Trekking (Half) A Tolkien Trail

Last weekend I finally convinced Terry to do a walk that I’ve wanted to do for a while. The Tolkien Trail is a walking route around Hurst Green in Whalley.

The route is named as such because the landscape supposedly inspired J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, so as Lord of The Rings nerds we wanted to have a wander up there for a while.

I’ve gotten really in to walking around the Clitheroe area and I’mma take a minute to talk about the apps I’ve downloaded which I really love to use for walking. Those are:

• Organic Maps (Pictured above): This is a simple GPS app which shows you all the footpaths in your area, you can map out walks yourself, download GPS files and mark landmarks as you go, I mostly use it to mark the locations of things that I don’t want to revisit on a walk, such as heavy large gates, or paths which are mega muddy, for example.
• Fog of World: This app is really fun to use, all it does is give you a world map, completely fogged over, but you ‘unfog’ the world by walking around in it! Er, yeah, that’s pretty much all it does, but it encourages me to try and find new paths and places to wander and it’s pretty fun to see my progress.

You can download my .gpx file for this walk here: The-Tolkien-Trail.gpx

Route pictures and thoughts

We started the route at The Shireburn Arms, which was a great visit. The pub is really nicely decorated, it wasn’t too busy and the food was great.

The route involves walking through a lot of open field areas, so you see and interact with a bunch of farm animals, and my personal highlight was seeing a bunch of wild rabbits running around.

Something we kept saying along the route however is that it didn’t feel particularly Tolkein-esque. The exception being when we went off track and in to a forest area to sit down with some food we brought.

It’s a lovely walk, but I probably wouldn’t recommend it to someone really trying to feel a Middle-Earthy vibe. There’s some gorgeous views of Pendle and the River Ribble. But yeah, nothing really stood out as an obvious inspiration on the books.

It’s worth mentioning we did cut the walk early though, it’s been a while since I did a walk that long and when we got to the Whalley Road connection on the far side we just walked back to the pub hahaha. The part we missed was mostly a river-hugging walk back, so we might go back for that at some point.

Anyway here’s a few pictures!