| Offa's Dyke - South | |
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A missing boot, a climb to the Kymin, the streets of Monmouth ....
The plan had been to rise an hour earlier than the previous morning. We overslept by thirty minutes instead, which represents a net loss of ninety minutes against the stated objective and says something about the optimism of plans made the night before a long walk. I was first awake, and was halfway down the stairs to rouse Colin before my legs registered what was happening and protested by almost locking entirely, threatening to pitch me headlong into the hall. I grabbed the banister and took stock.
So that was how I felt in the morning.
I showered and then sat down to perform what I have come to think of as the Ritual of Foot Therapy — necessary before a long day's walking, and deeply unglamorous as a way to begin one. A visual inspection first, then a careful fingertip assessment of any developing trouble spots. Both heels looked a little red but had not yet committed to anything worse. Compeed plasters on each, followed by wraps of micropore tape around the front of the foot and back over the heel to reinforce the dressings. It sounds excessive. It probably is excessive. But I dropped out of my last long-distance walk because of a skinned heel and I was not going to let that happen twice.
Bod arrived just as we finished breakfast. We were loading the cars when he noticed, with the particular stillness of a man processing unwelcome information, that one of his boots was missing. He searched the car methodically and thoroughly, because Bod is not the kind of person who searches anything any other way. The boot was definitively absent.
"It must have rolled out of the car yesterday," he said.
He had a brand new pair in reserve, but they had never been worn and he regarded them with the expression of a man being asked to run a marathon in shoes fresh from the box. He said nothing further, which with Bod communicates rather more than saying something would.
Our first task was to drive my car to Llantilio Crossenny. — the day's endpoint — a hamlet so modest it barely registered on the map as a place at all, appearing to consist of a farm and a church and the space between them. We drove through Monmouth and along twisting country lanes for what seemed a considerable time before a tiny track appeared, dropping down to a lovely old church built of local granite in the English Gothic style.
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Climbing up The Kymin |
Locals. Excellent. They would know.
I noticed, just in time, that the man was the vicar, and reached across to switch off the music system before Lord of This World by Black Sabbath could introduce itself to him through the open window. It would have been, under the circumstances, a difficult opening.
"You can use the car park," he said, in the tone of a man who has better things to think about. "We never lock the gates." And he wandered off.
We then drove all the way back to Redbrook to start the walk, which involved a round trip of considerable length before we had taken a single step. Using a single base to avoid the cost of B&Bs has much to recommend it financially. As a system for actually starting a walking day it is, I was beginning to conclude, considerably less efficient than simply paying for the accommodation and being dropped at the path each morning.
Back in Redbrook we got out and began our preparations. Bod was studying the car park further down the road with the focused attention of a man who has formed a plan.
"That's the one we used last night," he said. "I think I'll just go and see if my boot fell out there."
He strode off. I gave it approximately no chance of success and was therefore revising my estimate when he reappeared several minutes later, waving a boot above his head. "I found it. Just sitting there. Not even squashed."
Colin considered this. "Are you sure it hasn't been pissed in?"
Bod shrugged. "It'll help toughen my feet."
While we waited I had been doing my morning stretches and demonstrating the finer points of what I call the Victorian Lunge to an audience of Jo and Colin, who found this mildly entertaining. Two couples crossed the car park as I performed these exercises, the men dressed in stockings, suspenders, and Viking helmets. I absorbed this without immediate comment, reasoning that rural Monmouthshire probably had its customs, and then recalled a sign I had seen in Monmouth the previous day.
"Raft racing?" I offered.
"No," said one of them pleasantly, "we always dress like this on Sundays."
I suppose it was a stupid question.
We set off uphill — which on Offa's Dyke is always the direction of travel until proven otherwise — first along a side street out of Redbrook, then onto a gravel track climbing steadily toward the open high pasture of the The Kymin. A local out for a morning walk fell in ahead of us and spent some time eyeing us over his shoulder with the mild suspicion of a man who has views about people using his hill on a Monday morning. We didn't engage and he eventually peeled off, apparently satisfied that we meant no harm.
It wasn't a steep climb but it was a sustained one, and my right heel began to communicate its opinions fairly early on. I filed this under *deal with at the first opportunity* and kept going.
A Labrador exploded out of the garden of a pretty bungalow we passed and bounded toward us across the grass with a volley of barking that his furiously wagging tail immediately contradicted. He had, I suspected, made many a dog-wary walker take the last stretch of that field at an involuntary trot. I whistled and encouraged him to come and say hello, which threw him completely. He stood his ground as the barking lost conviction, then watched us leave the field before running to the gate to deliver a final warning about future territorial infractions. It was mostly for form's sake by then and we both knew it.
The Kymin's summit, at eight hundred feet, delivered the views it had been promising all morning — a wide, clear prospect across Monmouth and deep into Wales, with the distant smudge of Hatterrall Ridge visible to the southwest. A charming Regency building called the Roundhouse stood at the top, built in 1794 as a pleasure house for a local dining club of some ambition, and beside it the Naval Temple of 1800, erected to commemorate British naval victories. The two buildings had a quietly self-important air appropriate to the era. History records that Lord and Lady Hamilton once hosted a public breakfast here, accompanied by Admiral Nelson — a ménage à trois of considerable historical significance, though the finer details of the arrangement are, perhaps wisely, not recorded on the information board.
An elderly gentleman among the tourists milling about the viewpoint caught my attention. He seemed genuinely perplexed by our arrival — kept looking around to establish where we had come from, as though walkers appearing from the hillside was a phenomenon outside his frame of reference. He had the air of the Major in Fawlty Towers, confronted by something that didn't quite compute.
I found a bench at the viewpoint and took the opportunity to address the blister that had been developing all morning. It had, by this point, become a proper specimen — the kind that requires a degree of management before it graduates to something worse. I dealt with it, applied fresh dressings, and declared the situation contained.
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The view from The Kymin |
Jo had been quiet for a moment, taking all of this in.
"I don't know why," he said, "but I thought it would all be flat walking."
Colin looked at him. "You didn't research it at all?"
Jo shook his head with genuine good humour. "I've just turned up with a carrier bag and a knotted handkerchief on my head. I'm like — here I am, let's go for this stroll, then."
This was, it turned out, a more accurate description of Jo's preparation than any of us had appreciated. We would learn more about the carrier bag as the week progressed.
We found a path downward and left the Kymin behind, descending May Hill in a series of uneven steps before losing the Offa's Dyke marker somewhere in a small residential road and regaining it via a narrow passage between garages — which suggested we had taken a wrong turn somewhere near the top. We dropped steadily down through the suburbs of Monmouth, losing in twenty minutes all the height it had taken two hours to gain, until we reached the main road and crossed the bridge over the Wye into the town.
Monmouth on a Sunday would normally, I imagine, be a quiet affair. Today it was not. The bridge was lined with spectators leaning over the parapet to watch the raft race on the water below — a cheerful, colourful crush of people in a good mood, the kind of crowd that is easy to feel well-disposed toward from a distance and slightly less easy to move through at close range. I wanted to stop and photograph the rafts as they emerged from under the bridge. We had mileage to make. I kept moving.
Under a subway — the only one I expect to encounter on a national trail in my walking lifetime — and into the town proper. Monmouth is a genuinely handsome place: clean Georgian architecture on a high street with an unhurried, self-assured quality. The Romans knew this, having founded a settlement here which they called Blestium, though they were apparently not consulted about the name that stuck. A chemist was open — a find of some practical significance at this stage of the walk — and we went in and replenished our supply of Compeed plasters with the foresight of men who have learned the hard way.
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Monmouth |
It never ceases to impress me, the mileage that accumulates in a day's walking. You can walk for hours and feel you have moved only modestly across the map, and then you turn around and there is the landscape of the morning, receding into the distance. A walking day has its own geography — the country of the early miles, when the legs are fresh and the day is open, and the country of the afternoon miles, when both have become more complicated.
A pretty little lane led us out of town, a deep brick-lined culvert running alongside it with each cottage set back behind its own small stone bridge across the water. Jo began musing aloud about the flooding risk to the properties, which led him on to the subject of the heavy rains earlier in the year. The rest of us exchanged glances. None of us could recall any heavy rains of particular note earlier in the year. The conversation went quiet, in the way that conversations sometimes do when it becomes apparent that one person is remembering a different year from everybody else.
Erasmus the bull, The Menu of Ailments, Cider scrumping ....
The map promised another climb after Monmouth — up through a woodland called Kings Wood — and we intended to take lunch at its summit. Before the wood, two large fields of old-fashioned square hay bales, each with a laden wagon standing ready to collect them, the whole scene carrying the quality of a photograph from the nineteen-fifties — braces and flat caps implied, the world briefly monochrome.
Colin and Jo both made furtive diversions into the hedgerow for reasons of basic biology just as a pleasant woman with two young boys came the other way. I watched the approaching collision of timing with the fatalism of a man who is not involved and can therefore do nothing useful. Nothing embarrassing unfolded. The countryside has a way of absorbing these moments.
Kings Wood turned out to be a deceptive climb — not dramatic, but persistent, the kind of hill that keeps finding another layer of itself just as you think you've reached the top. By the time we broke for lunch at the summit I had freshly rubbed heels and a new complaint making its presence felt: both hips had joined the register of grievances. I was beginning to think of my body as offering a sort of rotating menu of ailments — each day, a fresh selection from the available options. Today's special was blistered heel with a side of battered hip, served without garnish.
I spent most of the lunch break lying on my back with my boots off, which is not dignified but is considerably more comfortable than the alternative. Eventually Bod rose, limbered up with the effortless ease of a man whose body appears to have made different agreements with the terrain than mine has, and informed us it was time to move. I would have remained horizontal for another hour without strong moral objection, but I rolled upright.
"Flat from here," Bod said, as he took his first few steps. "And shorter than yesterday."
Music, genuinely, to my ears.
He was right about both. A wide gravel track carried us down from Kings Wood and into a stretch of pleasant, easy walking that tracked the general line of the Wye through Monmouthshire. Bod stopped at some large concrete bunkers half-buried in the undergrowth and inspected them with the methodical interest of a man consulting a map that has nothing to say on the subject. We never established their purpose. We walked on.
The country here was deeply agreeable — meadows and remote farmsteads, an occasional old church standing in quiet self-sufficiency, and the hamlet of Llanvihangel-Ystern-Llewern, which has more letters in its name than buildings on its street and carries this distinction with composure.
Jo, who has a connoisseur's eye for churches, examined one we passed with a critical tilt of the head. He liked the Gothic weight of it, he said, but took issue with the colour — a flat slate grey that gave the building an air of institutional despondency, as though it had been asked to do something cheerful and had decided not to bother.
A field of large pigs followed — bigger animals than the Tamworth weaners of the previous day, and rather more imposing for it. My affection for pigs, established in principle the day before, was being tested by the practical reality of sharing a field with half a dozen of them at full scale. They were, it turned out, uninterested in us, which was a relief.
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Colin leaving Monmouth |
A notice at the entrance to the next field introduced us to Erasmus.
Erasmus, the sign explained, was a bull of the field ahead. He was perfectly harmless. Walkers who nonetheless felt intimidated were welcome to use the farm drive instead. We elected to cross the field and found Erasmus — a great brown mass of bovine muscle and apparent philosophical indifference — moving his considerable herd about the far end of the field and paying us no attention whatsoever. He had, I thought, the air of a creature who is aware of his power and feels no need to demonstrate it.
The path took us past the front door of the farmhouse, where the farmer's collie came out to greet us with the unconditional enthusiasm of a dog who has decided all visitors are friends until conclusively proven otherwise. The farmer appeared shortly behind her in a Range Rover and leaned out of the window.
"You'll get tired of stroking her before she gets tired of being stroked," he said, and then parked up and got out for a conversation.
He was not what you might expect. Pleasant-faced, well-spoken, and possessed of the easy, attentive manner of a good pub landlord rather than the guarded wariness that agricultural landowners sometimes display toward walkers tramping through their property. He talked easily and generously. He knew, he said, that he was fortunate to live in such a place and made a point of appreciating the views each day, which struck me as both wise and surprisingly rare. Walking, he offered cheerfully, was a fool's pastime — and at that particular hour of that particular afternoon I was not in a strong position to argue. Erasmus, he told us, was a fine bull of excellent temperament, and would be beef burgers within two years. He doubted we would see any Red Kites for another day at least. And then he pointed to the spire of the church at Llantilio Crossenny, just visible across the fields ahead.
He had, in a ten-minute conversation, told us more about the landscape we were walking through than the guidebook had managed in twice the distance. We left him with a wave and dropped down into his orchard. The trees were cider apple varieties — grown under contract for Bulmers once a proud independent company and now part of the Heineken empire. At this time of year the apples were approaching harvest, hanging dense on the branches in neat, orderly rows. As Colin and I walked past one tree it released a fruit, which landed in the grass between us. We looked at each other. It had fallen. Of its own accord. It was on the ground. Picking it up was hardly scrumping, by any reasonable definition of the term.
We took a bite each. Cider apples are sweet and faintly extraordinary on the first contact with the palate, carrying the ghost of something excellent. Then, two chews later, they turn aggressively bitter and remove all available moisture from the mouth with the thoroughness of a substance that means business. Not really edible, in the conventional sense. An interesting experience, briefly, and then a reminder that some things are made into cider for a reason.
Further along the orchard, different varieties — confirming that good cider, like most worthwhile things, is a blend of more than one element.
After the orchards a road, and the road all the way back to the church. I was slowing down now, my heels reducing me to a pace that let the others drift ahead. But the afternoon was doing something to the light that made the walking beautiful regardless — a low September sun across the fields, long shadows, the day cooling toward evening without losing its warmth. I found myself settling into the discomfort with something approaching acceptance, and through it came a mood I always hope for on a long walk and never know in advance when it will arrive: a sudden, uncomplicated happiness. Work was far away. Great friends were nearby. The whole week still lay ahead. It was enough. More than enough. It gave me what I needed for the last mile.
Recovery: The Bell Inn Redbrook (again) ....
That evening found us back at Redbrook, where priorities included the restocking of Colin's fridge. He went into the village shop while the rest of us waited and emerged several minutes later with beer and a furrowed expression.
"Odd," he said. "I picked up some beers from the fridge and the lady told me to put them back because the ones on offer were on a different shelf in another part of the shop. I pointed out they were exactly the same product. She got a bit shirty until I put the fridge ones back and picked up the shelf ones instead." He paused. "I saved a few pence. But they were the same beers."
The Bell Inn received us again with evident pleasure and we returned the favour. The Riverdance Waitress was, regrettably, absent — perhaps her evening off, perhaps she had simply moved on to somewhere that better appreciated her talents. The food was excellent regardless, and Jo's vegetarian curry looked, if anything, more appetising than our carnivore selections, which we all noticed and declined to mention.
Colin, in the course of the evening, discovered the landlord's phone on a windowsill, left and presumably forgotten. This act of civic virtue was received with the warmth it deserved, and Colin's standing in the establishment was confirmed.
From a nearby table, fragments of conversation drifted over about the morning's raft race. A raft had capsized. Crew members had come close to drowning. We had walked past that bridge and pushed through that crowd and seen the rafts going under and thought nothing of it. The world has a way of containing its dramas invisibly, running them alongside the ordinary business of a Sunday morning while the rest of us watch from the parapet and take photographs.
We drove back to Brock Cottage in the dark, assembled tomorrow's sandwiches, drank another beer, washed what Colin politely described as minging walking gear, and distributed ourselves toward our respective beds.
My teeth began to throb as soon as I lay down.
I fell asleep anyway. Progress.
See Route on ......
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