| Offa's Dyke - South | |
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There's no such thing as free parking ....
The final day of the walk dawned bright and sunny, which felt like the appropriate weather for a conclusion and which the Met Office had not, to be fair, specifically promised. The Stone Trolls arrived under my window at half past six, right on schedule. I lay listening to their hammering and merry cursing for a few minutes with something approaching affection. I would, in a strange way, miss them.
Foot therapy this morning was a perfunctory affair — a couple of plasters, the faithful crepe bandage, and a decision not to look too closely at the left big toe nail, which had developed, over six days of sustained walking, into something I can only describe as pork scratchings and will not describe further. I covered it with a plaster and moved on.
Colin, Jo, and I navigated the small kitchen of Brock Cottage with the practiced ease of people who have shared a small space for a week and know each other's moves. Jo offered porridge. I accepted, which surprised me as much as him — I have never been a fan of porridge and have no clear explanation for why I said yes. Jo's preparation was impeccable. The porridge itself was entirely fine. I ate it with the forced enthusiasm of a man honouring a commitment and hoped nobody noticed.
Bod arrived, punctual as ever. Jo rode with me as always; Colin went with Bod. I rarely see Jo except on these walks, which is one of the quiet pleasures of a week like this — the long car journeys that give you the time to talk properly, to cover ground you never manage at family gatherings or over a quick pint. He has a perceptive and often surprising view on most things, and our conversations ranged widely enough that the drives always passed quickly.
We found the Offa's Dyke visitor centre in Knighton without much difficulty — a pleasant modern building of local Welsh slate, open and unhurried. Colin and I went in. I surveyed the merchandise — the sweatshirts, hoodies, and t-shirts — and made a note of what I would be purchasing after next year's northern section. Colin, meanwhile, had committed to buying the guidebook for that section and flinched visibly at the price: twelve pounds and change.
We asked whether we could leave a car there for the day. The woman behind the counter confirmed that parking was free, and indicated a donation box near the door. Colin looked at his receipt. "This was our donation," he muttered, pocketing the guidebook.
Outside, he discovered it had been signed by its authors. This probably accounted for the price. He seemed somewhat reconciled.
In Kington town, falling in love with a Bridgitt, Offa's Dyke reunited ....
We drove to Kington and shouldered our packs for the last time. Kington is one of those pleasant old market towns that still knows what it is — haphazard town planning, varied architecture, civic pride evident in the tidy streets and smart shopfronts, and a high street that has somehow retained its independent businesses rather than surrendering them entirely to the chain store advance. Titleys the hardware store. A proper butcher. The occasional anomaly that reminds you high streets used to be more interesting than they currently are in most places.
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Kington |
I had been looking at a row of red brick cottages. I looked up. Directly across the road from the town boundary, apparently positioned there for maximum psychological effect, was a large hill.
This was Bradnor Green, the approach to Bradnor Hill, and it had clearly been waiting.
We started up. The knees registered their objections through the established channels. Bradnor Hill tops out at 1,239 feet, which qualifies it, in the classification system that these things apparently have, as a Bridgett. To qualify as a Bridgett a hill must fail to meet the criteria of any other recognised classification and be somewhere worth walking to — which makes it sound like an also-ran, and I felt this was unfair on Bradnor. It has, for one thing, the highest golf course in England on its slopes, which you would think might earn it an honorary promotion. By the time I laboured up the final section and emerged onto a wide green plateau of lush grass and browsing sheep, I had mentally reclassified the word Bridgett using a term that suggested it had no father, and then immediately revised my opinion as the summit opened up around me. On a morning like this one, Bradnor Hill was a delight — broad, grassy, unhurried, with the sun on it and long views back into Herefordshire including a last retrospective glimpse of Hatterall ridge, made vague and insignificant by distance. I fell rather in love with it and apologised privately for what I had called it on the way up.
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Bradnor Hill and the dyke regained |
I had time, on the ascent of Bradnor, to observe the walking styles of my companions with the detached interest of someone who is moving slowly enough to notice things. Bod: a slow, rolling stride of consistent efficiency, the same whether climbing or descending, covering ground without apparent effort or urgency — the gait of a man who has made an arrangement with distance and intends to keep it. Jo: ambling, slightly built, baseball cap on backwards, hands often in pockets, never visibly tired, giving the impression of someone who could continue indefinitely without particularly minding either way. Colin: upright, balanced, economical — the textbook hiker's stride, nothing wasted. And myself: busier, longer strides, running on a battery that recharged endlessly on flat terrain but drained rapidly on inclines. Even at my fittest this profile has never changed. I have thought about this for years and have no satisfactory explanation.
Paradise found, oxygen lost ....
The route along the top of the dyke was slightly anti-climactic — the earthwork riddled with rabbit workings, the surface uneven and treacherous underfoot, every step a small negotiation with one's ankles. We soon left it and turned eastward along the brow of Herrock Hill, rounded a bend, and stopped. In a week full of awesome vistas the view down into the East Radnor valley, valley was, in my opinion, the finest of all — and this on a week that had included Hatterrall Ridge and Hergest Ridge at their best. A wide green bowl of a valley, surrounded on all sides by gentle hills, the landscape flowing away into the distance in the way that only Welsh countryside at its most generous manages. Perfect weather for a perfect view. Colin and I stood and stared for rather a long time and lost Jo and Bod in the process, who had walked on, not realising we had stopped to commune with Radnor.
We pressed on and found ourselves briefly lost — a gate into dense woodland ahead firmly padlocked and marked Private, no other obvious route forward except a sheep track dropping twenty feet or more to the left at a gradient that deserved more respect than I gave it. I went first, took three steps, and the ground made its decision. I went down on my backside and stayed there all the way to the bottom, arriving with the momentum and grace of a sack of potatoes. No damage done, beyond a questionable brown stain on the seat of my shorts that remained for the rest of the day.
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East Radnor Valley |
We walked under trees and along a trail sheltered in the lee of Herrock Hill, which, given the circumstances, offered a compensatory set of views. Eventually a gravel path, then a farm track, then a farmyard where Bod and Jo stood waiting with maps and the patient expressions of people who have been here for a while.
A pleasant B-road, — genuinely pleasant, the kind of road walking that feels like a reward rather than a connecting passage — past several attractive bed and breakfast properties, before the route inevitably peeled off across country again and up through woodland on Evenjobb Hill, which added flights of wooden steps to the usual formula. Hard going in the afternoon sun. At the top of the steepest section, a short sharp track ran up to a metal gate and a meadow beyond, and I looked at it and made a decision I immediately regretted.
I ran.
Not a jog — a proper, committed run, straight up the gradient, very nearly making contact with Jo who was walking it at a sensible pace. I made the gate, went through it, and paid for the optimism almost immediately. Anaerobia descended with the thoroughness of something that had been lying in wait for me to arrive. The feeling, for a considerable interval, was of trying to breathe through a very small opening in something solid. Colin had been filming throughout. The resulting footage is, by his account, fascinating.
A lunchtime bite, welsh cowboys, ploughing up Furrow Hill ....
Thankfully lunch was called after we had crested the field, which was merciful. We discovered in passing that the boundary fence was electrified, which was information Colin had already received through the fence itself. We settled in brilliant sunshine on the hillside, the countryside spread out below us for miles, and ate in the comfortable silence of people who have been in each other's company long enough not to need to fill it.
I lay back and covered my face with my hat. I dozed. Something bit me in the small of my back with a precision and malice that suggested purpose rather than accident, raising a lump that itched for days. I chose not to investigate.
Colin got to his feet, announced something about going ahead to film, and departed. We allowed ourselves another five minutes before following, cresting a small hill to find precisely the kind of tussocky, uneven ground that we had collectively identified as our least favourite terrain of the week. The menu of ailments, which had been largely in abeyance thanks to the knee support applied before leaving Kington, seized the opportunity to offer a dessert course: ankle twisters, served generously and at irregular intervals.
Colin reappeared from a hedgerow with the camera trained on us and filmed our progress across the entire length of the field with the patient thoroughness of a documentarian who has identified his subject and is not going to blink first.
Bod and I then missed the acorn sign and walked a respectable distance up the wrong lane before the others called us back. The sign pointed across more fields and up toward another Bridgett — Hawthorn Hill, which we apparently descended without having climbed, in the specific manner that Offa's Dyke uses to deposit you at the bottom of a valley before the next ascent. The descent offered Jo a moment of inspiration.
"I can't walk down this," he announced. "My knees are going. I'm going to jog."
And with that he set off — initially an undignified arrangement of limbs, then, as the physics sorted themselves out, a reasonable approximation of running. Colin, observing this, was apparently infected by the same impulse.
"Look at me — I'm jogging too!" he announced, and careered past me down the hill after Jo's rapidly diminishing figure.
I watched them go. I walked down. We all arrived at the valley floor at roughly similar times, which tells you something about jogging on hills, though I am not entirely sure what.
"Heeeaaahhh, geddon there, haa haa!"
We listened.
"Yaaarrrhh yarrrhhh, hey — HEYYY!"
"He's a-roundin’ up those ornery steers for branding, hyuk," I offered, in a reasonable approximation of a drawl.
Bod laughed. Then added: "We're taking the piss, but the poor bloke's probably got his leg trapped in a baler and he's calling for help."
We moved on, taking our guilt with us.
Furrow Hill was a strength-sapper of the slow, honest variety — not steep enough to be dramatic, just long enough to make itself felt. Even Bod, whose foot had been troubling him all week, took rest stops. But the summit, when it came, was worth every one of them: a wide plateau of rolling grassland, clumps of lonely trees standing at intervals against the sky, views as good as anything the week had offered. Similar in character to Bradnor Hill but larger and wilder, with the wind moving through the long grass and the kind of open space that makes you understand why people walk long distances to find it.
I made the final yards up to where the others were waiting.
"Have you seen my guidebook?" Colin called down.
I had not.
"Must have worked its way out on the path somewhere," he said, with the deflated air of a man contemplating a return trip.
"Just like my lungs," I said.
It was, fortunately, the dog-eared current-week copy, not the autographed northerly guide purchased that morning in Knighton.
A wind down into Knighton, the missing miles explained, a Plan B ....
The crest of Furrow Hill was generous with us — a wide prairie of grass and gorse, sheep grazing in all directions, the cool clean air of altitude after the warmth of the climb. A small stand of evergreens clustered at the top of one rise, incongruous against the open grassland around them, clinging on against the eastern wind and the south-westerly gales with the stubbornness of things that have decided to be there regardless of what the weather thinks. We turned eastward and upward to a crest where the town of Presteigne
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On top of Furrow Hill |
We began the descent from Furrow Hill, picking up Offa's Dyke once more for a last encounter with its lumpy, unpredictable surface. As Colin and I passed through a gate into the final steep meadow, the section of dyke running alongside it was the most impressive we had seen all week — twenty feet from ditch to crown, fenced off from walkers' feet, solid and deliberate, looking as though it had been raised recently rather than twelve centuries ago. We stood and looked at it for a moment. It deserved a moment.
Woodland followed, and through the trees the sounds of an ordinary evening: families, dogs, the distant percussion of a pitch-and-putt course. Knighton was close. The path tipped steeply downward through trees — roots and loose stones offering one final reminder that the walk hadn't entirely finished with us — and deposited us onto a road that led along and then down into the town itself.
We walked along Knighton's high street, past a pub flying Welsh flags, and arrived at the Offa's Dyke visitor centre.
Outside, a signpost pointed in both directions along Offa's Dyke. Northward — next year's walk — it read 97 miles. Southward — the way we had come — it read 80 miles. We looked at it for a moment.
"That's where the missing miles went," said Colin.
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Knighton and journey's end |
Bod considered this with the equanimity of a man who has carried a GPS all week.
"We've probably walked more than ninety anyway taking all the wrong turns into account."
He was almost certainly right.
We stripped off our gear, congratulated each other on a week completed, and drove back toward Ross-on-Wye via Kington, in the mood that follows the end of a long walk — that particular combination of physical satisfaction and the first small sadness of something being over.
The plan for next year took shape as we drove. The section immediately north of Knighton — Knighton to Brompton, fifteen miles — was reputedly the most gruelling single day on the entire route. Doing it as the opening day of a full week would be a brutal introduction. We decided to return in May, walk it as a standalone section, and return to Brompton in September to complete the northern half properly. Sensible logistics. Sound reasoning. The kind of plan that sounds entirely achievable over a car journey in late September, when the hills are behind you and the pub is ahead.
Celebration: The Man O' Ross Pub, Ross-On-Wye ....
The Man of Ross received us with the warmth of a pub that has been doing this for a long time and knows exactly what returning walkers need. An excellent meal, several rounds of the inn's finest ale, and the gradual unwinding of six days of effort and decision and landscape. Jo, who keeps reasonable hours even after a week of unreasonable walking, took a taxi back to Brock Cottage after a couple of pints, which was entirely sensible and which the rest of us chose not to emulate.
The landlord joined us at some point in the evening and showed no inclination to hurry us along. Bod, Colin, and I sat and let the night develop at its own pace. Back at the cottage, Colin and I took a last beer out into the garden and sat with it under the stars. The garden was quiet. The sky was clear. Somewhere across the fields the hills we had walked over were dark shapes against the night, doing whatever hills do when no one is watching them.
We always feel the same after a long walk ends — a genuine achievement settled alongside a genuine reluctance to let it go. In a few days it would be offices and deadlines and the ordinary accumulation of things that fill a working life. The September light and the open ridges and the easy company of these particular people would start to seem further away than they were. The winter would arrive and make it seem further still.
But we would be back in May.
I fell into bed at three in the morning, undisturbed by the thought of an early start, the Stone Trolls silent for once, and slept without dreaming.
See Route on ......
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