Horizon Walk 2: To Moel Famau

A distant hill behind some floodlights - it's Moel Famau over 50 miles away

When I was designing the walk around my flat’s hilly horizon, back in 2016, I was thinking I should one day attend to a bit of the horizon that the walk wasn’t accounting for, primarily because it was 48 miles away in Wales.

Moel Famau is a hill in the Clywidian range in Wales’ North East, and it’s the farthest away thing I can see from my flat (I used to be able to see some of the mountains of Eryri, but they were eventually obscured by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Business School). As the tenth anniversary of my walk around the Greater Manchester horizon has been approaching, I’ve felt that I should probably use the occasion to extend my horizon-based endeavours South West, and finally walk to Wales.

A map with two red lines on it. One represents a walk around the high ground surrounding Greater Manchester, the other a route to Moel Famau from Alderman's Hill

There’s a further spur to getting this walk done now. The view from the kitchen window, which had absorbed me to the point where I decided to trace and walk the line formed by the high ground I could see from it, is having a chunk torn out of it by a building that’s been rising between my flat and the horizon.

Of all the things that the recent waves of development have done to the city and its people, this loss of a part of a view of the hills from the perspective of a particular block of flats is incredibly trivial. But on a personal, biographical level – it stings.

Alderman’s Hill, the ’tilted and muzzled peak’ I’d fixated on since moving in here in 2003, is going to be completely obscured and it’s going to happen any day now.

Aaaaaaaaagh.

So I’m going to start my walk to Moel Famau from there. I’m going to ‘link’ the two hills by the walk and by doing so pay tribute to the about-to-pass time when it was possible to trace a sightline from one to the other, through this seventh floor flat.

I’ll be doing my best to document this one and to post a daily blog like I did in 2016. To be honest though, the planning for this one is a little less robust and feels a little fumbled-together at the last minute. In that way and in a few others, I’m expecting this to be a very different walk than the one I did ten years ago.

Wish me luck!!!