, which is not very different to writing a blog, especially when you’re as long-winded as me!

As well as blogging about hiking, I have now published three ebooks (also available as Amazon paperbacks):

• Never too old to backpack: O Fôn i Fynwy: a 364-mile walk through Wales
• The Via Algarviana: walking 300km across the Algarve 
• More Algarve hiking

From 2024, I am expanding the scope of this website to include my venture into fiction writing. For several years I’d been chewing over an idea for a book set in my home town of Newport during the unforgettable summer of 1976 (unforgettable at least for those of us of a certain age). After five complete rewrites, not to mention all the rewriting off various sections, I finally finished the novel in June. Not sure if my working title – Halter Necks and Cocky Elbows – would really resonate with anyone except me, I opted instead for the simpler Run Free and submitted my 98,000 word manuscript to my preferred publisher at the end of June. Now the waiting begins.