The Wye Valle Way Summary

The Wye Valley Walk
By Mark Walford Epilogue Prev

Though we didn’t know it at the time The Wye Valley Walk was going to be different from the walks that preceded it. The Centenary Way, the Heart of England Way, the Offa's Dyke southern section, the Great Glen Way — these were planned as discrete adventures, walked to their conclusions, their endings known in advance. In principal The Wye Valley Walk was conceived the same way: A hundred and thirty-six miles from Chepstow to Plynlimon, south to north, following the river back to its source. Colin and I would walk it together, using Brock Cottage as our base for the southern sections, moving to B&Bs as the route carried us further north. We would finish it. That was the plan.
The walk remains unfinished.
Colin had a change of circumstances — an unexpected and happy one — that led him to relocate to Massachusetts, where he now manages his own private corner of nature and, I imagine, identifies the local bird species with the same quiet authority he brought to the hedgerows of Herefordshire. He comes back to visit on occasions. We have walked together since, briefly. But the Wye Valley Walk, with its quiet waterways and its wooded gorges and its hills that always turned out to be steeper than they looked, will almost certainly not be completed by us. The years have settled into other shapes. The walking journals have been set aside, for now, for more pressing matters.
I have written this particular account in the same retrospective voice as all the others — the voice of a man looking back at something that was happening as it happened, without the knowledge that it would stop where it stopped. Reading it back, knowing what I know, I notice Colin in it differently. The moment he vanished down a riverbank after an unspecified noise. The Irish jig on the meadow path. The safety pins produced from his pack without comment. Lying on his back at the top of Murbach Hill, staring at the clouds. I notice these things now with a fondness that the original writing didn't require, because the original writing assumed there would be more.
We covered six days and roughly seventy miles of the route. Hay-on-Wye awaits, and the Welsh uplands beyond it, and eventually Plynlimon and the source. The walk is stunning. The lower sections — the gorge below Monmouth, Tintern, Symonds Yat — are as fine as anything I have walked in Britain, and the middle sections along the Herefordshire meadows have a gentler, less celebrated beauty that rewards anyone patient enough to find it. The higher sections north of Hay I cannot speak to. We never reached them.
If you walk it, and I hope you do, perhaps you will let us know how it ends. We would like to hear about it.
The river is still there. It always is.

Mark.

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