| Offa's Dyke - South | |
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Soft skills, estuary-wandering, a big lump of stone ....
The alarm woke us early and we responded with the collective urgency of men who had all, independently, decided that a few more minutes couldn't hurt. By the time Bod called — packed, ready, and giving every impression of having been ready for some time — we were still in the loose, unhurried phase of the morning that technically follows breakfast but bears no resemblance to actual preparation. He stood in the hallway regarding the heap of walking gear, the unpacked bags, and the general atmosphere of amiable disorder, and reached, with the quiet resignation of a man who has learned to manage his expectations, for his map. He studied it with great attention. It is, I have come to understand, one of the primary ways he maintains his patience in the company of the rest of us.
We got ourselves together eventually and set off at the not especially early time of eleven o'clock. Bod, as we walked to the cars, mentioned that he had recently been required to undergo training in something called soft skills at work, and that we should therefore expect to see demonstrations of his newly acquired interpersonal capabilities throughout the week. I received this information with polite scepticism. Bod is, by nature and by preference, a man of economy — in words, in gesture, and in the expression of feeling. The idea of him deploying soft skills felt distinctly implausible. Shortly after we set off, however, he addressed a car that was attempting an ill-judged overtake with several well-chosen words, and managed to do so without any accompanying hand gestures whatsoever. Perhaps something had taken root after all.
We drove to Redbrook. first, leaving Bod's car there — our destination for the day — before cramming into mine for the run further south to pick up the start of the path at Chepstow. The town itself was straightforward enough to find, being the last place you reach before driving into the Severn Estuary. Locating the actual start of the route was considerably less so. I parked in a pleasant-looking suburban lane and we set off with confidence in entirely the wrong direction.
We retraced our steps, found a discreet sign pointing behind a row of fenced gardens, and followed it out onto a wide expanse of marshy grass bordering the flat brown water of the estuary. Jo, at this point, announced the need for a comfort break — which, given that we had been walking for approximately four minutes, represented something of a personal record even by his standards.
The tradition on Offa's Dyke is to collect a pebble from the bank of the estuary and carry it the full 177 miles north, to be thrown into the Irish Sea at Prestatyn. It is a pleasing idea, and I have observed similar rituals on previous long walks. The estuary, however, had other thoughts. Without stilts or an amphibious vehicle the water's edge was unreachable, and the flat, pungent mud between us and it offered nothing in the way of pebbles — they appeared to be as scarce as diamonds. I abandoned the notion. I noticed later that Colin had somehow produced a flat stone from somewhere in the vicinity, though precisely where he had filched it from remained unclear and he declined to elaborate.
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The Stone Marker at the start of our walk |
The true beginning of our trek turned out to be at Sedbury Cliffs. They rose in a low craggy wall ahead of us, and tracing their line back toward the marsh I could just make out a gap in a hedge and, beside it, a signpost. I pointed it out with my walking pole and we moved toward it. Through the gap and a little further up the clifftop, a large lump of pebble-encrusted concrete sat in the grass. I assumed it had been fly-tipped by a passing dumpster until closer inspection revealed a plaque. This was the official starting point of the Offa's Dyke Path. I looked at it for a moment. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, an oddity.
I have stood at the start of several long-distance paths now, and with the honourable exception of the polished obelisk at Milngavie marking the beginning of the West Highland Way, I have been consistently underwhelmed by what awaits. This one merely confirmed the pattern. We took our photographs, recorded our video, consulted maps and guidebooks, and set off along the only obvious path available — straight inland, away from the estuary and the brown water behind us.
We would not see the coast again until Prestatyn. One hundred and seventy-seven miles away, and a year distant.
Escaping Chepstow, elderberry sampling, a devil of a pulpit ....
On a grassy slope nearby, people were being rolled down the hill inside giant transparent plastic spheres — Zorbs, as I later learned they were called. An outsized hamster-ball experience, by the look of it, with limited steering and what appeared to be a great deal of involuntary rotation. I pointed them out to Bod.
"Would you give that a go?" I asked.
He considered it briefly. "Yes," he said. "Until it made me sick."
"How long would that take?"
"Four, maybe five seconds."
It looked tremendous fun, I have to say..
Chepstow appeared soon enough, and we found ourselves walking through tidy suburban streets in full hiking gear, which is a combination guaranteed to produce a mild sense of incongruity. The streets were, however, almost entirely deserted — not merely quiet but empty in a way that felt faintly pointed.
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At the start point on Sedbury Cliffs |
The white acorn markers of Offa's Dyke led us on — sometimes a sticker on a lamppost, sometimes a wooden fingerpost — and for a while things proceeded well enough. Along a narrow path behind back gardens I spotted a damson bush heavy with fruit and picked a few handfuls to pass around. The others regarded this offering with the cautious expression of people who are aware that I am not, in general, a man of reliable botanical expertise. I know my damsons from my sloes, however, and these were excellent — sweet and juicy, and we walked along spitting the stones with the understated satisfaction of a group who have provisioned themselves for free.
The waymarkers then petered out with no warning, depositing us in a cul-de-sac where a large, shaggy dog howled at us from behind a picket fence in a bored half-hearted manner. We were still pottering about looking for any sign of the path when a man appeared from behind the hedge he had been trimming, taking in the scene with the resignation of someone who has provided this service before.
"Looking for the Offa's path?"
We nodded.
"They moved the path but not the sign." He gestured with his shears. "It's that way."
We marched up a busy road as Chepstow revealed itself to be a town of considerably greater suburban ambition than its population might suggest, its outskirts unspooling ahead of us with no apparent intention of ending. Just as I was beginning to suspect we might spend the entire day escaping it, the acorn signs diverted us onto a smart gravel path past a row of rather posh houses, then toward the boundary wall of a gated property where the marker indicated a leftward turn downhill. We followed it obediently.
The path wound to a viewpoint over the river, which was pleasant enough, but Bod's internal route-radar — a faculty I have come to regard as one of the most reliable instruments in the group — had clearly registered a warning. He produced the map and studied it with a slight frown. Colin, operating in his usual role as aide-de-camp, offered the observation that we appeared to be lost. Bod confirmed that we were probably off route but that continuing might yet resolve matters.
It did not resolve matters. Within a short distance the path returned us to an almost identical boundary wall of what appeared to be the same — or a very similar — gated property, with another acorn sign suggesting another leftward turn downhill.
Déjà vu, with gravel.
Bod examined the signpost carefully. "It's either been accidentally broken," he said, "or someone's deliberately turned it around."
We took the more obvious right-hand path, which drove us between high stone walls, up a flight of steps, across a road, and — suddenly, almost surprisingly — out of Chepstow entirely. A grassy slope pointed upward toward higher ground and we took it gratefully, the town releasing us at last.
A property near the top of the hill had, in its garden, the rotting remains of a castle tower. It sat there in the lawn with the incongruous dignity of something that had been important once and was now waiting patiently for the gardener to work around it.
"Useful for building your rockeries," observed Bod, with an appaling disregard for historical preservation.
For the next hour we followed bridleways and byways that led generally upward — road for a stretch, then a dive back into a hedgerow, then road again — making steady progress in the haphazard manner that Offa's Dyke seems to encourage in its early miles. We walked through a field of ripening corn and passed a hedgerow where a tree loaded with small, dark berries caught Colin's eye. He asked Jo whether they were elderberries. Jo said he hadn't the faintest idea.
"If you're not sure," Jo added, "maybe don't eat them."
Colin grabbed a large handful, turned to face Jo, and put the lot in his mouth.
Jo looked at him with the measured calm of someone who has known Colin long enough to understand that reasoning has its limits. "Well," he said. "You know best." This established a pattern that held for the rest of the week. Whenever another tree of the same species appeared, Colin would seize a handful of berries, turn to face Jo, and chew them with exaggerated relish. Jo would watch with the patient expression of a parent tolerating a naughty child. In retrospect it was fortunate that they were elderberries and not something with more dramatic pharmacological properties. The NHS, on the Welsh borders, has enough to deal with.
Stiles began to appear with some frequency — Offa's Dyke is said to involve over ninety of them, and they were now making themselves known. We came across an old boundary fence, partly dismantled for walkers' access, with a redundant stile standing off to one side, abandoned in a shady corner. Jo made a purposeful detour toward it.
"I want to do them ALL!" he announced, clambering over with great ceremony.
The path climbed into trees, became a woodland track, and eventually I recognised the rooty, uneven surface winding up toward the rocky outcrop known as the Devil's Pulpit. We were in Caswell Wood now, several hundred feet above Tintern, and lunch was overdue.
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Climbing up to the Devil's Pulpit |
My feet, I discovered, were already complaining — my heels in particular carrying a tenderness that gave me a moment's concern, as it was blistered heels that had ended my Kintyre Way walk two years earlier. I filed this information under *things to monitor* and opened my hip flask.
"Whisk-eeeeee," chimed Jo, immediately, from beside me, apparently finding this observation funnier than it strictly warranted.
He made me laugh all the same.
The group above us eventually packed up and moved off. I took the camcorder up to the Pulpit itself and zoomed in on the toy-like ruins of Tintern Abbey far below — the great roofless nave and its empty windows, still magnificent at this distance, still carrying the suggestion of what it once was. The Devil's Pulpit takes its name from the legend that Satan himself stood on this outcrop and directed his rhetorical talents at the monks below, attempting to lure them from their vows. Standing there with the zoom trained on the abbey, I found the story perfectly plausible. It's an excellent vantage point for temptation.
Jo and Colin appeared behind me and clambered up the craggy sandstone with the enthusiasm of people who have not previously fallen off it. I watched from a safe distance. Earlier in the year I had made the ascent and come down rather too quickly and rather too painfully for the memory to have faded. The Pulpit and I had reached an understanding. I did not go up.
Back at the hollow, hoisting my pack, I noticed for the first time what I had been sitting against during lunch — another craggy tower of rock, layered and fissured by time, from which a small, ancient Yew tree grew. Not beside the rock. Out of it. The seed had found a crevice, taken hold against all reasonable expectation, and sent its roots down through stone to whatever soil and moisture lay beneath. The roots that coiled around the rock face were so weathered and dark they were barely distinguishable from the stone itself. It looked like something that ought not to exist and had decided to exist anyway, out of sheer stubbornness.
I looked at it for rather a long time before we moved on.
The 11 mile rule, a love of pigs, ancient boughs, Redbrook the hard way ....
I strode ahead through the high woodland, thinking the loose, unhurried thoughts that walking at a good pace tends to produce, and settled into a rhythm. It was some time before I became aware that I was entirely alone. I looked back. The path behind me was empty in both directions. Doubt began its familiar quiet work — had I drifted off route? Were the others at this moment puzzling over an unexpected absence somewhere behind me?
I was contemplating a long retrace when Bod's tall figure appeared around a distant corner, Colin and Jo not far behind him.
"Oh — there he is," I heard Jo say, in a tone that suggested mild surprise at finding me in the lead.
The mossy bank of Offa's Dyke ran along to our right as we walked — still discernible after twelve centuries as something deliberately made, the earthwork overgrown but its intention legible in the landscape. We would lose it later today and not see it again for some miles.
"Remind me," I said to Bod, as we strode along. "How far is today's walk?"
"Eleven miles," he replied, without hesitation. "And then I stop."
During the planning stages we had told Bod we would be averaging eleven miles a day. He had absorbed this figure with the literal precision of a man who takes stated intentions seriously. The actual average, as it turned out, was closer to fourteen. Bod received this information with the expression of someone who has been mis-sold something and intends to remember it.
"At eleven miles exactly," he declared, "wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I am stopping and getting a cab back to Ross." This was, of course, said in jest. Mostly.
"Almost sixteen today," Colin offered, after a pause.
Crikey.
We descended from Caswell Wood and were immediately presented with a choice: the easier, longer route following the River Wye, or the shorter, more demanding *up and over* toward St. Briavels. We chose the harder route, because by this point in the day we had apparently developed the tunnel vision of people who have confused discomfort with achievement, and the thought of an easier option felt vaguely like giving in.
Madgett Hill followed — a sustained climb up a narrow, enclosed track, dark and humid under the trees, the ground slick with moss, nothing to look at and not much air to spare. I took several unofficial rest stops on the way up, disguised as moments of scenic appreciation. There was no scenery. Nobody was fooled.
Coming down the other side we passed a small wire enclosure containing half a dozen Tamworth weaners, who registered our arrival with a collective squeal of excitement and scurried about with the uninhibited joy of animals who find everything interesting. I was walking alongside Bod.
"They're cute, aren't they?" he said.
I looked at him. "Yeah," I said, with some surprise. "I love pigs."
"So do I," said Bod.
Colin, who also loves pigs, wandered over and leaned on the wire fence to get a better look.
The fence was electrified. He found out about this very quickly.
We continued down through grassy meadows to where a row of Chestnut trees stood — ancient beyond anything I have encountered before or since, their trunks thickened and warted to an extraordinary degree, their limbs so twisted by centuries of growth and weather that they had a quality almost of the theatrical.
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Bod and Colin rest under ancient trees |
We sat among them and rested, which felt appropriate. Jo settled on the fallen trunk and entered into a discussion with Bod about the current state of his body, concluding, with a certain wry detachment, that he was simply picking up where he had left off two years ago — a reference to the final days of the Kintyre Way, about which the less said the better.
I asked Jo quietly how his feet were holding up.
"I'm in bits," he said, with the cheerful resignation of a man who has made his peace with a bad decision and is seeing it through.
He had, he explained, chosen to walk the day in a pair of tough leather army boots that had not been on his feet for the better part of a decade. The leather had stiffened and contracted over the years into something closer to a wooden box than a boot, and had been hammering his toes with each downhill step.
"Going uphill is fine," he said helpfully. "It takes the pressure off. But going downhill is killing me. I may have to take the steep bits walking backwards."
He said this in the tone of a man making a practical observation rather than a complaint.
We left the chestnuts and continued — road walking uphill to Bigsweir Bridge, then a steeper path through old mixed woodland skirting Wygate Hill. Ancient woodland in September has a quality that justifies every steep path leading to it, and Colin's head turned this way and that as we climbed, registering the trees with the quiet appreciation of someone who notices these things without making a production of it. Eventually we broke out above the treeline and crossed a long series of meadows which, at this point in the day, were covering a distance that seemed considerably greater than anything the map was prepared to admit.
"This is taking the piss," said Colin, as the path turned uphill again through yet another stand of trees.
He was not wrong.
The day ended, as the best and worst walking days tend to, on a high ridge with expansive views. Or rather, views of tree tops
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Down to Redbrook |
The light under the canopy had grown genuinely gloomy by the time we emerged to find, to some surprise, that it was not yet twilight and Redbrook was visible below us. We could even make out Bod's car in the car park, which at that moment was one of the more welcome sights of the day.
The slope down to Redbrook was nearly perpendicular at the top — the kind of gradient that makes you wonder about the decision-making process behind the route and reconsider your relationship with your knees. In wet weather I would recommend a plastic bag as a sled and a philosophical attitude. Jo, with his ten-year-old army boots and his increasingly negotiated relationship with his toes, inched downward with the careful deliberation of a man defusing something.
We emerged onto a road just in time to observe a young lad on a bicycle commit fully to the hill, discover that his brakes had opinions of their own, and disappear into a hedge at some speed. His friends found this extremely funny. We did too, from a safe distance.
Sixty-four concrete steps — the guidebook had warned us in advance, which was either helpful or cruel depending on one's mood — and we were down, spilling untidily into the car park.
Day one. Done.
Recovery: The Bell Inn Redbrook ....
Before anything else seized up we drove back to Chepstow to collect my car. The pleasant suburban lane where I had parked it that morning had since acquired a population of youths carrying sticks and expressions of sullen resentment, heading back from the direction of the car. I braced for the worst. The car was completely untouched. We drove back to Redbrook.
The question of dinner took us briefly to a village beyond Tintern where a pub looked promising from the road. I got out to assess it and covered perhaps ten yards before my legs confirmed, with great clarity, just how far they had walked that day. The car park, however, was full of BMWs and Mercedes, and a glance through the window established a clientele that would have regarded four stiff and mud-adjacent walkers with the warmth usually reserved for planning applications. They would have made us eat in the cellars. We drove on.
The Bell Inn at Redbrook was exactly what we needed — good beer, excellent food, served with genuine warmth by a young waitress who performed a small involuntary Riverdance step each time she turned away from the table. A completely unconscious thing, and entirely charming. We watched for it all evening.
The restorative power of a proper meal and a pint of good bitter is one of the more reliable facts of walking life. Colin and I had both begun to feel cold and slightly shivery toward the end of the day — the familiar early signs of dehydration or exhaustion, or the ambiguous combination of both. We recovered completely over the course of the meal, to our quiet relief. It is an affliction that sometimes happens on day one of a walking holiday but once dealt with never usually returns.
We made it back to Brock Cottage just before ten. Showers were taken, sandwiches constructed for tomorrow, an obligatory nightcap administered. I eased into bed with the gratitude of a body that has earned its rest, at which point my teeth began to throb — an phenomenon I had been managing, with varying success, for several weeks.
I fell asleep anyway. The last thought I had, before the day released me entirely, was a simple one.
How would I feel in the morning?
See Route on ......
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