Tom's finds route baa-d by sheep in Shropshire
The man: A 28-year-old who chucked in his £100,000-a-year job in Mayfair. His mission: To walk the length of Britain. His problem: Flocks of sheep getting in his way on the Shropshire border.
In 2012 Tom Dennis decided to bet his life, as he puts it, on writing a walking book, narrating a length-to-length tour of Britain.
The upshot is "Great Britain – A Walker's Guide" which has now been published which details his experiences and adventures, and the people he met on his marathon trek from Land's End to John o'Groats.
In the immediate aftermath he found himself on the dole and unable to find another job.
"To a certain extent, it makes me want to cry. Still, if I am fair to myself I was so utterly bored with what I was doing, and so desperate about the direction that my life was going in that it seemed as if I had absolutely no choice," said Tom.
His route took him through the Marches, and following the Offa's Dyke trail. For the countryside in this area ohe has highest praise. It is, he writes, truly exceptional.
But as he plodded ever north, he found the behaviour of the large numbers of sheep increasingly aggravating.
"This section of the Offa's Dyke trail I remember not just for the beauty, but also for the incessant ovine bleating," he writes.
"As I walked forth, every step seemed to send sheep into waves of hysterical pirouettes. It is not that they found me frightening that piqued me so, but more that once panicked and pirouetted, they would settle only a metre or two further down the path, still in my direction of travel, only to repeat the process again and again as I inevitably advanced upon them once more."
And at the end of it all, after a year away, he went back to his old job.
