Some Hill Walking Magazines
Here are a collection of hillwalking magazines that I have been known to peruse and I either have or had subscriptions to all but the last in the list.
This is the magazine that I prefer to all the rest and it went through a major redesign in 2011 too. The Scottish influence thankfully remains with Cameron McNeish and Roger Smith staying on as contributors. The whole feel is much brighter these days and the issues weigh more too, a consideration that I needed to take into account while embarking on a recent trip to Ireland. Still, the content remains engaging and that’s the most important aspect of any magazine.
Though geared more towards the more leisurely walker, it does features hill country rambles along more low level walks and has been beefing up the hill country content in more recent times. The associated website is shared with its stablemate Trail and seems as if it is being developed as a separate portal in its own right. Saying that, I have my reservations about the site’s design but that hasn’t stopped me visiting when it comes to seeing what people thinks of various pieces of outdoor kit.
The name says it all: the main focus is clearly on Ireland. If I ever get around to walking in my home country, this is from where my ideas could come. Sadly, the website is little more than an advert for the magazine though online subscription purchasing facilities recently got added courtesy of PayPal; a missed opportunity to promote the island as a walking destination in my humble opinion.
Lakeland Walker
After a first glimpse in Booth’s supermarket in Keswick, I was hooked on this for about a year or so afterwards. In fact, I even became a subscriber though that lapsed when my interest wained. These days, only a return from a Cumbrian outing that needs some reading material on the way home will see me buying a copy.
There was a time when I was a regular reader of Trail but I grew beyond it when its various feature articles stopped appealing to me. That is not to say that I don’t pick up the occasional copy but it’s one of their extensive gear comparisons that will attract my interest rather than anything they feature on enjoying the outdoors. Even so, I recently found the route descriptions collected at the back of a recent issue were to my liking but it’s still not a regular read of mine. It shares its website with Country Walking so the same comments apply.
A recession might not sound like the best time to be launching an outdoors magazine but that is what the publishers of Trek & Mountain have done. They seem to be going after the most adventurous part of the market too with trips to High Sierra in the U.S.A. and Antarctica being featured in the current issue at the time of writing. These may be beyond my own horizons but I did acquire a winter mountain walking special from the same people at the end of 2010. It seemed useful given all the snow that we had everywhere back then.
