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A morning of mist and fields ....
I woke for the last time at about ten to eight to discover a cool, dewy morning. Sleep had been neither undisturbed nor comfortable. My new lightweight air mattress had sprung a creditable leak, deflating at intervals throughout the night until I was in contact with the cold, hard ground. Half-asleep each time, I had to locate the valve and blow several dozen breaths into it until it lifted me clear. After about an hour the process would repeat. I felt un-rested and muttered darkly at the mattress lying rumpled and flaccid beneath me.
I packed up slowly, had a cereal bar and did some filming to a background of morning birdsong.
Under way by ten o'clock. I made my way onto the Bream high-street intending to use the public toilet next to the library and fill my water camel from the sink, but it was firmly locked. I walked on to the local mini-supermarket, bought a litre of water and retired to a convenient bench overlooking what appeared to be a bowling green. I was re-sealing the camel when a local woman shuffled up and greeted me loudly, launching immediately into observations about the morning's weather before I could respond. I picked up fairly quickly from her instant familiarity and her clothing — a large overcoat buttoned wrongly, the lapels rising to just below her eyes — that she was probably someone with a borderline learning disability. She was a very pleasant lady regardless and rattled guilelessly on about what a terrible two years she had had, what with her health and losing her dad.
We had a bit of a natter. Then she hefted the coat up so that the lapels rose further still.
"Well — I'd best do my shopping," she boomed, and then smiled. "It's been a pleasure to meet you!" She held out a meaty hand and shook mine with emphasis, nodding as if we had just clinched a mutually satisfying deal. Then she shuffled away, and I turned to look in the direction my own day's dealings were to take me.
I walked out of Bream past a church and graveyard and turned left onto a country lane — immediately climbing, pleasantly, between low cottages and high hedges. I remembered groaning aloud on this incline last time, my pack heavy and my feet already blistered. Today it was a doddle and I swung along easily. At the T-junction I had to hunt for a stile that three months of summer growth had entirely hidden. Even when found, it required clawing through a mesh of brambles to use it. The farmers around these parts really don't like walkers.
I set off west and then south-west across the field, climbing obliquely around a small hill. The field was littered with large packages sealed in black plastic — hay, I assumed. The sore spot on my foot was present but I had tended to it before setting out and it wasn't troubling my walk. Another road brought me past Close Turf Farm and toward the superbly named Great Hoggins Farm, then off across country again through a muddy stripped field of broken stalks.
It was here that I had my first meaningful encounter with what I would come to call Followy Cows during my eight days of walking. A small herd of curious bovines began lumbering after me as I neared a farm, closing in behind me until billows of moist bovine breath began to engulf me. I was glad to reach a boundary fence where I perched and looked back at them.
"What do you lot want, then?" I demanded.
They gazed back mournfully. I took a picture of a wind turbine being shrouded in dreary fog and posted it to Twitter, then walked on past the farm.
At a place called Great Dunkilns
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My first campsite at Bream, the one that did for my air mattress |
I walked around the perimeter, grew impatient, and plunged in. I thrashed my way past the farmhouse, glaring hopefully into the windows in case anyone wanted to come out and argue about it. The wind turbine drew nearer and then receded as I blundered through avenues of cultivation. I reached a boundary fence, removed my pack, heaved it over, climbed over myself to avoid the barbed wire — and discovered I was in the wrong field. I reversed the whole procedure and negotiated the correct fence. Free of the corn at last.
Long lush grass on the other side immediately soaked my feet again. My boots, it was becoming clear, were not in the least waterproof. This was going to be something of a setback over the remaining days.
The ground was very broken as I descended through trees to a track, then across a plank bridge over Aylesmore Brook, then over a stile menacing with brambles and nettles, dispensing my views on local farmers in language not suitable for high company. A sudden steep pasture left me breathless and burning-legged by the time I reached a stone wall and stile at the top. I sat, sipped water, brushed away flies and applied sun cream — the day growing hot, the mist finally burning off. I ate some of my dried fruit and nut mix, carefully blended and bagged at home. My feet throbbed. Wet socks in waterlogged boots, I concluded, were the problem.
I remembered the lane I was now on, once I had climbed the stone slab serving as a stile, from having a good view of the Severn in June. I peered east but still couldn't penetrate the distant opalescence, so I moved on toward Hewelsfield, skirting its east side by way of a network of small lanes past isolated cottages that, as such dwellings always do, made me wish I lived in one of them. The lane rose above the village and eventually brought me to a clear height where, a little past noon, I finally saw a broad ribbon of the Severn — a narrow glimpse through a gap in a line of trees, but strangely encouraging. It confirmed the direction I was travelling.
My reflections were interrupted by a sound that always makes a walker nervous on a narrow road: the approach of heavy machinery. I turned and my eyes must have widened. What was bearing down on me was an impressive monster of yellow metal and gigantic tyres — some kind of digging apparatus, closing in at unnerving speed, the driver a remote figure in a glass cabin some distance above me. I had nowhere to go and shrank into the hedge as completely as I could. The driver barely slowed as he bore down on me. I looked up at him imploringly. He didn't acknowledge me in the slightest and stared steadfastly ahead — a heavy-browed individual who looked as if he had left school at fourteen still not having graduated from writing with crayons. One of the tyres scraped my leg as it rolled by and I tried to press myself further into the vegetation.
"Fuck off!" I shouted, fear making me react uselessly.
My relief when it finally roared away was considerable, tinged with extreme annoyance. The man had taken no care whatsoever.
I extracted myself from the hedge and pressed on, the route going gradually downward and then plunging to a T-junction. Right turn onto the Gloucestershire Way, which took me around a disused quarry. I turned right again, this time upwards at a fork in the track which led me to a place I remembered stopping at previously - a
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In a courtyard just before Rosemary Lane, Woolaston |
"Nice day for it!" he said, in a strong rural burr.
I agreed that it was and then noticed I had deposited myself across what appeared to be a major ant highway. I don't like ants and skittered several yards further along the grass bank. There I sat for about three quarters of an hour, enjoying the rest, the food, my temporarily dry feet and the view of woods on the opposite bank. I replaced wet plasters and covered some new blisters, fished dry socks from my rucksack and hung the damp ones from the rucksack strapping when I set out again. The restorative quality of dry feet in a fresh pair of socks is one of the most reliable pleasures of a long walk.
I had become horrendously lost at this point in June and wasted a couple of hours. Today, memory serving me well, I negotiated the difficult spots without trouble. What had been an exasperating toil was a swift tramp through wild and beautiful scenery — the mini-valley, a steep climb out, a few fields that had baffled me before, a doubling back on lanes, a descent into another fissure, a brief and blessed interlude of cool woodland near Ashwell Grove. I didn't lose my way at all. I broke free of the trees, edged around a field along a track through a thin belt of trees and found myself on Rosemary Lane.
A bridge too far .... ?
I had been looking forward to this all day. Rosemary Lane meant that the hilly part of the Forest of Dean area was coming to an end. Ahead of me, on Rosemary Lane, was the long descent to the A48 road into Chepstow and flatter country for a while. I passed a house and yard which contained a ruinous vehicle I likened to an ancient school bus. It had a rust-nibbled bonnet and was dressed in faded blue paint, vegetation sprawled over bowed plastic windows.
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The Wye meanders towards the Severn near Buffer Wharf, Chepstow |
I made the top and found a large swathe of the Severn now visible. I parted company here with the Gloucestershire Way and stayed with the A48 — I fancied level tarmac for a while rather than more rugged cross-country. Rosemary Lane plunged downward without hesitation, the angle acute enough to feel as though it were hurrying my footsteps. The Severn Bridge appeared way in the distance, looking dainty and insubstantial through the shimmer of heat. It was just after three o'clock. I made a decision: I needed to be on that bridge within three hours or so.
This seemed a very ambitious goal.
The lane twisted through a copse and past a row of cottages, then delivered me to the A48 in twenty minutes of continuous descent.
I was suddenly in a different world — quiet lanes, rooks and jackdaws, insects, all exchanged for the constant din of fast traffic. I walked a path adjacent to the vehicles and stopped briefly for water near Hanley House before settling into what was, essentially, a trawl. The A48 was long and straight and at times uphill. Hard unfamiliar concrete was unkind to feet already tired from the miles, and the convenient path beside the road kept disappearing, forcing me onto a narrow grass verge or the road itself, cringing at passing cars and lorries. I commented during some filming that this bit was, at times, bloody horrible.
It took a weary hour to reach the outskirts of Chepstow. Nearing a bridge across the River Wye — converging here with the Severn — I filmed a flyover I had just walked under. This second bridge marked the only point where my current walk crossed a walk done three years earlier: the Offa's Dyke path from Sedbury Cliffs, walked with my brother, my cousin and a family friend. Now I was alone, looking at Chepstow castle and trying to make a decision. I was thirsty and fancied a pint. It was twenty to five. Detour into town or carry on toward the Severn Bridge?
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Looking back on the old Severn Bridge |
It took about forty minutes to cross the full length of the bridge, including a couple of stops to film and simply stand and marvel. Tiny and delicate from miles away, it was enormous now. I craned upward at the height of the supports and the thick cables strung between them. Rivets the size of my palm were dotted everywhere in the pale grey steelwork. The tarmac road looked tired and worn and trembled flutteringly beneath me as vehicles thundered past. Looking left over the railings, the familiar rustic fields and hedgerows that had been my companions for two days gave way to huge mud banks glistening wetly in the late afternoon sun. As I progressed across, the road climbed for about fifteen minutes before levelling over the flat water of the Severn itself — tide low, more naked banks of mud in slick groups. I sniffed experimentally. There it was: the salt tang of the sea. On a distant eastern shore, a power station marked where a friend of mine had started his own invented walk a few months previously.
The road descended toward the bridge's far end and I passed over Little Ulverstone and Aust Rock toward Aust Cliff, — pronounced *ust*, as locals had previously informed me. I had intended, on my earlier attempt, to fossil-hunt at the Aust cliffs, which carry a bone-bearing bed famous for teeth and remains of reptile, fish and dinosaurs, discoverable simply by beach-combing the foreshore. An *Access Prohibited* sign had cut off that plan in June and did so again today.
I negotiated the road system around the Severn View service station and found my way into the village of Aust via a tunnel under the M48. Weary, feet hurting, I pitched my tent on the first available green space — a stretch of grass next to the flyover, snuggled against a neat little power station, houses on two sides rather closer than I would have liked. I would need to leave electronic equipment behind while I went to eat, which I was not entirely comfortable about. But the light was fading and I had no time to find a more secretive spot. I changed into something approaching respectability and walked to The Boar’s Head, where I had sat three months before having conceded that the walk was over, in its truest sense.
The lady behind the bar received my most ingratiating smile and a request for a hot meal. I was in luck and ordered steak, which I had been harbouring a growing craving for since mid-afternoon. I found a power point and covertly plugged in my phone. I ate, drank a few beers and chatted occasionally to the couple at the next table.
It was cool and dark when I left, strolled back to the tent and crept into my sleeping bag. Far from being an intrusion, the occasional vehicle on the M48 above me was actually quite soothing and it quickly lulled me to sleep.
Daily Tweets
- Quick one, before my battery expires. Spent a combative night in my tent, battling with an air mattress with a puncture.
- Now off to Easter Compton, on the far side of the Severn Channel. If the miles are hard on my feet, Chepstow instead. Or casualty.
- I've made it to the A48 in one piece. Now walking towards Chepstow. Feet are sore, but not shredded. This is preferable.
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Just a thought; maybe that driver in the death machine was the farmer whose cornfield you had previously invaded? You were probably out of gunshot range at the time ....
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