| The Wye Valley Way | |
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Back at the Yat ...
We were back at Symonds Yat under mild spring sunshine, preparing for another dozen miles of the Wye Valley Walk. When we had been here last August the place had been a hive of activity — cyclists, canoeists, sightseers, a crowded bar terrace, the narrow lane in and out requiring two cars to negotiate each other with the care of a diplomatic negotiation. This morning the riverside car park was almost empty and the village had not yet properly addressed the day.
What puzzled me, given this abundance of empty spaces, was that the car park attendant first tried to direct me into a space where my car obviously would not fit, and then insisted I reverse into a riverside slot on the very edge of the bank. I engaged the handbrake three times, testing its conviction, and spent the rest of the morning with a peripheral anxiety that on our return we would find only the car's bonnet protruding from the Wye.
The village, for those who have not been, divides along the river into Symonds Yat East and Symonds Yat West. The name itself is a marriage of Robert Symonds — a seventeenth-century sheriff of Herefordshire — and the much older word *yat*, meaning a gate or pass through hills. Which tells you something about the landscape before you've taken a single step into it. People have been finding this pass useful for at least twelve thousand years: the surrounding hills have yielded Iron Age forts, Roman occupation, and prehistoric remains that predate all of it. More recently, the gorge and its rocks have provided locations for the television series Merlin, the film Shadowlands, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The peregrine falcons that nest on Yat Rock are perhaps the most consistent attraction and require no special effects.
Yat Rock - Ransom and ruins ...
We shouldered rucksacks in the mild sunshine and made our way through a campsite still fragrant with frying bacon and fresh coffee — both of which we noted and moved past with the discipline of people who have miles to cover. The first climb of the day announced itself almost immediately as we left the village road and turned onto a woodland track ascending steadily through the trees. Not steep, but persistent, and long enough to require the measured pace and regular breathing that the walking websites recommend and that I actually deployed, for once, with some success.
At the top, a broad logging trail and the opportunity to test a new acquisition: a selfie stick for the camcorder. I spent some minutes mounting the camera, adjusting the angle, and filming us from various positions — the camera held high above a hedgerow, pointed back along the trail, extended to capture both walkers and the valley below.
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Ruined farmstead beneath Yat Rock. |
Clover and closures ...
The forest released us eventually into wide meadows of grass and clover along the riverbank, sheep everywhere, ewes shepherding lambs some of which were evidently a matter of hours old and still uncertain about the legs. They retreated from us on a time delay — waiting until we were almost upon them before wobbling away at a pace that suggested the concept of distance was still theoretical. There is something about new lambs that makes the committed carnivore uncomfortable in ways that the supermarket packaging is specifically designed to prevent. I registered the discomfort, acknowledged the contradiction, and ate my sandwiches without further internal debate.
We knew this stretch well. The route ahead was clear in both our minds: along the river, across the old factory bridge at Lower Lydbrook, past the mouth of the old railway tunnel and then the Victorian church at Welsh Bicknor for our lunch stop, along the pastures to Kerne Bridge. We would not need the guidebook. We could not get lost. Nothing could go wrong.
The abandoned factory at Lower Lydbrook grew above the treeline — chimney stacks, hangar-like buildings, acres of broken window panes catching the flat light, sheep grazing contentedly in its shadow as though the distinction between countryside and dereliction were a human preoccupation they had no interest in sharing.
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The Wye after Yat Rock. |
Boom, contraction, takeover, expansion, closure in 1994. The standard biography of a twentieth-century British industrial concern, written in concrete and shattered glass. We walked around the factory perimeter and found a gap in the chain link fence that allowed us inside to poke around briefly. The main workshop was large enough to park a commercial aircraft, all its doors padlocked, but a broken window offered a view into the interior — steel roof girders fading into a gloom of grey, what looked like thousands of pounds of vintage factory lighting hanging overhead, everything still and quiet and awaiting the scrap merchants. When the bulldozers come, and they will, another piece of industrial history will be replaced by a housing estate. Probably a better-looking outcome. Almost certainly a loss.
We reached the old railway bridge that served the factory — our crossing point, our gateway to Welsh Bicknor church and the lunch we had been looking forward to.
The bridge was closed. A simple sign. *Bridge Closed.* A plank of boarding across the access.
We looked at it for a moment.
We had no choice but to continue on this side of the river, on unfamiliar ground, and find our way to Kerne Bridge however we could.
Slow progress and Slow Worms ...
We crossed a football field, searched fruitlessly for a riverside path, and eventually gave in and walked the B4234 to Kerne Bridge. The road had no footpath and the rain was heavier for a spell, and neither of us made particularly cheerful videos of this section. We found a picnic area at
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Chase Hill with Ross behind it. |
Near the mobile home village of Whiteside Park, a rough grassy track offered a third attempt, leading down to a ploughed field and the possibility of continuing beside the Wye. As we prepared to cross the clay furrows Colin stooped suddenly and came up with a slow-worm in his hands.
We had seen one before — on the West Highland Way, high above Loch Lomond, a sleek glossy black. This one was green-gold with shimmering scales, entirely different in character, and it performed very agreeably for the camcorder before we returned it to the hedgerow. Ten years between slow-worm sightings. An infrequent pleasure. The ploughed field turned out to be one of the largest fields either of us had encountered — half an hour of rough walking along the track between the river and the plough lines, the ground uneven and rank with weeds, a regular opportunity for twisted ankles, the canoeists providing the only movement on the water alongside us. On the far bank we could see the sheep pastures and wooded slopes that the official route was taking, somewhere we were not. Eventually the field ended at an open area by the river where the last group of canoeists of the day were launching. A bench on a wooden platform offered itself for a lunch break. We took it. The canoeists slid into the Wye with splashes and clacking paddles and departed, and we had the place to ourselves.
A robin appeared in the nearest bush and watched our crisps with the focused attention of a bird that has learned how these situations tend to develop. As we ate he grew bolder, hopping onto the platform, working the crumbs that fell under our feet, eventually so close that we could have picked him up. We had no intention of doing so and the Robin knew it.
Walking over hills to Ross-on-Wye ...
We set off again, passing a community hall with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the river. Inside, men and women of a certain age were waltzing — a tea dance in full, unhurried progress, couples circling the floor while others sat along the back wall in a companionable row. They had a fine view of the Wye through the glass, and on this occasion a fine view of two damp and slightly bedraggled middle-aged walkers stomping past their window. I gave a couple of the ladies a cheerful wave, which they appeared to appreciate.
A minute later we discovered we had gone slightly too far along the bank and needed to walk back past the window.
Neither of us wanted to reprise the performance — there was a risk of being categorised as something other than casual passers-by. Fortunately there was a path around the back of the hall, which we took without being seen.
The route crossed to Kerne Bridge and turned back into the trees without troubling the village further, heading uphill again. The knees had things to say about this and said them. My shoulders, carrying the rucksack for the better part of a day, had joined the conversation. The Bluebells were starting along the path — early yet, but enough to lend some colour to the grey afternoon — and the walking was genuinely pleasant even when it was not entirely comfortable.
We came to a break in the trees and below us the red rooftops of Walford appeared. It is a small village, and Colin and I share the name — Walford, a dweller by a Welsh ford, which is precisely where we were standing. I laid a symbolic claim to the village. Colin claimed the pub. We agreed that there was not a great deal else to divide between us and moved on.
The afternoon wore in the way that late-walk afternoons do — the balance tipping from comfortable weariness toward the kind of tiredness that requires a fixed objective to push against. We had one last significant climb: Chase Hill, in the middle distance; a tree covered dome of a hill some 660 feet from base to crown. Beyond the hill, peeping coyly from beyond its left flank, we could make out the sharp church spire of St Mary the Virgin at Ross-on-Wye where lay the end of the day’s walk. I’m not sure if I was glad to see
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Heading towards Chase Hill and our last climb |
We approached the climb to Chase hill along a meadow that rose gently and narrowed, pointing like an arrow to the steeper climb through the woodland ahead. Chase Hill has a natural cleft bisecting it, and at least we were going to climb by passing through this defile rather than the two higher summits, but nonetheless it was quite a steep ascent. I let Colin go ahead and took my time, resting often, and admiring the ragged beauty of this old woodland. My breath had also become ragged but there was little beauty about me as I finally reached the top to find Colin had discovered a surprise at the summit of Chase Hill: a stand of Sequoia or Redwoods. Not the American giants — nothing like — but substantial nonetheless, their gnarled trunks rising above the Herefordshire canopy with a certain composure. We walked among them for a while. I laid a hand on the bark of one and found it yielded slightly under the pressure — spongy and faintly warm, nothing like what I expected. It is a strange sensation, touching something that old.
Colin's camcorder battery chose this moment to expire.
We descended Chase Hill as abruptly as we had climbed it, past a farm where a group of young workers conversed loudly in an eastern European language before taking a side track and leaving us to our own silence. The trees gave out onto a vast area of open grassland — the Tank Meadow, named for the reservoir serving Ross-on-Wye that was installed here at some point, invisible to us as we descended. A waymarker eventually appeared, leading us past an impressive Tudor-esque building belonging to something called Classical Ventures, and then abruptly onto the suburbs of Ross.
We had a car somewhere in this town. Neither of us could remember precisely where.
We did remember it was near a small hospital. Beyond that, the details were vague. We wandered through quiet residential streets for a while — pleasant streets, bungalows and town houses, nothing wrong with them, but also nothing that corresponded to where we had parked that morning. Colin suggested the town centre. We marched along the main road in that direction for some distance before thinking to ask a passing dog walker about the hospital. They knew exactly where it was, and it was at the opposite end of the road to the direction we had been walking.
We turned around and retraced our steps.
The hospital appeared. The surrounding streets began to resolve into something familiar. The car was in a side street nearby, precisely where we had left it, found by a combination of educated guesswork and the specific luck that follows a long day's walking and occasionally takes pity on the walker.
We agreed that tomorrow we would begin at the church of St. Mary the Virgin, snipping whatever small section of official route this omitted and caring not at all about it. What we needed right now was beer, hot food, and a couple of glasses of Merlot in that order.
We achieved all three. The early night remained, as it so often does, theoretical.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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