Updated: 3rd September 2009
About us
We are Dave & Edith Brown. Dave is 65 and Edith 62 and we live in Heysham near Morecambe on the NW coast of Lancashire. We have been married 40 years and have 2 children and 3 granddaughters.
From the promenade at Morecambe we have the most fantastic views across Morecambe Bay. We are able to see most of the Southern, Central, Eastern & Far Eastern Fells of Lakeland and also Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales.
We are within easy driving distance of the Southern & Central Fells , the Western Dales, the Forest of Bowland and also the Arnside & Silverdale AONB.
We have been into walking for many years mainly in the Lake District and have summitted many of the fells well into double figures. Because of our location the Far Eastern Fells and Southern Fells have become firm favourites many of them receiving 50 or more visits.
In September 1990 we set ourselves the project for want of a better word the task of walking all the 214 Fells listed in A Wainwrights seven Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells. We therefore forgot about what had previously been done and started with Wansfell. We finished on Haystacks to pay our respects to AW a week short of 3 years later. For the statisticians amongst you it took us 74 individual walks which embraced 763 miles of walking and approximately 200,000 feet of ascent.
About this website.
In September 2006 with Edith & I having both finished work decided to visit all the 214 summits again. This time armed with a camera and internet access I decided to record the walks and pictures on the Internet. This was initially done on an AOL weblog and I was amazed at the interest shown in our walks. In just a few months we had nearly 3000 hits from AOL subscribers alone but I was never happy with the format and was encouraged to start a bona fide website. It is not the best designed website by a long way and never will be but it does give me the opportunity to share our walks and pictures with a wider audience.
Recent Events.
Dave as had Rheumatoid Arthritis for over 30 years but until mid 2008 it had been kept under control with anti-inflammatory tablets. However it flared up badly around this time and was given various drugs to try and bring it back under control. This period lasted about 12 months and all the drugs tried had bad side effects which meant Dave had to stop taking them. One in particular, Methotrexate unfortunately caused permanent damage to his Lungs. There were periods of relief due to being given cortisteroid injections but these periods got shorter and shorter as the injections had less effect. Eventually he was "allowed" to go onto Enbrel which is an Anti-TNF drug self injected once per week. This drug because of its cost (£12,000 per annum) is not used as a first line treatment in the UK. To be eligible one must have tried at least two other treatments without success and pass a "pain test" (ie. have severe pain in a number of joints). On the 28th May 2009 only 15 minutes after my first injection my life was turned around. The constant pain was nearly gone and I was able to walk again without severe pain. This as continued but because of the Lungs I find any walking uphill, even on the gentlest slopes very tiring so any thoughts of completion the 214 are gone. The total remains at 135 and will do so.
The Walks
Walk distances and ascent are from Memory Map which I use for planning walks. I do not use a GPS so they are not 100% accurate but won't be far off. The Camera I am using is a Fuji Finepix S8000fd which I normally use in Auto mode. During a walk I can take up to 150 pictures which when downloaded to the PC will be filtered down and resized to about 30-40 pictures for publishing.
Well that's about all I can think of saying. If you need to know anything else feel free to e-mail me at djbrown1944@aol.com and I will do my best to answer,