How Did the Virtual Challenge work?

People couldn't walk or visit our beautiful Scotland during the pandemic of 2020/21. Fiona and I (Tracey) embarked upon this challenge because we are members of a global organisation called My Peak Challenge. We thought it would be fun to set up a virtual route around Scotland and walk it together, taking in a lot of the sights, using our individual daily distances added together! It was a challenge focusing more on learning about Scotland although it was driven by physical input. We created it initially for the local group we are part of, Peakers Scotland, but then we ran it for the global Peakers too.

We used a % of participants' distances and then posted how far we’d walked together, and what we passed on the way. We provided photos, history, and facts etc en route to make it a bit more interesting, well hopefully that's what we achieved!! You'll see the progress and % at the start of each day's post.

It is a virtual route, and what we plotted might not be as easily done in the flesh! We used Plot a Route to create our maps, but haven’t done the walk ourselves! Some parts aren’t walkable safely in real life (i.e. busy roads) so, please do your own research if you plan to take walks in areas we mention.

We saw most of Scotland’s coast; we walked through cities, towns and villages, visited castles, ruins, houses and more. We climbed a few mountains, visited most of the islands, but there are places we saw still affected by their past too! We didn’t go everywhere but we did a huge amount! We wrote about the relevant history and culture, and gave facts associated with places we passed. We endeavoured to be as accurate as possible. We couldn’t write about everything, but further research online is always fun. The photos used were from our own, and a few friends', collections; for the remaining photos our thanks goes to Creative Commons sources on Geograph and Flickr (the photos are labelled as such).

We did mention buildings that are hotels and restaurants etc. They are well known 'landmarks' but these are not endorsements. All the places written about were operating in a pre-COVID world so the situation may have changed. Again, please do your own research with regards to these places as well as others in the area, should you plan to visit.
We started the virtual walk on Monday 4th January and crossed the finish line on Thursday 8th April 2021, having walked a whopping 8868 kilometres of Scotland! The following 94 days are what we experienced!

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