The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (14 page)

Prior to doing the Ridgeway, people had warned me that the most knackering part of it was dropping down to your overnight stop in the villages below, and climbing back up again the next morning. The same is said of the South Downs Way, a similar chalk ridge route. I found it a wonderful aspect of the walk, a kind of daily decompression and chance to contextualise the high way within its wider geography, to head off the bone dry tops down to the welcome springs, brooks and streams below. Watering was very much the theme, for there are some marvellous pubs in those villages too; a world away, thankfully, from the overbaked fakes of the Chilterns.

These were journeys between seasons too. The vale is only 300–400 feet beneath the ridge, yet it was weeks ahead in its spring plumage. Up on the Ridgeway, hawthorn blossom was tight and tentative, budding leaves looked delicate enough to be blown away with one gust, excitable daffodils waved in the breeze. Down below, cherry and apple blossom frothed lustily, magnolias swung in pendulous bloom, the leaves on the trees danced full and crunchy, tulips and bluebells lit up gardens and verges. I never tired of walking slowly up and down through this progression, one of English nature’s finest shows, and I couldn’t quite believe how many B&B owners told me they usually had to drive their Ridgeway walkers back up on to the trail in the morning. Being a puritan at heart, I was keen not to get into a car for the duration of the walk, not to break the spell and bring myself crashing back to normality. That could wait.

Loveliest of all the ascents from the vale back up to the Ridgeway came one sunny Sunday morning. I left the village in which I’d stayed just as the four-bell peal of the medieval church was repeating its call, over and over, to morning service. The only other sound was the excitable twittering of birds in the blossom-heavy trees. Sunday mornings have always been my favourite time of the week, their atmosphere like no other. Time hangs more languidly, and there is an indefinable sense of freedom and possibility stretching far into the distance. It was there in my childhood when my dad would drive us through empty streets to be the first at the doors of the swimming baths. It thrilled me in my Brum dancing years, catching the first bus of the morning back from some city-centre club or squat party, the bizarre mix of passengers – us hollow-eyed ravers and a gaggle of Jamaican ladies in fabulous hats on their way to church – only making it more special. Nor is the sensation confined to still-slumbering urban streets. Even in my tiny Welsh village, where, to the untrained eye, a Sunday morning looks much the same as any other, there is something sweeter and less hurried in the air, and it was there in bucketfuls as I marched and sang my way back up to the path, the church bells ringing and my mind as playful as a box of kittens.

If Didcot power station is the elephant in the room on the eastern section of the trail, then Swindon is its westerly equivalent. Wiltshire’s largest town, more than three times the size of Salisbury, struggles to shake off its image as a corpulent, corporate nowheresville, fed by the intravenous drips of the Great Western Railway and M4. Famous for producing trains, pneumatic blondes – Diana Dors, Melinda Messenger and Billie Piper – and having the most terrifying roundabout in the land, the massive sarsen stone chip on its shoulder is periodically polished every time there’s one of those competitions for city status between the usual municipally desperate suspects. In 1999, the town council made one of its regular requests for an upgrade, only to be told by the Home Office that its bid was ‘too materialistic’. As both rebuff and proof of the charge, Swindon did, however, win the competition to become the UK’s first official twin town to Walt Disney World in Florida.

More fittingly perhaps, Swindon’s real twin town was revealed to be Slough, in Ricky Gervais’s excruciating series
The Office
, when the decision was taken to consolidate both branches of the Wernham Hogg paper company in the same place. Both towns evoke exactly the right image of open-plan tedium, of designated parking space one-upmanship on grey industrial estates and instantly regretted fumbles at the Christmas party. It was some surprise, therefore, when the National Trust relocated their headquarters to Swindon in 2005. Not everyone was happy: one manager confided to the
Financial Times
that ‘I can’t think of anywhere worse.’

The arrival of the NT in town caused some significant ripples in the local property market, if not on the new estates that make up the bulk of Swindon itself. Period properties in nearby villages were snapped up as soon as they landed on the market, and it only served to widen the suspicious divide between town and country. From the Iron Age hill fort at Liddington, just off the Ridgeway, I gazed down on the motorway and the massive town still spreading like a stain beyond it. Though if you look on the toposcope there, erected as a millennium project by Liddington parish council, you’d be hard pressed to work out quite what you were looking at. The arrow pointing towards the town is marked as to Cirencester, nearly 15 miles beyond. London, Oxford and Marlborough – none of which you can see – are marked. Swindon, which you cannot miss, is not. If Liddingtonians had their way, you feel, the mile (and several grand) gap between their village and the outer reaches of the eternal city-in-waiting would be landmined.

The trail was drawing to a close. As I marched like a centurion across the Marlborough Downs towards Avebury, the feeling of regret about finishing became stronger with every step. During my week on the Ridegway, the niggles and frets of daily life had been replaced with a calm certainty that my only goal was the next mile and the next view. Everything suddenly seemed so absurdly simple, that love and landscape were all that I needed. As I walked: I inhaled the words of Richard Jefferies, that great Victorian worshipper of these Wiltshire paths and downs: ‘It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now.’

With only about half a mile to go, I saw a slight figure coming along the track towards me, under a rucksack much the same size. It was obviously a fellow Ridgeway walker, but one who was only just setting out. Most unexpectedly, I felt such a surge of jealousy towards her, of all the wonderful things she was going to see, smell, hear, think and feel over the next week. We chatted like long-lost cousins, and I lapped up her excitement. A nurse near Sheffield, she’d decided a couple of years ago to do an annual solo walk on a long-distance path; this was her third after the Dales Way from Yorkshire to Cumbria and the West Highland Way in Scotland. Strangely, my only previous LDP walk had also been along the Dales Way, though I was 15 at the time and it was more of a long pub crawl, interspersed with some walking and the odd bus trip when we were too hung-over to move unaided. I told her – possibly with a little too much evangelistic zeal – that I was sure it was better to finish at Avebury, rather than Ivinghoe, despite what all the guidebooks said. Coming into Avebury really did feel like the right conclusion, the end of a pastoral symphony that had been almost imperceptibly swelling to a glorious climax. Either way, she was going to have a great time, and we hugged each other goodbye, two complete strangers united for just a few minutes, but in the same cause. I crossed the line, if there had been a line, one week and two hours after leaving Ivinghoe Beacon, and a new addiction had begun.

To walk an ancient path, you probably need to go no further than a couple of miles from your front door. Although headline grabbers like the Ridgeway, the Icknield Way, the Sweet Track on the Somerset Levels or the Golden Road in the Preseli Mountains of Pembrokeshire make much of their undoubted antiquity, the footpath network everywhere takes you straight back deep into history, for they are some of the oldest features in our landscape. If you’re in the right frame of mind, you can feel it, those moments when suddenly you’re walking where thousands have gone before you, passing the same trees, fording the same streams and breathing the same champagne air. There are tell-tale signs on the map and ground alike: odd dog-leg routes edging around long-vanished boundaries, holloways and green lanes sunk like pensioners into comfy armchairs, smugglers and drovers routes heading high over the hills, church ways, pilgrimage routes, monks’ trods, herepaths, salt ways, drift ways and portways.

Into the higgledy-piggledy ancient British network of tracks and paths came the methodical Romans, who sliced their roads through the old ways in much the same way that we do with motorways now. In some parts of the country, the pattern left by the Romans endures still: where I live in mid-Wales, for instance, almost all of our market towns are between 15 and 18 miles apart, a day’s march. Many of the Roman roads are now tarmaced and integrated into the modern network, some as great trunk roads such as Watling Street (the A2 from London to Dover and the A5 from London to Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury), Icknield Street (the A38 in the Midlands) and the Fosse Way (the A46 from Leicester to Lincoln and the A37 and A429 in the south-west). Perhaps the most thrilling is the A68 north of Corbridge in Northumberland, the Roman Dere Street. So empty is the landscape and so straight the road, that it is all too possible to lose any sense of perspective and speed, as the many warning signs make clear. Other Roman ways are much-loved B-roads and country lanes, but many were never aggrandised by tarmac and provide some of our most striking bridleways and byways. And they almost always are bridleways or byways, rather than mere footpaths: proof that a route’s historic use, however far back it may date, is still generally used to determine its contemporary status.

Two of the most evocative paths I’ve ever walked have been over some of the best extant stretches of Roman road, both on bleak moorland. One sits high on Blackstone Edge above Rochdale, its tight cobbles and grooved channel like an illustration from a school textbook about the marvels of Roman engineering. Odd, therefore, that there is much academic debate as to whether the track is genuinely Roman or later. No such arguments at the other, north of Ystradfellte in the Fforest Fawr, the splendidly gloomy western part of the Brecon Beacons National Park. There, the cobbles are not quite so intact, but they still impress as the track runs up through a conifer forest in a perfect straight line, before cresting the hill by the ten-foot stone blade of Maen Madoc, its rough Latin inscription still faintly legible on the side. This is part of Sarn Helen, the great legionary causeway from Carmarthen to Conwy, often said to be the last time anyone successfully managed to build a road that unites north and south Wales. There’s some truth in the bitterness: the building of a decent north–south road in Wales has been a stated priority of government since the 1920s. It still is.

Britain’s most celebrated Roman remain, Hadrian’s Wall, is also the site of what is commonly said to be the country’s most expensive footpath. The 84-mile Hadrian’s Wall National Trail was first proposed in 1984, given approval by the government in 1994 and finally opened in 2003. By the standards of the early Long Distance Paths, 19 years might seem a reasonable average from idea to inception, although it should perhaps be remembered that the Wall itself – 80 Roman miles long, and with forts every mile – took only six years to construct. The National Trail’s budget of six million pounds was also rather bigger than Hadrian’s.

Most of the money was spent on compensating landowners for the 30 miles of new path that were needed to drive the project from Wallsend, now swallowed by Newcastle, to Bownesson-Solway, on the Cumbrian coast; it took a dedicated team of 11 officers seven years to sort out the hundreds of claims and complications. The Lonely Planet guide
Walking in Britain
called it a ‘latter-day battle between the Wall’s guardians and the restless natives hereabouts’, the latest in a very long line. In one instance, in order to create a path where none existed near the village of Banks in Cumbria, a compulsory order had to be made – not because the landowner objected, but because, as the council’s own minutes put it, ‘she has an aversion in general to signing legal documents’. No such reticence at the other end of the trail, around the village of Heddon-on-the-Wall, near Newcastle. Despite being one of the least attractive parts of the route, it was here that the bulk of the compensation money was spent. Heddon’s other recent claim to fame was as the epicentre of the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak – another bumper year for the compo.

Some of my favourite old paths are those that were used to go to market. These I imagine to have been supremely sociable ways, alive with chatter and laughter, flirting and gossip. Trouble too at times, of course: the sheer physical graft of shifting goods through muddy ruts, exhaustion and disappointment at a poor day’s trading, even theft and harassment. After finishing the Ridgeway at Avebury, I wanted to go and walk another of Wiltshire’s finest, Maud Heath’s Causeway: not just any old path to market, but quite possibly the grandest in the country. Maud Heath was a fifteenth-century widow from Bremhill, between Calne and Chippenham. Every Wednesday, she walked four miles to market in Chippenham to sell her eggs and poultry, down into the valley of the River Avon and back up the other side into town. The river was notorious for frequent flooding, and in those conditions, the path was treacherous. She fell on numerous occasions, breaking her eggs and ruining her clothes.

On her death in 1474, she left a bequest ‘in land and houses, about Eight Pounds a year, forever to be laid out, in the Highways and Causey leading from Wick Hill to Chippenham Clift’, according to the inscription on a memorial pillar erected in 1698 by the Kellaways bridge over the Avon. This was plenty enough to build a raised walkway across the marshy valley and for it to be maintained by a trust. Not only is the causeway still there, so is the trust, who still meet and pay out grants from the initial investments, more than 500 years later.

Maud Heath’s Causeway is at its most impressive where it soars over the river, elevated on 64 arches above the modern lane by its side. At other places, you’d barely notice it if you didn’t know it was there, a cobbled pavement, home to the same wheelie bins and fag ends you’d find anywhere. What is most touching about the story, though, is that Maud Heath herself never benefited from this most gracious act of generosity, for she was long dead by the time it was constructed. That her name lives on, and is thanked daily, is as fine a legacy as anyone could hope for. The memorial pillar by the bridge ends with the most sweet and enigmatic of inscriptions: ‘Injure me not.’ Is this a prayer for passers-by, a plea to highway engineers, a warning to would-be vandals or a message from beyond the grave from Maud herself?