| Offa's Dyke - South | |
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The Symphony of Stonemasons, the Hatterrall Ridge plan ....
I slept badly. Strange, recursive dreams kept pulling me back from the edge of proper rest, and by the time I finally sank into something deeper the alarm was barely an hour away. In the event I didn't need it. At around half past six a group of workmen assembled directly beneath my open window and began applying hammers to lumps of stone with the focused enthusiasm of men who have been looking forward to this all weekend. Colin's landlord had apparently been refurbishing a new property nearby for some months — I had been subjected to the same symphony on a previous stay and assumed it had long since concluded. It had not. I lay there listening to it and marvelled, not for the first time, at the specific cruelty of building work that begins before seven in the morning.
I showered and sat down to assess the feet. The news was not encouraging. Despite the previous evening's careful ministrations both blisters had problems, and the left heel had developed the biggest problem of all — it had broken overnight and was now presenting a patch of raw red flesh that caught the morning light with the cheerful visibility of something that intends to be taken seriously. I depleted the last of my Compeed supply, applied tape, and achieved a result that would hold provided I didn't think about it too carefully.
We were also out of sugar, tea, milk, and sticking plasters, so I offered a supply run into Ross-On-Wye. I had one other objective: a new video tape, the current one being nearly full. I pulled on my walking boots for the trip and discovered, somewhere between the bread and the dairy aisle in Morrison's, that my heels had begun to chafe within ten minutes of putting them on. I filed this under *minor inconveniences* and carried on. The groceries were acquired. The video tape was not — Morrison's, it emerged, had no more familiarity with the concept of a video tape than they had with dutch clogs.
Back at the cottage I found Bod and Colin bent over maps. The day's route presented a genuine dilemma. The official path from Llantilio Crossenny could either stop short of Hatterrall Ridge at around seven miles, or commit to it and continue for nineteen. Seven felt inadequate. Nineteen, given the current condition of my feet, felt aspirational to the point of delusion.
I remembered something. An earlier walk, a different year, a path down from the ridge to Llanthony Priory.
"What if we split the ridge?" I said. "Walk up from the south, come down to Llanthony, leave a car there, then climb back up and complete it the next morning?"
This condemned me to ascending Hatterrall Ridge twice. I was aware of this as I said it. It still seemed preferable to a nineteen-mile day on feet that were already filing formal complaints before ten in the morning. Everyone agreed. We loaded the cars and headed for Abergavenny, and the long road south into the Vale of Ewyas.
Bod, incidentally, had been out the previous evening and shared a pint or two with the locals at the Man of Ross. They had given him a weather forecast: cloudier today, possible rain. I had dressed accordingly, swapping shorts for walking trousers.
The day turned out to be a stunner.
Dogfight in the skies, the lonely ticket-collector, White (once) Castle ....
If the driving to our various start points had occasionally felt excessive this week, the journey to Llanthony Priory elevated that excess to an art form. Pleasant enough along the Golden Valley, and then a B-road that threaded into the Llanthony Valley and simply kept going.
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Climbing up to White Castle |
Bod opened his car door, extracted himself, and looked around with the expression of a man who has been patient for some time and has now reached the end of that patience.
"Where the f*ck have you brought us?" he enquired, with considerable clarity.
Several visitors turned to look.
Colin, who had been travelling with him, spoke with the quiet precision of a man deploying a previously established counter-measure.
"Soft skills, mate," he reminded. "Soft skills."
We drove back to the church at Llantilio Crossenny, — the vicar was absent this morning, Jo suggesting that he was probably responsible for several local parishes — and set off at just after eleven. Which was, improbably, barely later than on the previous days. The walk resumed where it had left off, moving in a generally north-westerly direction through open fields and meadows toward the village of Treadam. The sun shone. We made good progress. And the menu of ailments — which I had perhaps naively hoped might take a morning off — was presented within the first hour: freshly rubbed heel, as expected, now accompanied by chafing where my pack rode against my lower back. I had applied Vaseline liberally before setting out, which addressed the latter if not the former.
The land began to crumple after a while, in the manner it does throughout this part of the walk. Offa's Dyke runs laterally across the grain of the country here, crossing a series of low rolling hills at right angles to the natural fall of the land. The result is a constant sequence of ascent and descent — some steep, some modest, all of them accumulating. If you have strong feelings against hills, this path will test them methodically.
We joined a minor road climbing between high hedgerows toward what the map showed as a ruined castle on the summit. Partway up we stopped to breathe and admire the view. Cows in a nearby field regarded us with mild curiosity. Colin and Jo leaned over the gate and offered them handfuls of grass, which the cows treated with the scepticism of animals who know what grass is and can get it without assistance.
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Colin, Jo and a photo-bombing cow |
Two of them cracked out of the sky and into the valley with a sound like the world being briefly torn, then began performing training manoeuvres at speed — each one attempting to get behind the other in a fluid, violent ballet that lasted perhaps a minute before they vanished as suddenly as they had come. We stood and watched in a silence that was partly awe and partly the temporary absence of any capacity to speak. We assumed they had gone. We were wrong. A few minutes further on, passing a pretty cottage where chickens clucked contentedly in a large coop, the two jets reappeared from somewhere unseen and made one final low-level pass that removed all possibility of conversation for several seconds.
Silence returned.
"Those chickens," observed Bod, "won't be laying for a while."
White Castle. appeared at the top of the road — a proper Norman fortress, walls several feet thick, battlements still intact enough to frown, the ghost of a moat still visible around its base. It takes its name from the white render that would have covered its stonework when occupied, which on a clear day on a commanding hilltop with pennants flying must have been a considerable sight. A Marcher Castle built for a Marcher Lord, its purpose to watch over the border country and remind the Welsh of the relevant power dynamics. It does this still, after a fashion.
At the entrance a small ticket office contained a single occupant — a lady of cheerful disposition and possibly the most isolated paid position in the heritage sector. She beamed at us with the warmth of someone who greets each visitor as an event rather than a transaction.
"Oh, we have to pay," murmured Jo, noting the admission sign with the expression of a man for whom this information changes calculations.
We hesitated briefly. The feet, the mileage, the day ahead. We moved on. I felt a small pang of guilt about the lady in the ticket office, sitting there in her booth on a Monday with the Welsh border countryside stretching emptily away in all directions. Had my heels been in better order I might have bought a ticket simply to give her someone to talk to, without necessarily going in. As it was, the castle was almost as visible from the road as it would have been from within. We admired it from the outside and pressed on.
I learn to hate hills, one man and his dog, people-less Pandy ....
The views north from the castle were generous — a valley laid out below us, and beyond it the long bulk of Hatterrall Ridge, now close enough that its individual contours were legible: the gorse and heather on its upper slopes, the green of its flanks, the dark line of its summit. Tomorrow's work, made visible. It had a certain quality of inevitability about it.
We descended into the valley cleft and, unavoidably, began immediately to climb the other side. I looked up the slope ahead and saw Bod and Jo already labouring upward, reduced to small determined figures against the hillside. The field was peculiar underfoot — studded with regular tussocky mounds, as though a team of moles had spent considerable time practising formation work. It was steep and I was tired and my blisters were making themselves heard. I ran out of patience somewhere near the middle of the slope.
I arrived at the top gasping, found the others waiting, and addressed the hill directly.
"We climb down," I said, "just to climb back up again! What is the actual bloody point?"
The hill declined to respond. My companions considered various possible answers.
"Well," said Colin eventually, "that's the nature of hills."
He was entirely correct, which was, at that moment, deeply unhelpful.
We took lunch at the top of the field. I considered removing my boots and rejected the idea — the thought of having to force my feet back into them afterwards was worse than keeping them on. Above us, large birds turned slow circles on the thermals.
Colin and Jo watched them carefully.
"Kites?" I asked, hopefully. We were in Red Kite territory and none of us had seen one in the wild.
Colin shook his head.
" Buzzards again."
As if confirming the verdict, the thin, mewing cry of a buzzard drifted down from directly overhead. It was examining us with the professional interest of a bird that has considered cheese and onion crisps as a dietary option.
A figure appeared at the bottom of the field — a man with a dog, beginning the long climb toward us.
"It's the farmer," pronounced Bod. "We're trespassing and he's going to shoot us. And we can't run because our legs are wrecked."
We watched him climb for several minutes. The collie arrived first, capering with the energetic goodwill of an animal that has four legs and no blisters and considers both of these circumstances completely normal. The man followed, slightly portly and rather out of breath, and stood before us, eyeing our general state of disrepair.
"On the Offa's Dyke?" he asked.
We confirmed that we were.
"Me too. I need to be in Pandy by half four — last bus back to my B&B."
He was walking the complete path. Two weeks. With the collie.
We watched them continue upward after a short rest and felt, simultaneously, admiration and a mild sense of inadequacy.
Time pressed. We dusted ourselves off, shouldered packs, and pressed on to a handsome whitewashed church at Llangattock Lingoed where I was forced to stop yet again and deal with the left heel. It had gone past the point of being ignorable. I sat on the churchyard wall ripping open dressing wrappers and muttering while Jo slipped inside the church — possibly to find some peace, possibly for reasons of basic biology, possibly to pray for the improvement of my mood. We reconvened and set off again, and I did my best not to limp.
Bod and I had been admiring the Welsh slate on the roofs of many of the buildings we walked past. Some of the slate was obviously brand new, purchased from the ever-dwindling number of specialist companies that still produce the tiles; others were reclaimed but probably no less expensive. The slate was of a rich blue-grey colour and set off the whitewashed walls of the cottages handsomely.
Shortly after leaving the church we encountered another steeply pitched hillside which we began to edge down. There was a herd of cows huddled together in a nearby corner and it was with a certain amount of misgiving that we detected the presence of an enormous bull in their midst. He didn't seem particularly interested in our progress
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Nearing Pandy |
"It's ok," muttered Bod. "He's carrying a red rucksack - the bull will have a go at him first."
The hiker waved at us as he went by and marched confidently straight into the middle of the herd which I thought was extremely foolhardy but at least it took the bull's unwanted attention away from us.
The water situation was becoming critical. I had been drinking steadily from my CamelPak without tracking the volume, and somewhere between the church and the next hill I heard the distinctive gurgle of a nearly empty water bladder and then nothing. Nearly two litres gone, and a significant portion of the day still ahead.
Pandy, at the foot of Hatterrall Ridge, was where we needed water. What Pandy proved not to have was people. It was not merely quiet — it was abandoned. We knocked at several cottages. Nothing. Tried a B&B. Nothing. Wandered down the hard shoulder of the trunk road to a campsite and worked our way around the back of some farm buildings to the reception. I opened the door and called out.
Silence.
An annexe revealed a dilapidated games room, a set of toilets, and a small kitchenette with a working tap. I drank directly from it with profound gratitude and refilled my CamelPak. We left without seeing a single member of staff.
On the walk back through the village — if village it could be called — we still encountered nobody. Colin observed later, with some diplomatic care, that his England cap might have contributed to the lack of response at the doors. I prefer to believe the village was simply elsewhere that afternoon. I noticed, for what it is worth, that he had removed the cap before we tried the campsite.
The first ascent of Haterall Ridge, I say "bollocks", a footware revelation ....
Bod and Jo had waited at a railway crossing just before the start of the climb, sitting in the shade of an oak with the patience of people whose feet are not currently the limiting factor in proceedings. We started together. This arrangement lasted approximately as long as it takes a steep path to separate people by fitness rather than intention.
I fell behind almost immediately and told the others to go at their own pace. I would catch up when I could, or I wouldn't, and either way was fine.
What followed was a sequence of events I will describe briefly and without excessive self-pity. There was a long grassy knoll. There was a metalled road climbing further. There was a point at which I could look down and see the valley, and the approximate ghost of the village of Pandy, several hundred feet below. The three ahead of me reduced to small figures against the ridge and then to dots and then to nothing. Hatterrall played its customary trick, presenting a succession of crests that each appeared to be the summit and none of which were. The guidebook, to its credit, acknowledged the apparent pointlessness of a particularly cruel descent partway up — the path drops sharply to the right and then almost immediately begins climbing again, for reasons the landscape keeps to itself. We descended. We climbed again. My right knee, which has been harbouring a grievance for some years, formally joined the list of complaints.
Eventually — and the ridge does eventually relent — we stood on the top of Hatterrall, and the world opened.
To the right, Wales rolled away south and west, and at the furthest reach of vision a sliver of silver light revealed the Severn Estuary. Colin pointed further — beyond Weston-super-Mare, the unmistakeable hump of Brean Down just visible across that narrow finger of sea, where goats graze scrubby grass and an old fort still keeps a theoretical watch for Napoleon. To the left, the borderlands stretched into England, the foothills of the Black Mountains giving way to rolling country, and on the far horizon the blue shapes of the Malvern hills.
I had walked on those hills many times, years ago, with my young daughters — stopping at a café called The Kettle Sings, drinking tea on the terrace, looking west at the Welsh mountains and trying to name them. Forty miles away and many years later I now looked back east, and found them unchanged and seemingly eternal.
Colin had been commenting on the nature surrounding us all morning — the Green Woodpecker doing its Professor Yaffle laugh as it went over, the gorse and heather in flower, the names of the hills as they revealed themselves. Bod pulled out his map. On the ridge, faced with a choice of two paths, he didn't consult it.
"That one," he said, pointing to the steeper option. "It's the steepest track so it has to be the one."
He was right, as he invariably is about these things.
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Mark and Jo on Hatterrall Ridge |
The gorse on either side threw long shadows. I surveyed a particularly substantial bush and found myself weighing the serious question of whether curling up underneath it for the night might be preferable to the descent that awaited. It was a fine evening. Not too cold. The others would come back up in the morning. I could be up and walking again by the time they arrived. It had a certain logic.
"Bollocks," I said, to nobody in particular.
I came to the descending path and started down.
The priory appeared far below — impossibly small, moving away from me at roughly the same rate I descended toward it, as though someone had installed it on rollers and was pulling it backwards in direct proportion to my progress forward.
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Hatterrall Ridge trig. point |
Eventually the trees appeared, and with them the knowledge that the worst was over. I found Jo unexpectedly, alone and attending to something on his rucksack.
He looked up. "Oh hello. How you doing?"
"I'll be glad to get these boots off," I said.
He nodded slowly, in the manner of a man who has been thinking something for a while and has decided the moment is right to say it. "It might be the boots, actually, causing your problems. If you've had them a long time they lose their support. Could be doing more harm than good."
This struck a chord I had not expected. These were the same boots I had been wearing on the Kintyre Way when the heel had opened up. And that morning in Morrison's my feet had started complaining within ten minutes — the boots barely on — and I hadn't connected it.
"I'm changing footwear tomorrow," I said. "I have some lighter shoes."
Jo looked dubious. "Trainers?"
"Something like that. And yes, they're probably not designed for long-distance walking. But what have I got to lose at this point?"
We came off the lower path and down a final steep grassy field — horses mooching about with the inquisitive obliviousness particular to horses — and the priory appeared, all at once and from close quarters, its ruined arches frowning down from what seemed a great height. There is no gradual reveal to Llanthony; it is either impossibly distant or right above you, with nothing in between.
Bod was at the car, already changed into something more sensible, with The Raconteurs playing at a volume that the priory's absent monks would probably have had views about.
Recovery: The Half Moon Inn, Llanthony ....
The small pub built into the priory ruins was shut, which we all received philosophically and with little surprise. A country pub called the Half Moon Inn sat a short drive down the valley and we drove there instead.
It was, on this particular Monday evening, operating under conditions of some duress. A single member of staff — the proprietor, a portly and increasingly perspiring man — was performing the functions of chef, waiter, and barman simultaneously, with the expression of someone who had made a business decision earlier in the day that was now revealing its consequences. He had, we later established, given all his staff the evening off on the reasonable assumption that Monday would be quiet. The Priory pub's unscheduled closure had redirected its customers to him. He was managing, but only just, and the strain had communicated itself to his face in a way that made us phrase our orders with some care.
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Bod climbs down from Hatterrall Ridge |
The reply was brief and not especially warm.
"He's not being rude," I said, when Colin returned. "He's trying not to cry."
Three Australians at a nearby table were playing dominoes with the settled comfort of men who have been walking long enough not to care what day it is. They had been at it for weeks — the complete path from one end to the other. They noticed our condition and our boots and asked the question we had been asked at almost every pub that week.
"Offa's Dyke?"
They had decided, they told us, to skip Hatterrall Ridge the following day and take the road through the valley to Hay-On-Wye. We received this information without comment, having already opted to tackle the ridge again in the morning.
The food, given the chaos behind the bar, was better than it had any right to be. Several of us, however, were one sausage short of what the menu had promised. We were, in the precise and slightly deflating language of the situation, one sausage short of a mixed grill. It was a condition that seemed, in the circumstances, to say something broader about the day.
Colin, who had by now stiffened considerably, undertook the crossing of the pub to find the facilities. The Australians watched his progress with interest, then appreciation, then the kind of sympathetic laughter that seizes people who recognise something they have experienced themselves.
I had taken my boots off under the table during the meal and now had to put them back on to walk to the car. This negotiation — lacing up, standing, taking the first few steps — confirmed everything Jo had said on the ridge. The boots had to go.
Bod drove us back to Llantilio Crossenny in the dark. I dozed against the headrest, my head rolling gently, and then drove myself back to Bridstow on autopilot, the lights of Monmouth passing in a blur. Nobody was particularly talkative. It had been that kind of day.
We arrived late and went straight to bed. Before showering I peeled off the dressings on my feet and inspected the damage with the reluctant honesty of a man who already knows what he is going to find. The left heel was not good. Not Kintyre-level damage, but pointing in that direction with some intention.
I cleaned it with antiseptic, showered, and lay down.
Tomorrow was going to be a make-or-break day. New shoes, a large bandage, and whatever happened next. The worst outcome — dropping out early, watching the others walk on without me — was available to consider, and I considered it for a while in the dark before sleep, eventually and mercifully, arrived.
See Route on ......
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