Bred of Heaven (36 page)

According to Speed's Chronicle, the dyke's construction was not without incident. Marmodius, the defeated King of Wales, arranged with other enemies of Offa to ‘brake down the banke of this fortification, filling up again great part of the ditch' and then attack Offa's court. The guerrilla campaign was soon snuffed out, Marmodius conquered and his vassals taken hostage. And work on the dyke resumed.

The scale of the achievement was not fully acknowledged by academe until 1955 when Oxford University Press published
Offa's Dyke: A Field Survey of the Western Frontier-Works of Mercia in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries AD
. That publication date is deceptive. Sir Cyril Fox, the study's author, first accepted the commission from the National Museum of Wales and the Board of Celtic Studies of the University of Wales as a young man thirty years earlier. He spent eight summers poring over the dyke and its offshoots, from 1925 to 1932. ‘It provided the finest possible introduction to Wales and the Welsh,' he wrote, ‘and largely accounts for the affection I have for both.' Like Warner he took a companion, a Mr Dudley W. Phillips who brought his fiddle and a chatty disposition, along with a willingness to be a human yardstick in photographs of the dyke. ‘The survey of Offa's Dyke was certainly a laborious undertaking,' Fox wrote, ‘both in field and study, and is perhaps tedious to read. But I venture to think that it was worth doing.'

Fox devoted those summers to measurement, assessment, cataloguing. Of constructed earthwork he measured 81 miles, spread over a distance of 149 miles. Taking soundings at forty different points, he calculated the bank's average height to be over six feet, and its breadth nearly sixty feet. His conclusion was that the earthwork was begun in the middle nearest to the heart of Mercia, continued to the north, while the southern sections where the border was less contended were the last to be built. It was constructed, he thought, by experienced engineers working to the plans of one controlling designer, but that responsibility for building it was possibly taken on by landowners across whose territory the dyke passed. Hence some of its sudden changes of direction. Discrepancies in size and profile between sections, in misalignments and overlaps suggested to him that such works were completed by different gangs.

He feels certain that Offa spread the cost. ‘I doubt whether the King who built the Dyke expended a single penny on labourers,' writes Fox. It must have involved many hundreds using basic tools and working in all weathers. Not for Offa's men with picks and shovels the pleasure of digging and heaping huge mounds of earth in the summer months. If the dyke took only eleven years to finish, including many sections which would have been much higher than they are today, no wonder Fox concluded his somewhat dusty academic appraisal with an exclamation: ‘What an astonishing effort for a small state of farmers and peasants this eighty miles of earthen wall and excavated ditch represented!'

The hiker cannot avoid the same conclusion. Even when it's raining old women and sticks. Halfway through day five the heavens open between the easily confused Kington and Knighton. They finally close again at the end of day nine, at Buttington Bridge, sixty-five miles later. The rain is never quite of the torrential variety which dissuaded even Borrow from venturing out. But intermittently it persists. I note that things are going to take a turn for the worse while munching on a sandwich on a hill looking south to the distant Black Mountains along an avenue flanked by Hergest Ridge and Radnor Forest. Beyond, jutting proudly to attention in my opera glasses, are the twin turrets of the Brecon Beacons: Pen-y-Fan and Corn Du. From thirty-five miles off they are no more than tiny hints on the horizon. I can't take my eyes off them. Then a dark cloud swoops across and they are no more. In a trice, Radnorshire has disappeared altogether. We are alone with the slithering dyke.

In due course it becomes apparent that my Gore-Tex boots, recently purchased and guaranteed to keep the water out, are fundamentally permeable. We trudge over green damp hills, searching for consolation. A laminated notice strapped to a gate across a
bridge soon promises it. ‘Use the facilities behind the chapel in Dolley Green.' How friendly. Trust the Welsh to offer a welcome (we have crossed back into Powys). We traverse a valley floor and come upon a quiet cluster of houses. There's a sign to a loo at the back of a sturdy red-brick Baptist chapel. I loiter. A man outside a house greets me in a thick accent from one of the southern states of America: Georgia, it turns out; the Baptist minister, I presume. He and his family, he explains, are off back home after six years. ‘It's been a good ministry,' he's saying. ‘We've converted six people, including our sons.' Excluding the sons, youngish boys with mullet haircuts whom they have home-educated, that's a strike rate of one conversion every eighteen months. ‘You believers?' he says. I now realise why the loo is advertised to hikers for miles along the ODP: it's a honeytrap. ‘Er, not as such,' I say. My efforts to believe in any of the Welsh ways, from Cistercian to Congregationalist, have already proved abortive. ‘Save thee,' he says. I thank him. He adds, ‘Some people don't like it when I say that.'

As we move on, E— confirms that the loos are covered floor to ceiling with billboards, stickers, posters, pamphlets, leaflets, all designed to lure the abluting hiker to the path of righteousness. We have our own path to follow, plus our own brand of baptism, as we clamber over exposed hills. Even a herd of cows we pass is sheltering under conifers so you can see only their legs. We descend into Knighton, the traditional mid-point of the ODP, wishing the world were a warmer. drier place.

Day six brings no relief. Only twelve miles. Most of them vertical. Up. Down. Up and down. A bit of along. Up and up. Down and down. Wales can't claim responsibility for this purgatory supplied by Shropshire. The dyke hares over them unimpeded. At points we are reduced to climbing for ten paces, then resting, eleven then resting, twelve then resting and so on. One would be grateful
for rope ladders and the odd zipwire. At one point we lose our way and are ensnared in a head-high bracken forest sprouting from steep slippery mud. One's thick socks, dried out on radiators overnight, are now wringing again. No sooner do you conquer a hill than it's required that you plummet all the way down to cross yet another footling rivulet in the valley floor. On the plus side, one can feel one's gluteal mass solidifying into granite. There are occasional treats. A long path over one hill is lined on both sides with wild raspberry bushes which, without a care for other dykers, we strip like locusts. It makes a change from the hundreds and thousands of plump blackberries lining the ODP in August.

We bump into a flock of sheep being removed from one field and on to another. The farmers are sensibly shod in knee-high rubber. I think I may be developing trench foot. Crossing an old drovers' route the dyke grows to impressive proportions. Below us we can see most of Montgomeryshire. The dyke plunges downwards and we with it until it is slinking along the backs of gardens. It was the occupants of one such property that Fox asked in 1928 if the locals knew what Offa's Dyke actually was. ‘His reply though indirect was not ambiguous. “You put your head inside the back-door of Bob Jones's cottage there; tell him he was born the wrong side of Offa's Dyke, and see what happens.”'

It is becoming apparent that each day on the dyke is like a journey from innocence to experience, hope to despair, and maybe even from youth to death. You start out each morning as springy as a freshly born lamb. Yes, it helps if the sun blesses you with its bounty, and if the fields are as flat as Holland, both of which suddenly happen on day seven. But neither is obligatory. The first two or three miles are painless like childhood (especially if you have popped a precautionary painkiller). By elevenses, you're refuelling your way into your teens. When you sit down to lunch you have
pushed hard through your twenties and feel the need to settle, in this case to sandwiches, crisps, chocolate, an apple. Suddenly everything becomes hard work. You are now in the breeding years of your mid thirties and bewilderingly exhausted, but the hard yards must be traversed until middle age gradually restores your mojo and for a brief deceptive phase you are a contender again. Then the reality of exhaustion kicks in. For the final few miles you plummet headlong towards geriatric enfeeblement, prey to twinges and aches, malfunction and dolour. Eventually you can go not a step further. The mind is technically willing, but the body has been pushed too far. You lie down and close your eyes and wait for oblivion.

This happens to us eleven days in a row.

We are now passing one hundred miles. I look at a map and cannot quite believe how far up towards North Wales we've traipsed. The dyke races along the current border for a mile or two. Frustratingly, the path keeps to the English side of the line. Wales is precisely four yards away. I itch to trespass into the land of my fathers. I am desperate to be in Wales. At a certain point I can stand it no further: at a gateway I plant my feet on Welsh soil, stop and aim a satisfying arc of piss into England. In such visceral ways does one demonstrate one's
Cymreictod
. Across a watery valley Powis Castle is a dull orange smudge.

On day eight the dyke forges forward along the horizontal with a masculine sense of purpose while to its right the sashaying Severn flashes its flirty curves like a street-walker. We tot up twelve miles before lunch – a record – and reach our digs so precipitately that we decide to carry on for two miles into tomorrow's schedule. This is what it feels like to be fit. The day ends at Carreg-y-big where the unimpeded hilltop view as the sun slants across Mid Wales yields a brilliant display of mountainous activity. Pumlumon is clearly
parked on the horizon. I'm pretty sure those are the Arans, important-looking hulks just a mile or two as the crow flies from Hedd Pugh's farm in Cwm Cywarch. And far off in the distance is the unmistakable silhouette of Cadair Idris.

Day nine brings faint annoyance at the Boundary Commission and its arbitrary choices. We pass English villages called Nantmawr, Tyn-y-Coed, Trefonen, Craignant, Bronygarth. Clearly they've been stolen by England. My huff lightens as we cross the Afon Ceiriog and re-enter Wales. A red plaque on the bridge notes that it was near here in the Berwyn Mountains that the Battle of Crogen took place in August 1165 between the army of Owain Gwynedd and Henry II of England ‘as Wales fought for its freedom from English domination'. The plaque is too polite to mention who won. (The Welsh did.)

And now a sad moment looms. We are parting company with the dyke. It swerves off to the east to follow a course into the outskirts of Wrexham. Those who designed the ODP chose to take it through more pleasing pastures, such as Chirk Castle now materialising not far to our right. ‘A noble edifice it looked,' said Borrow, who walked here with his wife, stepdaughter and a guide, ‘and to my eye bore no slight resemblance to Windsor Castle.' The Borrow party crossed the fields, rang on a bell and were shown round the ancestral home of the royalist Middletons. ‘We had never seen in our lives anything more princely and delightful than the interior.' For us a rule established at Tintern applies: no tourism if it's a yard off the path.

Before the morning is out the path has crossed an even more spectacular landmark. We walk along the flank of a canal full of idling longboats piloted by, for the most part, gentlemen with a wheel in one hand and a preprandial glass of red in the other. The canal veers round to the right and by some miracle throws itself for
300 metres across a wide chasm cut by the River Dee, which roars distantly underneath us. Pontcysyllte – which sounds thoroughly romantic in Welsh but merely means ‘connecting bridge' – was completed in 1805. Its architect Thomas Telford would later create the suspension bridge over the Menai Strait at whose construction Wordsworth marvelled. But this levitating waterway, which ferried slate down from the quarries of the Eglwyseg Mountains, seems somehow the more astonishing. ‘Ancient Rome was celebrated among nations for her bridges and aqueducts,' enthused the
Cambrian Quarterly Magazine
in 1831, ‘but modern Wales surpasses her.' Never mind that the actual experience of walking across it induces weak knees and queasiness. Borrow's guide advised him that this was ‘the finest bridge in the world', adding that it made him feel sick. ‘I too felt somewhat dizzy,' conceded Borrow, ‘as I looked over the parapet into the glen.' It is indeed nerve-racking that there is nothing between the canal and the drop. One too many glasses of red and a longboatman could easily topple the forty metres to certain death. We pass over the other side with relief.

After a few miles along the canal path in the shadow of the bristling Trevor Rocks, we stumble into Llangollen, walk through the town and up the hill to a large black-and-white cottage on the edge of a cascading stream. It's not on the ODP, but rules are there to be broken. More than anywhere in eighteenth-century Wales, it was Llangollen which fed fashionable notions of the romantic and the sublime. Thomas Pennant, the great Welsh travel writer of the era, declared that there was no other place ‘where the refined love of picturesque scenes, the sentimental or the romantic could give further indulgence to his inclinations'. Bizarrely, these fantasies of an alpine wilderness on the doorstep of England were channelled through a pair of spinsters who settled in this very property in 1780. Lady Eleanor Butler and her younger companion the Hon.
Sarah Ponsonby both hailed from noble Anglo-Irish families and flouted the marital plans hatched for them to elope and spend a blissful half-century luxuriating in each other's company in the house they grandly renamed Plas Newydd – New Hall. They were retiring but certainly not shy. Polite Georgian society knew of their case and collectively accepted them. Visitors flocked across the border to pay their respects – mostly a long procession of the titled, and even royalty. No doubt their celebrity derived partly from their aristocratic roots, which the ladies were themselves careful to insist upon. Would we have heard of the Ladies of Llangollen who dressed like men had they been commoners? As it was, they became part of the tour of North Wales, as much as the nearby Cistercian ruins at Valle Crucis and the castle at Dinas Brân glowering down at the town from its crest across the Dee. Among their visitors was Arthur Wellesley, later to become the Duke of Wellington, who within a year would sail for Spain to engage in war in the Peninsula. Walter Scott, whose novels they devoured, visited them when Lady Eleanor was ailing. Wordsworth on hearing of Lady Eleanor's ill health in 1824 sent a slightly palsied sonnet from Ruthin which alluded to ‘Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb / Ev'n on this earth above the reach of time'.