The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (13 page)

There were three weeks to go to a general election and, as it was to turn out, a new resident at Chequers. Despite the profound effect the house seemed to have on its Labour inhabitants, you couldn’t help but feel that a Tory, especially a patrician posh one like David Cameron, would be far more suited to the area. I walked past dozens of vast ‘Vote Conservative’ hoardings in lush paddocks, and even more of their smaller brethren on little posts in people’s front gardens. The only other party that seemed to be gaining local support was UKIP, whose posters could often be seen peering out from behind fake mullioned windows, just beneath the three burglar alarms. One sign was entirely new to me: warnings of the use of ‘Concealed CCTV’, which seemed to crop up particularly in pub gardens. One of the great joys of doing a trail is the way in which normal life and its tedious rules just evaporate away, and that includes the feeling that if you pass a pub, you are duty bound to stop for a pint, regardless of the time of day. Most were horrible. If there’s a part of the world that screams cosy rustic pub, it’s the Chilterns, but gastro-greed had overwhelmed them and they were nearly all pretentious restaurants or cheerless food barns. On the second day of the walk, one foot had really started to hurt, so I hobbled into a pub that looked like something out of ‘Dick Whittington’ from the outside, but turned out to be a glossy pine and chrome wannabe within. As I entered and ordered a quick fortifying brandy, the unwelcome sound of Dire Straits was oozing out of the CD player. Ten minutes later, visiting the gents, it was Phil Collins and, when I came out, Simply Red: surely the musical equivalent of ‘three strikes and you’re out’, and all I needed to know that I’ll never return.

The B&Bs I stayed in were run by ferociously efficient ladies of a certain age, who managed to welcome me in, get me out of my boots, rustle up a pot of tea, bake a light sponge, order the kids to piano practice, saddle a couple of horses and hoover the Labradors, all without pausing for breath. They reminded me of a great routine I saw once in Glasgow by American comedian Scott Capurro. He’d been touring England for weeks, and had garnered a wealth of material about how mad the English were, a sure-fire winner of a topic in Glasgow. He wondered aloud why Britain needed an army, as all we had to do, he said, was position on the white cliffs of Dover a few battalions of upper-middle-class English ladies, their arms folded and one eyebrow raised menacingly. No-one would dare invade.

I’d rather them any time, though, than their husbands, who were either golfers in loafers or tweedy types in regimental ties. In one guest house, I was grilled by an ex-army chap, who, his wife whispered to me, had already had three heart bypass operations. It quickly became obvious why: he was permanently on the verge of scarlet-faced apoplexy. His wife invited me in to watch the early evening news with them, which was accompanied by a constant barrage of heckling from him. During one story, they took vox pops in the street, one coming from a young male student with shoulder-length hair. ‘Get a bloody haircut!’ he kept shouting at the screen; we never got to hear what the student had to say. His wife, doing her best to keep the mood sweet, asked me if I had a wife or children. ‘No, I live with my partner,’ I replied, provoking a snort of derision from the corner as he plunged back into the pages of the
Telegraph
. At breakfast he told me, at some length, about the organised holidays that he leads to the Second World War battlefields of northern France, ‘though never to the American beaches in Normandy – what bloody good were the Yanks? Too little, too late.’ Despite my still-painful foot, I fair danced out of there and back on to the trail.

The Chilterns must be up there as having perhaps the best signposted footpaths in the country. It wasn’t just the Ridgeway that was waymarked with such colour co-ordinated vigour, but so was every single footpath, bridleway and byway that either led off it or connected to it. And I never came across a single broken stile or gate. The Chiltern Society, run with the same brisk efficiency as the area’s B&Bs (and probably by the same formidable ladies), is largely responsible for this laudable state of affairs. Not only do they have a Rights of Way group to browbeat any recalcitrant local government worker into submission (‘Come on now, chop chop!’), they also publish and sell their own footpath maps, some 28 of them, which will set you back £70 for the whole pack. They’re at the same scale as an OS Explorer, though each covers only a small area as it is designed to be more portable than a sometimes bulky OS. They’re very beautiful as well, emphasising not just the paths, statutory and permissive, but pubs, car parks and Anglican churches too, a set of features that makes as good a definition of the Chilterns as any. This is, you surmise, a supremely map-literate part of the world. I was tickled to see on the Chiltern Society website a button haughtily labelled ‘Report Something’, which sounded like one of the buttons in longstanding Chilternite Roald Dahl’s great glass elevator. Report Something – anything: stray sheep, hoodies, drug dens, inconsiderate parking, a porch with no planning permission, late-night noise, smoking on an open-air station platform, bad highlights, suspected Labour tendencies, wearing something that’s
so
last year. On the report form, you are politely asked to nail the location of your grievance with an OS grid reference, the inference being that anyone wanting a proper moan would, of course, know both what that meant and how to do it.

After four days, I reached the Thames at the Goring Gap. It’s one of those names that I’d seen on the map, but had rather dismissed as a classic piece of British landscape over-exaggeration. Rural Oxfordshire is hardly the Alps, I thought, and having driven this way a few times, I’d not had cause to change that opinion. Dipping down to it on foot from the ridge of the Chilterns, however, gave me a completely different angle on the landscape, and suddenly, the name made perfect sense, for the Thames slicing through the hills really does create a notable gap. Only by walking slowly into it, with the Wessex Downs (and the cooling towers of Didcot power station) rising up ahead, could I see it, for it is subtle and needs a similarly subtle approach to be appreciated.

Until 1837, Goring, on the eastern bank of the river in Oxfordshire, had nothing much to do with the larger, more important Streatley, over on the western side in Berkshire. Then a toll bridge was built connecting them, and three years later, the railway came, but only to Goring. That then became the major settlement, and so it is today. The twin villages are exactly half-way along the Ridgeway path, and provide a much-needed splash of semi-urban glitz – a cashpoint, a shop that’s open past five o’clock, a choice of places to eat, that sort of thing.

Earlier on the Trail, near Watlington, I’d bumped into a party of four Americans walking the other way. They’d decided to do the Ridgeway after reading about it in
The New York Times
a few months earlier. I later found the article online, its opening words stealth-bombed to excite any historically minded New Worlder: ‘The Ridgeway is the oldest continuously used road in Europe, dating back to the Stone Age.’ A grand supposition, but it had done its job. My American friends had had two nights and a day’s rest in Goring, which seemed to be stretching a good thing to possible breaking point, but they’d
loved
the place. Cute, quaint, cheerful, old, so very
old
; all the things that do it for a party of enthusiastic Ohioans. They were loving it all in fact, including – and this may come as a shock – the ‘amazing B&Bs and brilliant food in the pubs’. I crossed my fingers, and hoped they weren’t booked in at Colonel Shouty’s.

My B&B at Streatley was in the home of a delightful lady, a retired school geography teacher. We sat for hours in her conservatory, drinking tea, watching the sun go down and chatting about life and, more importantly, maps. She told me that she once taught Clare Balding, the jolly-hockey-sticks TV presenter. When she got the class to draw maps of their home area, Clare’s was nearly all pubs. I was proper excited by now, for the following morning I was being joined by an old college mate and his wife, to do the long stretch up on to the Ridgeway proper, that great chalk highway and bulwark, that liminal border between worlds, that self-declared ‘oldest road in Europe’.

It was great to see Jon and Helen, even more so because they had come equipped with the right OS for our day’s 16-plus mile walk to Letcombe Regis. God, I’d missed a decent map. My Harvey’s trail plan had been doing its job with perfunctory precision, but I fell on their Explorer map like a starving man on a plate of chips. And just in time too: the section we walked was the first stretch along the Wessex Downs, where you needed to see the Ridgeway in its far wider topographic context. From here to the path’s end at Avebury, the landscape is strewn with ancient relics, all painstakingly mapped: other tracks, hill forts, tumuli, ditches, temples, sarsens, standing stones and circles, field systems, deserted villages, barrows, enclosures and earth-works. It’s OS at its best, the image on the map demanding closer inspection and intimating huge rewards.

There was much else to learn about the area from the map. In stark contrast to the popular image of southern England, the names of Starveall and Skeleton Farm hinted darkly that these downs are a barren prairie, where little would ever grow. And so it is: the fields we passed looked like ethereal installations at the Tate, so full were they of flinty rubble. As a result, much of the area has been given over to horse gallops and, over the next few days, it was a pleasure to watch them flying by, the horses sleek and sinewy, their riders red-cheeked and intent. On the map, it looks as if the day’s walk would be entirely dominated by the great hulk of Didcot power station, sat belching in the Thames valley below. On the ground though, it doesn’t much intrude, at least not in the foreground. I’d caught my first glimpse of the cooling towers two days earlier as I was crossing a field just south of Watlington, and they remained part of my horizon for four days, eventually vanishing in a blue-sky haze near Uffington. They never offended me, though; quite the opposite. It was good to see real life chugging onwards as I glided indulgently across the landscape, and better still, the power station, and its changing position from my viewpoint, gave me a powerful sense of my own locomotion.

The Streatley to Letcombe Regis stretch, where there really is nothing to break the flow, was my longest day’s walk, and it was great to have such good company. I love walking alone, going at exactly the pace that suits only me, but it is quite possible to have too much of your own company. It was a blazing spring Saturday, and the chalk track dazzled phosphorescently. You could often see it miles ahead or behind, a pale corduroy ribbon across the green swells of downland. Far below to our right, the vale shimmered in a gentle heat haze. In the fields at our side, skylarks trilled and hares squared up to each other as we strode by, laughing and gulping lungfuls of freedom.

Up here, it was far easier to raise the spirits of long-gone farmers and drovers, merchants and messengers. Walking ancient paths is hugely powerful, for it places us directly in touch with our ancestors (‘Foot of Briton, formal Roman/Saxon, Dane and Sussex yeoman’, as Andrew Young had it on the South Downs Way). This is very much part of their magic, for we share these ways with the pounding feet of countless unknown others. It is a sensation that we will only ever get on foot, for not only are we on exactly the same routes as our forefathers, we are also travelling in precisely the same way and at the same speed as them. And it is the perfect speed for contemplation and revelation.

Along this prehistoric motorway that winds its way through the voluptuous curves and swells of the downs, great hill forts punctuate the way like ancient service stations. Segsbury, Uffington, Liddington and Barbury are all on the lip itself of the ridge, while the track generally held back in its lee, unseen from below. There’s little evidence that they were ever used defensively, and it was far more pleasant to imagine them as gathering places for travellers and pilgrims, somewhere to refuel, stock up, pay respects and swap news or gossip. Uffington is the overlord of the clan, the mighty ridges of its fort visible for miles either side, and its indeterminately ancient chalk ‘horse’ (or dragon, or cat, or serpent) a fine example of early advertising to the lowland tribes.

A mile or so beyond Uffington is Wayland’s Smithy, the most powerfully atmospheric neolithic relic on the entire Ridgeway. Usually described only as a burial chamber, it is so much more than that. People may indeed have been buried there, but it is no municipal graveyard, for this has long been a place of celebration and ceremonial focus, a point of power for all time. Look at it on Google Earth, and two fields further along the Ridgeway you’ll see another of Wiltshire’s famous features, a crop circle. This one is in the shape of a gorgeously geometric jellyfish, pertly swimming its way upfield. I just love Wiltshire, and it was such a pleasure to be back there and, even more so, to have walked there from suburban Hertfordshire. Crop circles and UFOs, tumps and relics, crazy pagans and beer that can fell a frisky bullock all make it one of our most exhilarating counties to visit. Even in the trim little towns, where posters advertise tennis tournaments and whist drives at the Conservative Club, there’s the sense that, just beneath the sensible frocks and comfy jumpers, there are tattooed warriors waiting to burst out.

One of my favourite photos of my dear departed dog Patsy was taken as we walked this bit of the Ridgeway on a similarly bright spring day in 1999. As I passed the spot where I had taken the photo, a little vortex of wind suddenly whipped up on the path just in front of me. Chalk dust and a couple of leaves spun round and round in a perfect circle about 18 inches high, and I just knew it was her. She spent hours of her life spinning in circles, chasing her tail; virtually anything would set her off. ‘Hello Pats,’ I whispered, my eyes prickling. The vortex vanished, a solitary leaf floating out of it and off up the path. I followed it up into Wayland’s Smithy, settled against the trunk of a massive beech tree, and fell into a deep, contented sleep.