'Heart attack hasn't stopped my 20 year mission to complete 1,001 walks in Britain' says former Yorkshire teacher

“It was a year when I had a bit of a breakdown,” he recalls. “Both my parents died within a month. My sister found this AA book of 1,001 walks which she thought might keep me occupied. I was on leave from work at the time.

"It started casually with me doing the ones around Berkshire, where she lives, as I often stayed with her at that time. I suppose I’m a bit of an obsessive and gradually it turned into I wonder how many of these I can do."

It soon grew into a mission to complete them all, with Adrian averaging about 50 walks a year until Covid hit and travelling became harder.

All the routes have been between three and ten miles long, he says, covering urban centres like York and London as well as rural and coastal destinations.

In Yorkshire, highlights have included Bolton Abbey, Malham and Austwick. His notes from a route in Fylingdales simply state “horrible, wet and lost”.

“It’s taken me to all parts of the country, places where I’d never really have gone…It’s become quite a dominant feature of life,” Adrian says.

"Of the 1,001, you can count on one hand the walks that I don’t think were really worth having done, which is pretty remarkable.

"I did most of the Yorkshire walks between 2006 and 2009, quite early on, and I loved the walk around York, one of the shortest but most fascinating.”

There was a time, in December, when former secondary school history and politics teacher Adrian worried he would not ever be able to complete the final few walks after he was unexpectedly admitted to hospital and told he would need a heart bypass.

“I didn’t know at the time whether I was going to be able to walk the six or seven miles of the remaining ones I had left,” he says.

Towards the end of last year, Adrian, who these days lives at Morecambe Bay, attended his local GP surgery for blood tests as part of routine monitoring for COPD.

“In the middle of it, the nurse suddenly said I just need to speak to a colleague,” he remembers. “And the next thing I knew I’m in an ambulance on the way to Lancaster Hospital. They confirmed there was a concern…

"Eventually they told me I’d had a heart attack which I simply didn’t recognise at the time, a minor one, and they discovered that two of my arteries were dangerously blocked and I was a suitable case for a bypass.”

He believes the medical incident must have occurred last October, when he says he felt queasy and faint after his wife set off on a two-week trip to Japan.

“I felt faint for a while and was in the garden and steadied myself and went inside to bed. That’s the only occasion I can think of when it could have been,” he says. “But I carried on as normal, including doing three of my walks whilst my wife was away.”

After undergoing surgery in December, Adrian was back walking in April. “I was quite nervous because I’d no idea whether I would have the stamina but all went well and I did three walks in three days in Suffolk.”

More followed in Dorset and Hampshire over the early May bank holiday weekend and now just one walk remains.

Quite what Adrian will then do with his free time is yet to be decided, but since retiring from teaching, he’s been a case worker for Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale.

"It feels a bit nostalgic that it’s the end of a 20 year mission,” he says. “Everyone asks what I’m going to do instead.

"My wife says we ought to follow the river courses from source to end so that might be a possibility. But I shall probably just slump into an armchair and watch sport.”