The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (19 page)

I dreaded walking where there was no path
And pressed with cautious tread the meadow swath
And always turned to look with wary eye
And always feared the owner coming by;
Yet everything about where I had gone
Appeared so beautiful I ventured on
And when I gained the road where all are free
I fancied every stranger frowned at me
And every kinder look appeared to say
‘You’ve been on trespass in your walk today’.

Caution, dread, wary, fear, frown, trespass: words with which any modern walker is all too familiar. But there are signs already that Clare’s mind is troubled way more than it should be by such matters. ‘I fancied every stranger frowned at me’ (even as he walks on the open road) is the key line here: most people he passed by would surely have been wrapped up in their own minds and worlds, scarcely even acknowledging the furtive poet skittering by, muttering to himself. And this is why we remember John Clare today, not just for his lyrical power, but for the delusions and mental decline that eventually sent him to the madhouse.

For someone who never had much to begin with, it was Clare’s extreme sense of loss that defined his life, informed his poetry and ultimately destroyed his sanity. His first-hand witness of the effects of enclosure both confirmed and exacerbated this, but it was by no means a unique example. The lost figure of Mary Joyce, his first love at school, haunts his work throughout. She came from a smarter background than him, so her father forbade any further alliance and, although she remained unmarried in the neighbouring village of Glinton for the rest of her life, it is not believed that they ever spoke again. Even when the sad news of her death in a house fire in 1838 reached him, he continued to think and write of her as his second wife and pine for her by name in poems and diary entries for the rest of his days. She had long since transcended from being a flesh-and-blood Northamptonshire wench into a totem for all that had gone: not just first love, nor the commons and paths, but childhood, innocence, comradeship, freedom, easy sexuality, his status as pin-up of the chattering classes. Family too. John was born a twin, but his sister – a far stronger baby than him – died after a few days. Surprisingly little is made of this in Clare’s numerous biographies, but it must have set in stone the heartbreaking emptiness and perhaps his sense of viewing life from the sidelines that stalked him for ever.

With some irony, if you care to visit Clare’s native country today (and you should), it is its sense of openness that first strikes. Big-sky country, it’s a place of cornfields and cornflowers, poppies and skylarks, languorous clouds, good pubs, woods and furzey commons (at least in early summer, when I was there. Heavy, sodden soils and vicious north-easterly fronts – ‘Flood bellowing rivers and wind roaring woods’ – are its lot come the winter). Church spires are still the tallest things for miles around. Many of the natural (and indeed man-made) features of Clare’s tender verse can still be found, and there are innumerable good paths and open spaces binding them together. Compared with many other rural parts of the country, this seems to be an unsung walkers’ paradise. But then, unlike Clare, we have no intimate knowledge of just how much more free it once was, for we are measuring our sense of its accessibility from a very different base. On top of that, Clare was witnessing the area as it hurtled into the modern age: enclosures, breakneck industrialisation in the limestone quarries and finally the coming of the railways, all events that traumatised him. Now the spent quarries are designated nature reserves, many of the former railways signposted wildlife corridors or cycle paths and, to the amateur eye, the fields look reassuringly timeless. The leisure age has spun its illusion, and we tumble for it. I don’t suppose Clare would have done.

The Soke is a surprising understudy for the Cotswolds. Shown a picture of villages such as Castor or Barnack, many would guess that they were looking at Something-on-the-Wold or Somewhere-on-the-Water. They share the same geological bedrock of mellow limestone, the same fleshy productivity and easy nature, and are full of similar honey-coloured Georgian piles that set the property sections of the weekend papers ablaze with desire. Yet there are no tourist coach parks here, no flocks of Japanese snappers, no antique emporia, no artisan patisseries flogging cupcakes at two quid a bite. There are barely any places to stay, and none at all in Helpston itself. As I wanted a night in the village, I kipped in the back of my van parked on the verge of what I thought would be a quiet country lane, but which instead proved to be a major route for tractors, muck-spreaders, haybalers and even a few enthusiastic members of the local dogging fraternity. John Clare would be proud, on all counts.

As with most poets, Clare’s popularity has waxed and waned according to changing fashion and prevailing moods. Because of the acute sense of loss that permeates his poetry, he seems to swim back into view whenever times get rough, which may partly account for his growing popularity these days. Writers, composers and artists seem eternally fascinated by him: Edward Thomas, Iain Sinclair, R. S. Thomas, Benjamin Britten, John McKenna, Geoffrey Grigson, Adam Foulds and Edward Bond have all produced major Clare-inspired works, and there have been paintings and exhibitions, radio plays, TV documentaries, dramas and readings galore. One event in Clare’s life seems to capture the artistic imagination far more than any other, and that is the longest walk that he ever undertook, 80 miles in July 1841.

This was no loving, leisurely nature ramble. Clare was escaping an asylum, at High Beach in Epping Forest, to which he had been committed four years earlier. Over four days, with no money or food, and in already ruined shoes, he hobbled from Epping Forest back to Helpston, sticking mostly to the route of the Great North Road, what we now know as the A1. Clare’s journey has enthralled us ever since, and many have felt moved to follow in his fevered footsteps. In the visitors’ book of Helpston parish church, numerous modern-day pilgrims record that they have walked there from Epping, and when recent fundraising efforts were going on to help convert Clare’s birthplace cottage into a museum, the central event was a sponsored walk from High Beach to Helpston, albeit not clinging quite so closely to the thundering Great North Road as had Clare nearly 170 considerably quieter years earlier.

A few days walking his landscape, with a book of his poetry in my satchel, was an absolute pleasure of the purest kind (save for a field of frisky bullocks), but I was starting to feel quite bonkers by the end of it. On some of the walks, I found that I was reheating arguments in my head as I was pushing along paths chemically scythed through fields of corn or stamped through woods. The realisation dawned that this was not a unique occurrence, either. I thought back to my daily walks at home. Many of them inspire me and help produce and foment ideas, but all too many get used to rehearse barbs that I’ll never actually have the guts to use, or to chew over long-flavourless gobbets of ancient grievances. Walking with Clare brought a stark understanding that down that road does lie an unnecessary madness, a raging fury and unspecific, unfillable sense of loss, and it brought me up sharp.

One way to quieten such nonsense is to physically stop walking, and focus instead on something very small and specific: a bud, a hedgerow flower, a leaf, an insect, a fern, the bark of a tree, the play of light on water or of water on rock (this is one of the reasons that picking blackberries, bilberries or mushrooms is so therapeutic). Mentally note down every detail of it and be prepared to wonder at its perfect design. Spend as much time as you dare in the pursuit. The eye and the brain are refocused, and you can continue in a far humbler frame of mind. Doing this also seems entirely appropriate in the company of John Clare, for it is his unerring instinct for the tiny details of the natural cycle that marks him out from a slew of contemporary nature poets, usually men of means, as they wandered and declaimed through the countryside.

Perhaps though, it only leads to another kind of madness, one in which the perfection of nature only sharpens in relief the dreary mess that we tend to make of it. All I can tell you is the answer that came as I put flowers on John Clare’s grave in Helpston churchyard. They were a gorgeous bunch of pungent Sweet Williams, a pound in the honesty box – well, honesty Asda bag – at the farm opposite his birthplace. It seemed thrillingly appropriate, for William was the name of his penultimate son; William Parker, in fact, for Parker was John’s father’s first name and grandfather’s surname. I smiled at a small link cemented, for William Parker was my grandfather’s name too, a man I knew only briefly. Another twinge of loss fluttered by.

Clare’s grave is a low slab of local stone, with his details on one side and a defiant motto on the other. Only, the final letter of the sentence, an ‘E’, temporarily disappeared from my sight – and indeed, lichen seems to be doing its best quietly to obliterate it.

‘A POET IS BORN NOT MAD,’ it said.

The calm before the storm: Wainwright’s Coast to Coast path, at Ennerdale Water, Cumbria

Stuff. More Stuff than can possibly be good for you. Do I really need quite so much Stuff just to go for a walk? And does that Stuff really need to be quite so hi-tech, streamlined, lightweight, ergonomic, as-tested-by-NASA and so witheringly expensive? Ah yes, sir, you could compromise your safety, your health, your comfort and quite possibly YOUR LIFE by using some old crap from the Army & Navy store, but is it really worth the risk? Gosh, I never knew that a pair of socks could make that much difference.

But I fall for it, hook, line and very costly sinker. Of course I do. I’ll sit through an advert break on the television and shout abuse at the stupid bints who are prepared to pay 60 quid for a tub of cream because it’s rammed full of made-up science as demonstrated by jiggly graphics, but now I’m standing in the outdoor shop, wallet prised open ready to be raped, and I’m willing myself to believe the exact same guff about rucksacks, bivvy bags, waterproofs, tents, camping mats, cookers, fleeces, trousers, T-shirts, boots and whatever other exorbitantly priced nonsense they can persuade me to buy in the next hour.

Before setting out to walk the Ridgeway, I had an image of myself as a gentleman stroller of the old school, and that I was going to remain entirely aloof from the marketing mania that has now eaten the walking industry alive. There I’d be, soaking up the oldest path in the country in dubbined leather boots, cotton, linen, silk and tweed, a direct descendant, both spiritually and sartorially, of the tribes and travellers who had gone before. I’d sniff haughtily at the Gore-Tex-clad masses as they crinkled past, sounding like a thousand crisp packets being opened.

With some glee, I stumbled online across the manifesto of the Band of Historical Hillwalkers, which ‘advocates the exploration of the great outdoors wearing attire made by underpaid adult craftsmen in the United Kingdom, as opposed to fashion-wear made by underpaid children in the Pacific Rim’. My people! I was almost ready to sign up.

Tweed, wool and leather boots are worn in preference to inferior man-made materials. The BHHW considers velcro, gortex [sic] and other such imposters objectionable and the wearing thereof is politely discouraged.

Our mandate is to get outside, breath the air and engage with the world for a few moments. Along the way we make pinhole photographs or draw and paint the scenes before us, taking time to be present and amazed by the world. Whether hiking 15 miles or just strolling a few hundred yards onto a salt marsh the Historical Hillwalker pauses and interprets the scene before them, seeing the world rather than merely glancing at it. In this way we engage with the colours, the play of light and the atmosphere and by doing so become whole and happier.

I wanted to believe it; I truly did. But the text just became more and more pompous, and the photos – all fully Fuji digital, rather than pinhole – were mainly of people in jeans and anoraks wandering across the marshes of north Kent, or looking terribly pleased with themselves in various pubs. Artist Billy Childish was one of the founder members, but it seems that he’s not much involved these days, and, in an interview in
Time Out
in February 2010, declared that he was forming a new outfit, the Damp Tweed and Hobnails Walking Association, not that there’s been any mention of it since. I too would have to find my own style, and my own way.

‘All the gear and no idea’ has been a phrase that I’ve bumped up against lots in recent years. I first heard it when interviewing a veteran surfer in Pembrokeshire as he described the urban numpties, whose training mainly consisted of reading the weekend-paper lifestyle sections, and who were turning up in increasing numbers on the beach that he’d surfed for decades. I could see it for myself on a daily basis when they opened up mountain-bike tracks, including a hairy two-mile descent, on the mountain above my house, where I’d walked the dog for years. All too often, the ones being winched off the slopes in a pool of blood and shattered bone were the ones kitted out in the brightest, newest lycra, the flashiest, most aerodynamic helmets and on bikes that cost way more than I’d ever paid for a car.

Popping out for a few essentials for my walk along the Ridgeway, I was soon a good 500 quid down. I say popping out, but in fact it was a highly stressful two-day canter around mid-Wales and the Borders, a breathless race against the clock to snap up that all-important last pair of gloves with essential ThermaLite® technology. I started as I meant to continue, in an old-fashioned gentlemen’s outfitters in Ludlow, being soothed by the sound of the ticking clock and the calm tones of the solicitous assistant. In an ideal world, they would have kitted me out from head to foot, like a Victorian explorer heading off to the Tropics, but it quickly became apparent that, for all their tweedy loveliness, it wasn’t going to suffice. As the clock ticked down to retail closing time, I screeched into Shrewsbury and shuttled frantically between the town’s two main outdoor supplies shops.

They are the two chains that you’ll find in most mediumsized British towns: Millets and Blacks. They are also owned by the same company, and appear to be run in artificial competition with each other, even, as I discovered in Shrewsbury, to the point where the branches of each are just yards apart on the same street – all part of the illusion of choice. Blacks like to aim themselves at the more aspirational outdoorsy type, the serious sort who truly believes that he’ll be bivouacking through the Pyrenees, even if all the pricey gear he buys in readiness only ever makes it as far as the camping field behind a pub in the Malverns. They are big on rugged, ballsy euphemism: a water bottle is a Complete Integrated Hydration System, and you’ll get withering looks if you’re not sure of the difference between a daysack, a backpack, a rucksack, a ramblesack, a belt pack or a compression sack. They’re big too on must-have, trademarked technology that you’d never heard of three seconds earlier: don’t even think of buying poles without an integral AntiShock
^®
system, a GPS with no HotFix
^™
satellite technology, or a pack that’s lacking an Excel
^®
300D Ripstop polyester contrast, let alone a Self Adjust carry system and Bi-Radial
^®
chassis. I have made none of those up. Looking you straight in the eye while they reel off these fantastical technologies will be earnest young men in branded fleeces and bum-fluff beards, who promise you that that particular bit of kit saved their bacon last year when they were yomping across the Faroe Islands. Cowed into submission, you buy it all.

Across the street in Millets, it was all aimed at a far camper camper. The shop assistants were mumsy types and chatty fat lads with highlights, and while Blacks had been an ocean of khaki and frowning colours, Millets were a party of dayglo in multiple plastics. If Blacks were for gadget freaks and wannabe survivalists, Millets were unashamedly pitched at claques of lasses wanting all the gear for a totally wazzed-up weekend at some festival off the M4. Once the 40 quid Cath Kidstonesque tent had been erected, pissed and puked out of, shagged in and tripped over, it would be blearily abandoned, along with a thousand sagging compatriots, to the primordial ooze.

The Ridgeway walk, though, had been a hop from one pre-booked B&B to the next, but to do the Coast to Coast, I was notching it up a couple of gears. I’d loved the walk, the idea of the trail and the stately progress across the landscape, but I’d ended up in the B&B routine of having breakfast around eight and then being back on the path and walking from about nine. Most days, I seem to reach my destination for that evening’s stop between five and six. It was like going to the office, a proper 9 to 5, more so than my normal life has been for 20 years, and it had begun to piss me royally off. For starters, I was only ever seeing the landscape and the wildlife at exactly the same time every day, and was missing the two best bits – sunrise and sunset, when so much of the world, both this one and the ones beyond, come dazzlingly to life. For my last day’s Ridgeway walk down into Avebury, I’d asked the B&B if I could forgo the breakfast, get a packed lunch instead, and headed out of there at six, just as the sun was inching up and casting its buttery light over the dewy slopes. I saw more wildlife in those first few hours than I had throughout the previous week.

For the Coast to Coast therefore, I was going to mix it up: stay at some B&Bs, pubs and maybe the odd hotel as a treat, but also perhaps take a tent and a bivouac (bivvy) bag, so that I could camp or sleep rough as the mood took me. Neither was I going to pre-book anything except the first night’s accommodation, so that I could wing it, both in terms of daily distance travelled and even in terms of my chosen route. Freedom on the trail. I would need, therefore, a great deal more Stuff.

Mindful of the stress and expense of that pre-Ridgeway shopping crawl, I went online. Hours later, with my eyes and brain nearly bleeding, I wrenched myself away from my laptop, way more confused than I’d been beforehand. And I’d bought nothing. Instead, I’d devoured scores of angry and illiterate reviews, worried just how great was the difference between a three-star- and a four-star-rated camping mat, watched a few YouTube videos of shaven-headed Americans cooking survivalist rations in the woods and read endless autistic lists of kit posted on forums by lads called JungleWarrior and BornSurvivor (a.k.a. Kevin of South Shields and Darren of Biggleswade). In short, I’d been scared silly. Even more so by a forum dedicated solely to the Coast to Coast path, where I’d read a portentous thread that started with a warning, posted in March, that thanks to Julia Bradbury’s television series about the route that had been aired the previous year, accommodation was fast being snapped up, especially for the peak months of May, June and September. I was walking it in May, and reading this, with only the first night’s accommodation booked, just three days before setting off. Visions of limping my way across England, kipping in hedgerows like an old tramp and hanging round the bins at the back of chippies and pubs began to swim before my bloodshot eyes.

To get any idea of the place that walking holds within the modern British psyche, you have to do the Coast to Coast. Officially, it’s not
The
Coast to Coast, but
A
Coast to Coast walk, as detailed in his obsessively fastidious manner by Alfred Wainwright, the undisputed god of the rambling curmudgeon. That subtle difference between the definite and indefinite articles is crucial. Wainwright wanted to prove that you could stitch together your own long-distance path out of existing rights of way, and first published his account of doing just that in 1972. In his introduction to the book of his walk, he stated that he wanted to ‘encourage in others the ambition to devise with the aid of maps their own cross-country marathons and not be merely followers of other people’s routes’. Nearly 40 years on, the thousands tramping religiously in his wake, sticking with dog-like devotion to every twist, turn, stile and gate mentioned in his book, would, I suspect, bewilder him and make him despise humanity even more than he already did. For his path, only one of the infinite possible routes to take you from one side to the other, is now Britain’s most popular long-distance walk, and the second busiest in the world, with tens of thousands attempting it every year.

To the authorities, Wainwright’s CtC is an unending headache. Despite being the nation’s favourite, it is not a recognised LDP (Long Distance Path). Within the Lake District National Park, it is official policy not to signpost it at all, while elsewhere way-marking is sporadic and often unofficial, sometimes as vague as a painted arrow on a rock. Meanwhile, other minor footpaths and tourist-oriented circular walks, each with a fraction of the footfall of Wainwright’s behemoth, are relentlessly promoted and signed. It’s like sticking up a thousand signposts to guide motorists along every B-road and country lane in an area, while studiously ignoring the six-lane motorway that thunders through the middle of them. Even Ordnance Survey, slavish to every diktat of government, be it from Whitehall or the Town Hall, plaster the map with the likes of the Taff Trail and the Barnsley Boundary Walk, while pretending that Britain’s most popular path is not there.

As policy, it’s probably counter-productive too. The renegade nature of the route surely only boosts its numbers, for many walkers like to feel like outlaws, even when they are locked in a multi-coloured snake of fellow outlaws 200 miles long. As they stride by, the idea that they are cocking a snook at the authorities puts a definite spring in their step, makes them feel young and radical again. And by ignoring the jazzy leaflets in the hotels and the plaintive signs to try the thrills of the officially sanctioned West Ackerdale Way instead, they know that they have chosen the rebel path. It’s a tiny victory, and a little hollow when you’re fighting over the last teacake in a wayside café crowded with other CtC pilgrims, but it’ll have to do.