Guided by Tom Deakin

The hills came to me early, from a father who climbed hard in his youth and went as far as Everest, turning back below the Khumbu Icefall in the days before anyone carried supplementary oxygen. He passed on the habit of planning holidays around something to climb, and the beach never really stood a chance. Day trips became weekends, weekends became wild camps with a shelter on my back, and a few years living in Norway added ski touring and snowshoeing in Jotunheimen and Hardangervidda, places I still think about whenever the forecast turns cold.

I'm a project manager by trade, which is less of a contradiction than it sounds, because a route is a plan with weather in it. The instinct that keeps a programme on track is the same one that watches the cloud coming over the tops at eleven o'clock and decides, without any fuss, that lunch will be taken lower down today. I spent several years as a volunteer with a Mountain Rescue team, and it taught me more about how a day on the fells goes wrong than any course could. It's also the reason I'm quietly fussy about kit, timings and the time we turn around. Turning back is a skill.

In 2017 I walked across Scotland from coast to coast on the TGO Challenge, about three hundred kilometres of glen, bothy and blister, and the diary from that crossing still sits in the journal on this site (a little sunburnt, but honest). I'll admit I used to plan every route around the summits, keeping high for as many miles as the map allowed. It took me longer than it should have to notice that the best part of the day was often the quiet valley or the gurgling stream I'd been hurrying past.

These days most of my walking has a pilgrim edge to it. I've spent six years leading pilgrimage groups across several counties and in more than one country, from day walks in Teesdale to the Camino in Spain, and I've come to think of pilgrimage as the original walking holiday. The holy wells, the old chapels and the saints' names on the map do a lot of the talking if you slow down enough to hear them – the Mun in Mungrisdale is St Mungo, which still makes me smile every time I walk past it.

I live at Askham now, on the edge of the eastern fells with the Pennines across the Eden. If you'd like a day out with someone who'll get you up the hill safely and still stop to wonder why the beck is called what it's called, I'd be glad to hear from you.

Qualifications

• Mountain Leader (Summer)
• Six years leading pilgrimage groups, across several counties and countries
• A long history of long-distance walking, including the 2017 TGO Challenge
• Several years' Mountain Rescue team experience
• Fully insured to guide groups of all ages