Retired vicar in Worcestershire set to take on 700-mile walking challenge
Dave Foster, who lives in Harvington, is aiming to walk from Land's End to the Scottish border to raise funds for a disaster relief charity
A man living in a Worcestershire village is putting himself through his paces as he prepares to take on a mammoth 700-mile challenge which gets underway this month.
Harvington's Dave Foster is setting off from Land's End on the 9 May, days after his 71st birthday, and aiming to make it all the way up to the Scottish border in Berwick-upon-Tweed and finish on the 4 July.
The retired vicar will be fundraising for charity ShelterBox, which provides emergency shelter and aid to people across the world who have lost their homes and have been impacted by the likes of earthquakes and conflict.
"The principle behind it is that if you lose your home, if you lose everything, the very first thing you need is the essentials like shelter to give yourself a place to rebuild from," he said.
"The £20,000 I’m aiming to raise could buy for example a shelter pack for over 300 people.
"A shelter pack would include a tent, sleeping stuff, cooking equipment, essential tools, solar lighting, mosquito nets, water filtration."
He'll be supported on the journey by the project team at the Rotary Club of Evesham Vale and it isn't his first walking challenge.
In 2023 he walked 425 miles across England and Wales, raising over £10,000 for ShelterBox.
"An obvious one would have been Land’s End to John O’Groats, but I thought 700 miles is a lot further than I've walked continuously before, that’s going to take 8 weeks, that’s 8 weeks away from home, it has a big impact on home life," he said on why he decided on the distance for this particular one.
"I've been doing anything from three to a dozen miles most days, which gets raised up on Sundays, and more recently I've just started walking with my pack on my back filled with water bottles.
"So that weighs about 10 kilos, and I think that's probably as much as I'll be walking with, but that just helps to create the reality of it."