Mountain Warehouse Hiking Boots - A 6 Month Review

I have been wearing these hiking boots for six months now, walking around 1.7 km every day along streets and the occasional field. They have been comfortable - but they have also been wrecked. These are a pair of boots whose RRP is over £100, although they could be purchased cheaper in their sale.

You can see the state of them in the picture above - the laces have broken, and the outer layers come off. More importantly, the outer harder bands have started to break, which is then accelerating the break-up of the rest of the boot. This can be seen more clearly in the picture below.

This is the right front in close-up. You can see how the harder layer has torn at a flexing point, and is now coming away from the base. This allow the inner fabric layer to flex further, making it more likely to break.

This is the inner liner from one of the boots, which came loose within a couple of weeks of wearing the boot. The liner has slipped back within the boot but then not moved, which meant that there wasn't really a problem. However, recently I've noticed that the padding over the lower sole has compacted so far that I can feel the holes within it. The following two pictures attempt to show this:

You can just see the depressions in the second picture where the sole is falling into the holes, and to the right at the top you can see a line in the layer where it has come apart from the base. You can then lift this up and see the holes - and empty the stones which have collected in them due to slit-holes forming in the base which you can see in the picture below.

You have to empty the stones otherwise when you take the boots off, you notice that the one with the holes rattles.

They have been comfortable boots, and waterproof, but now due to the compaction of the internal structure, you can feel the holes when stepping hard onto something, and it doesn't feel like it is protecting your foot. They have been used daily, but I'm not hiking in harsh terrain, and I feel that they should stand up to much more than this. I have a pair of lightweight trainers I've ran in for far more distance than these, and they are not anywhere near the state of disrepair. Given the RRP, I think that this is a very poor showing, and they should hold up much better.

Mooching among the mudflats

Little Egrets feeding amongst the seaweed at Sheppardine, end of August.

Walking on a frozen gravel path

Do you notice that when walking on a gravelled path on a lovely sunny morning, the gravel makes a deeper crunching sound than normal when you step on it? Reminiscent of walking on and compacting fresh snow.

Autumnal trees

Clear skies at night lead to frosts, but crystal clear skies. Not a cloud around, the early morning sun picking out the moon and highlighting this lovely old ivy encrusted tree.

Amblyteles armatorius

Ichneumon wasps

This ichneumon wasp was spotted laying eggs on a hebe. Ichneumon wasps are longer than the usual common wasp, and there are many different species. They are harmless to humans.

The Hexagons of Social Distance

Consider a person – a normal person, someone who feels, looks, needs and loves, who farts and toilets just like anyone else on the planet; we are one species after all. But that person is now an island, who has to be two metres away from anyone else, an imaginary cage around them. Social distancing we call it in the newfound argot, or perhaps that should be self-cellation? Because if you picture it, a person surrounded by others all two metres apart forms a hexagon.

So one person can be surrounded by six others, each covering their own two square metre patch of ground, an imaginary cell of 12 square metres imprisoning the lot. But each side of the cell is the wall of another, and so on – the cells forming the edge of more cells, and so on, spreading across the countryside like a mutant form of Christaller’s central place model.

So 31 people are now entrapped, seven hexagons mentally formed in the mind, 84 square metres of anguish. You can dehumanise it and put it in numerical form: 4n+3. So consider a small town, 10,000 souls. 4n+3…… That’s 2499 full hexagons, 29,988 square metres of incarceration. Scale it up again to the 60 million or so in the country – 15 million cells, 180 square kilometres of nothing – you could socially distance the UK inside South Gloucestershire. But would you want to? Imagine the anxieties seeping out, spreading from person to person, just as invidious as the virus. Some of the vertices will break, dots disappear, a minor statistic to the holistic view, a deepening dark hole in the fabric and wellbeing to others. Will the breaks grow and cut completely off?

But it will burn out – vertices can snap and form other shapes. It will get better.