The news stories give the essential details, so I won’t add much.
Get ’em on. We’ve made it [Link still valid!]
If the certainty of having your collar felt, metaphorically of course, by the local police every few days is not enough to put you off walking the length of Britain naked, then the February wind blowing off the Pentland Firth should at least be a deterrent. So, as the Naked Rambler and his girlfriend finally arrived at the northernmost tip of Scotland yesterday, their first thoughts turned to clothes.
A man trying to walk the length of Britain wearing nothing but a hat, boots and a rucksack completed his marathon trek on Monday and celebrated by putting his clothes back.
“It’s nice to get warmed up again,” self-styled “Naked Rambler” Stephen Gough (46) told the domestic Scottish Press Association news agency from a café in John O’Groats, on the tip of the north-east Scottish mainland.
Gough and his partner, 34-year-old hairdresser Melanie Roberts, completed the last 32km of their 1 363km walk from Land’s End, south-west England in temperatures of about five degrees Celsius.
“It has been pretty cold and the locals have been coming up to us offering us whisky and all sorts,” said Gough. “They’ve been very, very friendly. We passed a school and there were even parents coming out with video cameras.”
Naked rambler completes his trek [Link still valid!]
Mr Gough and his partner Melanie Roberts, 34, from Bournemouth, reached the north coast of Caithness on Monday.
The ex-marine, who began his 874-mile trek in June, has been arrested and jailed on several occasions.
Mr Gough, from Eastleigh in Hampshire, said he wanted to challenge public attitudes to nudity. He celebrated his success by putting his clothes on.
It was a nice touch that the Guardian ran, in addition to the story, a brief — but quite favorable — opinion piece:
In praise of… the naked rambler
[Link still valid!]
However often the police may have arrested the incorrigible nudist, including twice in his final week on the road, the general public always seemed hearteningly unfazed by his presence. The nearer he got to John O’Groats, a tired but happy Mr Gough reflected yesterday, the more that local people offered greetings and whisky to him and his partner Melanie Roberts.
Oh, and just in case you’ve been living most of the last year (or more) in the Amazonian rainforest (hopefully naked) and find this story interesting but lacking in background, just go to the Naked Rambler’s web site for more information and pictures…
Originally published February 27, 2006