TGO Magazine

25/09/2025

Explore Scotland’s most unruly park with our November issue 🌄

⛰ This issue, we're talking 'high culture'. Much like art, the mountains are at their most thrilling when they don’t play by the rules. We hope this issue inspires a creative impulse in you, whether it’s cooking up some delicious grub outdoors, penning a quick poem on a summit camp, taking a sketchpad out with you, photographing golden Autumn light as it hits the crimsoning leaves just so, or simply whistling a little tune as you walk. Perhaps even try colouring outside the lines.

🎼 Artists, poets and musicians share their personal mountain muses
🤫 Norman Hadley confesses to a Cairngorms faux pas
🥾 Phoebe Smith climbs a sacred summit shrouded in controversy
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Tales from TGO Challenge – a truly unique backpacking event
⏱ Break bad navigation habits with tips from Alex Roddie
🎒Sunny Huang explains how she stays motivated to bag a Full House – again!
👣 Mapped section hikes of Britain’s finest long-distance trails
🎨 Jim Perrin paints a portrait of Fiacaill Couloir
🍳 Our gear team test stoves, midlayers and gloves
❄ Nadia Shaikh looks to winter in praise of hoar frost
⁉ Juls Stodel helps another reader with their own Uphill Struggle
📚 Get inspired with our reviews of new outdoor books
and so much more!

📸: Paul Skea

Get your copy now:
https://www.thegreatoutdoorsmag.com/latest-issue/november-tgo-cairngorms-in-autumn/

24/09/2025

🍂 The leaves on the trees are beginning to crimson, and this can only mean one thing... The Great Outdoors Reader Awards are officially open!

🏆 The Great Outdoors Reader Awards are the UK’s biggest democratic celebration of the best of outdoor culture. Fourteen years ago, we launched our first annual awards and you - our readers - have been championing the people, places and businesses that make our lives outdoors better ever since.

🥾 Once again, The Reader Awards are open across 15 categories including the Open Outdoors award, pub of the year, campaigner of the year, brand of the year, and many more. What makes these Reader Awards different – and gives extra kudos to the winners – is that it’s you, the outdoor going public, who decide the results. Only your nominees make it onto the shortlist, and only those shortlisted who win most of your votes walk away with a top accolade.

🔗 So, choose wisely and nominate now - and please share the news so other can have their say!

⏳ Nominations close on October 31 2025 at midnight. Thank you for taking part.

Recognise the best of British outdoor culture. Nominate your outdoor heroes for The Great Outdoors Reader Awards 2026 now!

22/09/2025

Last week we partnered with Trek Scotland and writer Minreet Kaur for a first-time Munro and wild camp adventure in the Cairngorms ⛺

🌄 Minreet's mum Pal is in remission. She's 75 in November, and is also nails enough to attempt Bynack More in the dark!

Watch this space for her full story. Meanwhile, join us in applauding Pal. What an inspiration! 👏

📸: David Lintern

19/09/2025

🏔️ Win a £100 CEWE Photobook Voucher – Turn Your Mountain Memories Into a Stunning Keepsake! 📸

Whether it's epic hikes, snow-capped peaks, or scenic trails, capture your adventure in a beautifully printed photobook – stylish, personal, and made to last.

Click the link, enter your details, and you're in the draw!

https://r1.dotdigital-pages.com/p/5D8F-IY0

with - CEWE

19/09/2025

🪱 Even in the company of slugs, sharing can be caring, says The Great Outdoors’ Uphill Struggles advice columnist Juls Stodel... You've just got to stick around for the plot and be your weirdest self.

🔗 Read Juls' bivvying etiquette advice - and learn how you could win a £100 voucher to spend with Highlander Outdoor:

Even in the company of slugs, sharing can be caring when it comes to camping and bivvy spots, says The Great Outdoors’ columnist Juls Stodel.

17/09/2025

⛺ All killer, no filler! Britain's most experienced gear team reveal the winners of TGO's Gear of the Year Awards 2025 - from budget kit to brands that consider our planet.

🎒 With over 200 years of experience, and many hundreds of hours spent in the hills as outdoor professionals, our gear testing team can distinguish between hype and what’s genuinely innovative.

🥾 If you are wary of outdoor media that only review brands that advertise with them, or sceptical of social media accounts singing the praises of the latest freebie, you’re in the right place!

Britain's most experienced gear team share top picks of outdoor kit and innovations. See the winners of TGO's Gear of the Year Awards 2025.

10/09/2025

From September to December, new members benefit from Austrian Alpine Club (UK) membership for the remainder of 2025 when they join and pay the 2026 membership fee. Find out more:

Welcome to the AAC(UK)! A Club for alpine walkers, climbers, mountain bikers and snow sport enthusiasts. Join now to access to great benefits including Rescue and Repatriation services, discounts on huts, events and more.

08/09/2025

🥾 Juls Stodel has spent a night getting back to basics in every Mountain Bothies Association shelter. In her second advice column for , she helps a veteran hillwalker who feels a bit lost in the quagmire of Gore-Tex and gadgets get back on track.

Read on and learn how you could win a £100 voucher to spend with Highlander Outdoor:

In her second advice column, Juls Stodel helps a self-confessed technophobe lost in the quagmire of Gore-Tex and gadgets to get back on track.

03/09/2025

The Cuillin for Mortals 🌩

👣 This ridge is often regarded as Britain’s most sustained and technical mountaineering excursion. Co-editor David Lintern attempted a ‘walker’s traverse’ of this infamous challenge, supporting a friend’s Munro round in the process. In an environment now largely professionalised, theirs was an adventure by amateurs in the classic sense.

🌄 “The Cuillin of Skye is made of dreams, perhaps a little of nightmares too, its jagged profile rising straight out of the sea or perhaps just straight out of Mordor. Certainly, it’s had this hold on my imagination since my first visit a quarter century ago. A friend and I were pretty literally washed down the Stone Chute by the most water I’d ever seen come from the sky. Back to the side of salmon and bottle of Talisker in our Broadford cottage, well and truly chastened. For mere mortals and aspirant Munroists, the ridge’s 12km of toothy scrambling and 11 Munros has a legendary reputation…”

Read on in the new issue of :
https://www.thegreatoutdoorsmag.com/latest-issue/uncover-britains-mountain-legends-in-our-october-issue/

29/08/2025

Water Courses 🛶

🇸🇪 Piteälven, one of Sweden’s great rivers, has carved out 400km of landscape through Swedish Lapland, shaping its geology through sheer brute force. By following these watercourses, Mark Waring learns lessons in fully appreciating this remote and seldom-visited wild land from the Norwegian border high in the Scandinavian mountains to the Baltic Sea.

🏞 “Mountains and landscapes are shaped by water, their geology carved often by water’s sheer brute force. Only by following those watercourses can you fully appreciate them. Packrafting teaches humility, too. I am roundly taught that on the last day of this trip as I cockily assess the rapids before me as ‘straightforward.’ Blindly, committing my packraft to a whitewater run of several hundred metres, I am confident that I will effortlessly clear the half dozen foaming obstacles. Within a matter of seconds, misjudging the complexity of one of them, I am tossed into the river’s churning waters, at its mercy and helpless with several hundred metres of whitewater coming at me fast as I try to swim to the shore…”

Read on in the new issue of :
https://www.thegreatoutdoorsmag.com/latest-issue/uncover-britains-mountain-legends-in-our-october-issue/

27/08/2025

🧙‍♀️ The landscapes of our ancient woodlands and timeless mountains can often illicit a deeply spiritual connection with our surroundings. Sometimes, we resort to rituals to commune with these feelings, awe-inspiring but hard to put into words. As we approach the Autumnal months, these natural and human observances reach their peak. Here, we share four walkers’ stunning encounters with the sublime outdoors.

👣 With thanks to our four featured readers, whose photos have been published in our mountain myths special issue which you can read via the link in bio.

📸 Conor Gault📍Ben Alder
📸 Gabby Secomb Flegg📍Clootie Well
📸 lexitravelsandeats/IG 📍West Highland Way
📸 Lisa Forbes📍Wykeham Forest

🎨 Next up is our 'High Culture' special - an issue dedicated to all things creatively-fuelled outdoors. If you have a photograph of yourself making, moving, playing, or creating in our high places, tag us to be in with a chance of it featuring in Britain's original mountain magazine.

27/08/2025

Tall Tales in Wales 🧚

🌄 Poet, lecturer and Mountain Leader Emily Zobel Marshall returns home for an epic adventure over the Welsh 3000’s – the highest and most multi-storied mountains of Eryri.

📖 “I grew up in a remote farmhouse called Garth-y-Foel, near a tiny village named Croesor, nestled at the base of the peaked mountain Cnicht. Home was a kilometre from the road, unreachable by car. There was no TV and my brother and I lived a semi feral existence. Dad was English, mum Caribbean and our tiny primary school was Welsh speaking. There, tales from the Welsh legends Y Mabinogion, compiled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from Welsh oral traditions, were part of our daily diet of storytelling. At home, my mother told me Caribbean folktales about the wily spider trickster Anansi. I grew up in an enchanted place, still half haunted by the ghosts of druids, Roman soldiers, jilted lovers and magicians, a loaded landscape with a myth hitched to every rock, tree, cave and valley. In my teens, I made friends in Borth-y-Gest, a few miles away. Now, 30 years later and newly emboldened with a Mountain Leader qualification, I was returning to my Welsh homeland to make a new story. ‘The Borth Boys’ and I would try for the 15 Welsh mountains over 3000 foot, together!”

Read on in new :
https://www.thegreatoutdoorsmag.com/latest-issue/uncover-britains-mountain-legends-in-our-october-issue/