New walking guidebook pays homage to composer Gustav Holst By Gloucestershire Echo | A CENTURY after composer Gustav Holst started work on his famous work The Planets, a Cheltenham museum has published a walking guidebook in his honour. The Gustav Holst Way is a 35-mile rambling route across the Cotswolds that was laid out by volunteers at ... Read morethe Holst Birthplace Museum. The richly-illustrated book, with numerous photographs and maps charting the five contrasting sections of the route between Cranham and Wyck Rissington, is partly a conventional guide for walkers and partly a homage to Gustav Holst, who was a keen walker himself and had a lifelong love of the Cotswolds. Walking for Holst was both a pleasure and a necessity; as a young man whose first job - as the organist at Wyck Rissington church - earned him only GBP4 a year, he was invariably unable to afford the bus or train fare home. The budding composer would often take his trombone with him to practise his skills in the sparsely populated hills. On one occasion he was chased off a field by an angry farmer who blamed him for alarming the ewes. and making them lamb too early. The route picks out important landmarks in Holst's early life, including his birthplace - now the museum - and several places where he played, taught and composed music. The guidebook, has been written by former BBC and Sky News journalist Frank Partridge Show Less