Never resist steps into the unknown

Obsessed with perfect paths and tucked-away tracks, Will Gore looks back on a winding route that lives on as one of his earliest memories, in the first in a new series of reflections

Your first steps can stay with you a lifetime – particularly if you take them in the Peak District (Rex)

Steps. I couldn’t say how many. Certainly quite a few though, especially for a two-year-old toddler version of me, used as I was to the flatlands of Cambridgeshire.

The house itself was called Rivendell, named by my grandmother – we called her Mongo – when she and my grandfather had first moved there for the cleaner air of the countryside in the early 1960s. Within a decade she had been widowed.

She was, in fact, more Mrs Tiggywinkle than hobbit; and like Beatrix Potter’s fictional hedgehog, she was soft, homely – never spiky.