The Club has been successful in gaining a further grant to help support our walking activity.

The award, received from the County Durham Community Foundation, was made following concentrated effort put in at the application stage by stalwart club walker and valued committee member – Sheila Pinkney!

The £500 grant is to help offset the cost of providing coach travel for our walkers over the next twelve months – and is very well received and appreciated by all club members! Well done again, Sheila!

On Saturday 23rd November the club set up a stand at the Great Aycliffe & Middridge Partnership event Your Money, Your Area, Your Views. where local people were invited to vote on the local community projects they thought worthy of a grant. An allocation of £27,000 was available, to be shared between those projects that received most votes.

A total of 31 projects were exhibited, including Aycliffe Fell Walking Club, our stand being ‘manned’ by Sheila and Maria. Some 900 local people visited the event, which was held at the Newton Aycliffe Youth Centre between 11 am and 3 pm. In all, twelve projects received money from the scheme. Unfortunately we were unsuccessful in winning a grant.

However, we had lots of visits from people interested in walking, who until today were not aware of our walking club! Despite being unsuccessful in obtaining a grant all in attendance viewed the time as being well spent, and we can look forward to seeing some more new faces joining our walks in 2014.

Many thanks to all who attended the event to cast their vote, their attendance was greatly appreciated.

Fancy raising money to help one of our regions mountain rescue teams and having a spiffing good walk into the process.

The Three Rivers Challenge is being held on Saturday September 21 in Teesdale. The walk is a 21 km / 13 mile linear walk starting at the Wynch Bridge near Bowlees and Finishing at Barnard Castle, taking in along the way some spectacular scenery as it passes the rivers Balder, Lune and Tees. The distance is long enough to be a challenge but not that long where you need to embark on specific training and so is suitable for most abilities.

The entry fee is £15 which includes coach transport from Barnard Castle to the start of the walk and a £5 donation to Teesdale and Weardale Search and Mountain Rescue Team. The event promises to be quite popular and so early entry is recommended. See the event website at www.discoverdurhamdales.co.uk