We had a bit of a problem. With the completion of the Luton county top at New Year we had run out of places to walk on daytrips (or at least places we could walk which would contribute to "challenges"!). Whilst we would continue to occasionally bag county tops (along with completing the south west coast path) on longer trips away, the days of easy high-speed bagging close to home were past. We needed a new challenge to fill in the time between these sporadic weekend bagging trips.

What was it to be? Bagging all the marilyns within daytrip distance was briefly mooted, but to be quite honest we'd got a bit bored the low walking-to-driving ratio of hill bagging in southern England. A long-distance path seemed to be the order of the day. We briefly mulled over the idea of doing the Capital Ring, but the only path we'd fully completed to date - the LOOP - had also been an urban one, and we felt the need for something more rural. The Ridgeway seemed an appropriate choice - it started in our ancestral lands of Wiltshire, passed briefly through Jim's current county of Berkshire, and ended in my current county of Buckinghamshire.

The Ridgeway is a path with a lot of history behind it. It follows (roughly!) the route of a trading route running diagonally across the country - there's evidence to show it having been used since stone age times. The route originally ran for about 250 miles from the Dorset coast to the Wash, but the modern day Ridgeway National Trail only follows 87 miles of the total distance (the remainder can be walked by linking the Ridgeway to the Wessex Ridgeway trail to the west, and the Icknield Way and Peddars Way in the west).

Jim and I had walked bits of the path before - we'd seen some of the Wiltshire part during childhood walks, and had also seen some goodly chunks of it whilst walking to the Swindon, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire county tops. Much of what we'd seen had been on one of my favourite types of walking terrain - open chalk downland - and I couldn't wait to get back there and walk some more!