LAST Legs staggers on, four walks around the region since the last report. None has been more lucrative than Shildon to Spennymoor, none more fascinating than that embracing the ascent to Penshaw Monument.

Pensher, as hereabouts it is known, was a North-East icon when the Angel was barely a cherub. Built for £6,000 in 1844, in the style of the Greek temple at Hephaetus, it is a memorial not to the Earl of Durham’s wife – as popularly is supposed – but to the first Earl, Radical Jack himself.

The walk began at Bournmoor, near Chester-le-Street, a pre-Christmas day so warm that a postman wore shorts and a T-shirt and barely ten minutes before all of us had worked up a sweat.

Bournmoor, it should be said, is subject to variation. At one end of the village a road sign says “Bournmoor” and at the other “Burnmoor.” Patiently, it answers to both.

The great folly atop Penshaw Hill has mainly solid pillars, but one with a spiral staircase to the top. The door was permanently locked after a 15-year-old boy fell to his death in 1924, but has recently been reopened by the National Trust – a fiver to non-members and rather them than me.

The 12-mile walk was to Sunderland RCA, based in Ryhope. It was organised by Owen Haley, an enthusiastic outdoors man who’s walked 194 of the 213 Lakeland fells identified by the celebrated author Alf Wainwright.

So what constitutes a fell? “When Wainwright says it is,” said Owen.

Back down to earth, we walked the former railway line from Silksworth to Ryhope, where local youth would meet half way to resolve – shall we say – their differences.

“At first it was just stones, then catapults,” Owen recalled. “When the Silky lads got air rifles, we scarpered. We couldn’t afford air rifles in Ryhope.”

Though the pace was fast – Owen Haley and his comets – one of the 10-strong party even had breath to recall the festive joke about the chap in court for stealing an Advent calendar from Tesco. He got 24 days.

It was a great day; Last Legs wholly rejuvenated.

THE Santa suit cost £3.99 from Yorkshire Trading. The wrapping proclaimed that it was made in China, a country where Christmas may be celebrated a little less enthusiastically than here, and that one size fitted almost all. Good word, almost.

The bobble at the end of the hat wouldn’t flash as promised, either, and was offered to someone for a second opinion. “I’m a builder, not an electrician,” he said.

Festive fig was donned for the Shildon to Spennymoor stage, December 28, the raggy-trousered philanthropist joined by 25 others inspired by Spennymoor Town chairman Brad Groves’s magnificent offer to double every penny raised on the day.

Among the walkers were former Shildon centre half Arnold Alton, who’d not been on the Dean Street ground for getting on 50 years – “It’s changed,” he said, inarguably – and our old friend Baz Mundy, newish captain of Bishop Auckland Golf Club, who’s introduced a swear box into the clubhouse.

It’s 20p a cuss, £70 raised in the first week. “There are some serial offenders,” said Baz.

Pete Sixsmith, now a semi-professional Santa, gave the £36 he’d earned for two hours work on December 25. Double time at Christmas, apparently.

The walk was mainly along the old railway line from Bishop to Spennymoor. Mr Mundy recalled the days of steam – sic transit gloria, Mundy? – when a school friend would have recurring nightmares about being hit by a train.

“One day it became reality,” said Baz. “He was chuffed to little pieces.”

Half way there was a pub, the Top House. A round cost £70, and for these guys worth every penny.

The walkers raised around £2,000. A bucket collection at the match with Farsley Celtic added £340.67p – amazing how many pennies are still in circulation – all of which will be doubled by the Moors chairman.

The total’s now over £16,000, 338 miles gone, but plenty of walking still to come. The Santa suit’s in the bin.

THEN it gets tricky, as those with the most perfunctory knowledge of North-East geography will grasp. Last Wednesday’s roundabout route is from Thornaby-on-Tees to Norton-on-Tees, the former on the south bank and the latter on the north.

Unless walking on water becomes an option, at some point there has to be a bridge. You know what it’s like with bridges and me.

Steve Warnes, leading the walk in the convivial company of our kidder, decides that the least formidable is the Newport, Britain’s first vertical lift bridge when it opened in 1934, but inoperative these past 21 years.

For those with gephyrophobia – a Greek term meaning yellow-bellied – it still proves a bridge too far. A detour takes us through that part of Middlesbrough once notoriously known as over the border, where in wet-eared days I really did see a lady in a pub with the asking price chalked on the sole of her sanny.

Twelve and sixpence, since you enquire.

The revised route also takes in the Riverside Intermodal Park, whatever one of those may be, and travels the considerable length of Forty Foot Road. An internet search suggests that it’s not unique, but not how it came by its imprecise name.

Bus to Stockton, we enjoy a pint in the Golden Smog – good Teesside name, that – in Hambletonian Yard and another in the Hambletonian itself, a newish micropub in Norton. Hambletonian was a late 18th century racehorse which won the St Leger, was bought by Sir Henry Vane Tempest of Wynyard Hall and then stood, as they say, to great effect.

Arrival at Norton and Stockton Ancients completes the 27th leg. To no surprise whatever, the match has been postponed.

CLEVER things, computers. These days they not only plan a route and measure it, but advise, to the minute, how long the walk’s going to take.

So it is last Saturday. Mostly along former colliery railway tracks, the plodge from Castle Eden to Seaham Red Star is said to be 10.4 miles and to take three hours 22 minutes.

How do they know that? How do they factor in age and infirmity or that the quagmire is so unrelenting that a fellow walker supposes it akin to a guided tour of World War I trenches?

Are they smart enough, for that matter, to allow for a restorative pint in South Hetton Cricket Club – these days the only licensed premises in that once-unquenchable colliery village – or another in the Westlea in Seaham, self-styled Caesar’s Palace of the North?

The route’s been planned by Lee Stewart, Peterlee lad, in football terms not so much a walker as a hopper. Last year he watched exactly 300 games – “some pretty remote Scottish matches at the end” – but this sodden season has barely managed 120. “I’ll be lucky to reach 200,” he supposes.

Six of us walk, matches tumbling en route. Thanks to a great deal of hard work, Seaham v Guisborough goes ahead. On Monday night, Lee and his girlfriend Katie were over in Runcorn for the Vase tie with North Shields. “It’s just good to get a game of football,” he said.