Best Foot Forward

This year the Ramblers Association’s Festival of Winter Walks marks two major anniversaries. Duncan Hall finds out more

For some families the Christmas walk is as much a tradition as the turkey on the table or the gathering around the television for the Queen’s speech.

For those who want to go a little further than just a quick circuit around their local housing estate the Ramblers’ Association is offering a range of free walks throughout the Christmas holidays.

This year’s Festival of Winter Walks coincides with a couple of very special anniversaries for the Ramblers – the 70th anniversary of the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act and the tenth anniversary of the designation of the South Downs National Park in 2010.

One Waterlooville resident who remembers the long campaign to establish the national park is Dr Owen Plunkett, a former chairman and trustee of the Hampshire Ramblers, who now helps the SE Hants Ramblers as a publicity officer. “The Ramblers is a campaigning organisation,” he says. “I got involved in the campaigning side for the South Downs National Park for ten years. Others had been working on it for even longer. When I joined the campaign it was for the Sussex Downs – I suggested they got people from Hampshire involved.” As a result the South Downs National Park stretches from Winchester to Eastbourne in East Sussex.