The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (21 page)

At the youth hostel, I found an open barn, its concrete floor providing little in the way of comfort, but at least its roof worked in keeping the rain off. Hunched on the floor, soaked and freezing, I watched the water splash down off the greenery and drifted into a stiff, uncomfortable doze to its rhythm. Feverish dreams of my own bed skittered across my subconscious, and when I woke up, I knew that I was going home.

The people who worked in the youth hostel thought otherwise. ‘No come on, you just need to relax a bit, and you’ll be on your way in no time,’ I was assured by Susan, an assistant at the hostel, as she cooked breakfast for me and – wouldn’t you know it – the two Iowans that I’d met the previous day in that terrible pub. She was quite magnificent, not flinching at all when she came down into the dayroom to find a wet, bedraggled stranger huddled in a chair, whimpering. ‘Lots of people have a bit of a shock at the beginning of the Coast to Coast,’ she continued. ‘It’s completely normal. You wouldn’t want to give it up so soon, would you?’ YES! Yes, I would. From whichever angle the question was posed, only one answer came booming back.

The taxi driver who took me to Whitehaven train station was even nicer. To him, giving up the CtC after two short days and about 20 miles was nothing to be ashamed of. I wasn’t, but it was very kind of him to reassure me anyway, telling me how he’d once picked up an American lady who’d given the walk up in Sandwith, the first village on the trail and about a mile inland from its beginning at St Bees Head. ‘She said that she hadn’t realised there were going to be hills.’

On the eight-hour train journey home, I had plenty of time to mull over my sharp exit from Britain’s favourite long-distance path. As per usual, this boiled down to the sticky question of exactly what I was going to tell people, which little excuses I would hide behind. There was the lack of accommodation. The apparently poor standards and high prices of the rooms that remained, and of the food and drink on offer. The zombiefied mass march across the country, a regiment of rambling beards, outdoor OCD and half-a-bitters. The relentlessly upbeat camaraderie of my fellow trailblazers that had succeeded only in making me feel even more alone.

Ah. The real truth.

I was lonely, and envious of those boring beardy bastards, smugly anticipating their chicken chasseur a week on Sunday. However hard I scoff at them, they had got it right and I had got it drastically wrong.

Somewhere past Preston, an idea seeped into my battered brain, and I perked right up. I’d failed to do Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, but it would be far truer to his legacy to devise one of my own and walk that instead. And not across northern England, either – this latest sorry saga had been yet one more in a lifetime’s litany of unfortunate experiences of the Lake District. I know how passionately many people adore it, and I can absolutely understand why, but it’s always seemed alien to me, succeeding in being both surly and twee at the same time. The relentless Outward Bound heartiness, the cagoules and calendars, the fell-bagging one-upmanship – it all left me as cold as a midsummer day in Witherslack. Years ago, I remember hearing a warning broadcast on the radio on some bank holiday Monday that ‘the Lake District is full,’ roadblocks were in place, the M6 was nose-to-tail and on no account should would-be daytrippers attempt to go there. This made it sound less like an area of stunning natural wonder, and more like an out-of-town retail park. Which, for very many people, it is.

As Cheshire rolled by and the far emptier hills of Wales loomed lovely on the horizon, I remembered Harri Webb’s immortal verse: ‘What Wales needs, and has always lacked the most / Is, instead of an eastern boundary, an East Coast.’ That was it! I would create and walk a Welsh Coast to Coast, starting with my feet in one of the rivers that form the England–Wales border and heading home to cool my toes in the tidal waters of the Dyfiestuary, just three miles from my front door. There was the added advantage that such a route would indeed take me across the entire width of Wales, but at its narrowest point, only 50-odd miles. After days of feeling nothing but vague, creeping dread, excitement pounded through my veins and I couldn’t wait to get home and get the maps out.

Better still, I could devise a route that took me across my adopted home county of Montgomeryshire, for it is the only one of the old Welsh thirteen that touches both sides, from the anglicised redbrick of borderland market towns to
Cymraeg
huddles hewn out of sweat and slate. Three days I decided it would take me, and not much wanting another night crying in a wet bivvy bag, I promptly found and booked a couple of B&Bs and set to working out a route that incorporated them. The options were glorious, and limitless.

A few days later, my partner dropped me off early one morning on the border, between Bishop’s Castle and Montgomery town. It was the obvious place to start: not only does the modern border run along the Caebitra river, but the spot is perfectly dissected by Offa’s Dyke, that mighty eighth-century bulwark between the tribes of Mercia and Wales. I paddled in the river, put my boots back on and set off on my three-day walk homeward. By car, the journey had taken an hour and a quarter.

For the first few miles, I walked along the Offa’s Dyke path, one of the loveliest of all our National Trails as it edges its way through the land that is neither England nor Wales, but hovers between them both, a delicious chimera. At this point, the path hugs the dyke itself and exactly straddles the official border. Puddles of bluebells could be seen shimmering in the hollows of the earthwork rampart, orchids in outrageous colours winked from the grass banks, the brand new leaves of oak, ash and beech trees trumpeted their recent return to life. I bumped into two groups of Offa’s Dyke walkers in swift succession, and had the same conversation both times. ‘Doing the whole thing?’ I was asked as I approached. ‘No, walking home to the other side of Wales, and making it up as I go along,’ I replied smugly.

In Montgomery, I had a pint of local scrumpy, which I fancifully thought might attune me to the rhythm of the place, but which turned out to be vile and left me burping acidically all afternoon. I wouldn’t dream of saying that that was the spirit of the place, although there is a culverted stream under the town called the Shitebrook, so maybe it’s not quite as Jane Austen as it first looks. Climbing up to the castle, a regular favourite, I spotted a sign for the Montgomeryshire war memorial, which I’d never visited before. It seemed like an appropriate stop on a pilgrimage across the county, so I followed the path high up on to the top of Town Hill, just over a thousand feet above sea level. The monument was soberly impressive, but the view thrilled me viscerally: not only was it an endless panorama of borderland loveliness, but it was the first time I’d seen from the same spot both the Clee Hills in Shropshire, behind which I’d grown up, and Cadair Idris, above the village I now lived in. My whole life in one view: I hadn’t realised it was even possible.

Though I say so myself, my invented Welsh Coast to Coast (though I’ll settle for the Montgomeryshire Way or, if that’s already taken, the Parker Trail) was stunning, and gave me everything that the English one hadn’t. I had numerous easy chats, and some great laughs, with people en route: farmers in the fields, old ladies hanging out their washing, workmen on the roads, a shopkeeper or two, landladies and regulars in a few pubs, mothers pushing prams, the mobile librarian, an old boy nailing up the parish notices on a chapel board. Staying with complete strangers in B&Bs quite near home is a novel experience too, giving you unexpected new angles on places you thought were so familiar, and both were great fun as well.

The variety of paths was similarly intoxicating. The most exciting were the sinuous green lanes, winding almost subversively under their leafy canopies around the edges of fields and woods. There were little worn ways grooved into fields, not much more than sheep tracks, a canal towpath and walks along river meadows, glorious strides through the whole landscaped length of the Gregynog estate, sweet little paths that tiptoed through bluebell woods, farm drives, rickety bridges, and zig-zags up and down the many hills. Quite a few country lanes filled in the gaps, and they were some of the best bits of all: high hedgerows bursting with colourful life and sudden views over gates. Not once did I wish I was on a rocky fell.

In one tiny village, there was a nasty blast from the past when I saw a sign hanging on the side of a stile, its lettering faded, but the words still able to burn into my heart:

FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE
Public Rights of Way are CLOSED in Powys.
Maximum Fine for use £5000.

How quickly, and how sickly, it all came back. The 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth had been my baptism of fire to rural life. I’d moved to Wales the previous summer, and had then experienced the wettest, greyest autumn on record (in our local weather station, rain was recorded on every single consecutive day for over three months), followed by a cloudy, damp winter. Just as March – and hope – approached, animals started blistering and footpaths were snapped shut all over the country, even in places miles from any outbreak. Real worry, paranoia and isolation hung over the countryside like a poisonous miasma.

The speed with which these signs had gone up had staggered me at the time – horrified me, if I’m honest. Within just a couple of days, they had turned up on every obscure, forgotten path and bridleway. It was impossible not to compare such brutal efficiency in getting the things closed with the eternally lackadaisical approach to getting blocked ones open. And no path was left unshut. The only place for miles around that I was able to walk the dog was the nearby four-mile beach from Borth to the Dyfi estuary, though there were angry demands in the local paper to close even that, but it was considered logisitically impossible. The boardwalk paths through the dunes were soon taped off, however, as were numerous urban tarmac paths in towns, floodlit cuts behind shops and through housing estates, tracks that hadn’t felt a cloven hoof along their length for centuries, if ever. It was a ridiculous over-reaction, and its lingering unease lasted years.

With hindsight, we can see now that the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001, and the hysterical blanket closure of footpaths that it sparked, ended up doing the cause of public access to the land no end of good. To lose every path in an instant was a wake-up call like no other, and to everyone. It wasn’t just the beardies and the hearties moaning, it was the folk who liked a nice run out into the country on a Sunday afternoon, the people wanting to walk their dogs or take the kids somewhere that they could charge around and let off steam. Rural tourism collapsed, the effects rippling through the whole community and alarming even the most loutish of local politicians. It was an apocalyptic vision of what could so easily be, and people didn’t like it at all.

It wasn’t even an effective way of dealing with the problem. There have been outbreaks of foot-and-mouth since, which have been successfully dealt with in a far more localised way. The 2001 outbreak, and the mass, aggressive closure of all rights of way and most common land, felt like the last stand of an old order, especially as it coincided with the enactment of the Countryside and Rights of Way (CROW) Act 2000, the so-called ‘right to roam’. Things would never be the same again.

Researching this book, when I’ve told English rambling campaigners where I live in Wales, there’s been a common response, along the lines of, ‘Oh, I don’t go walking in Wales. Too many closed paths.’ End of. Walking across the width of Wales, I came across only two that were completely inaccessible, each necessitating a bit of a detour, some scrambling over gates and, in one case, an encounter with a farmer that turned into a very enjoyable chat about local history and characters. Only once in 25 years of walking in Wales have I been threatened and forcibly turfed off the land, but I’ve lost count of the many illuminating and entertaining conversations ignited by having to ask for a little guidance.

It might sound strange to those of an absolutist way of thinking, but the Welsh way has at its core something even more precious, democratic even, than the holy grail of well-waymarked routes for all to march down. There is a danger that, when we walk the prescribed routes, we become stuck in their groove, sometimes at the expense of the wider context of the landscape and its evolution. The boundaries in Wales – physically in this instance, and ethereally in so many others – are more blurred and often more interesting. You have to ask, to engage with the people for whom every lump and seam of the land has a story to tell: they are as intrinsic to the path as the stones underfoot or the flowers in the hedgerow.

This less official, and considerably less officious, Welsh way has a long tradition. As a schoolboy on the run, Thomas de Quincey, later the author of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, wandered as a vagabond through Wales for a couple of months in the summer of 1802. He noted that there was ‘no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too generally upon the great roads of England, to the pedestrian style of travelling’. From the same era, the less charitable English response to walkers was captured by Pastor Karl Philipp Moritz, a German who set about walking from London to the Peak District. His diary records his amazement at the jeering and abuse he received everywhere, particularly from those on stagecoaches, and the way inn landlords took one look at his pedestrian attire and shunted him immediately into the worst rooms. ‘Why do the English disparage walkers so much?’ he asked a fellow traveller. ‘Because we are too rich, too lazy and too proud,’ came the reply.

More than 200 years later, it’s a distinction that endures, and, from the Welsh point of view, thank God that it does. In the same way that walking is woven into the natural fabric of life, rather than ring-fenced apart from it, so it is with the Welsh landscape. You can, of course, choose to see it purely as an aesthetic display, a succession of two-dimensional picture postcards; plenty do. But dig just a little deeper into the cultural, social and economic contexts that run through the landscape in recurring leitmotifs, and it comes alive in entirely new, and infinitely richer, ways.