| The Kintyre Way | |
|
|
|
|
Emergency repairs ....
I was awake and ready by quarter past six.
"Ah! He's up!" said Bod, as if surprised.
Now was the moment of truth. I tested whether I could walk and found, with perturbment but not tremendous astonishment, that I still couldn't put any weight on my right heel. It felt bulbous and was extremely tender. Something would need to be done. I sat on the bed, picked up my nail scissors and fairly drove the point through the hard skin on the sole and into the blister underneath. At last I was rewarded with a long spurt of fluid — as if somebody were discharging a five-millilitre syringe — a thin jet that shot over my left arm and soaked into the quilt. I had hoped this would ease the pain. I was lamentably mistaken. It stung viciously as I compressed the blister until I had bled every drop of fluid out of it and onto me. Good. Now I had to turn it into something I could walk on for twenty-two miles.
I managed this by applying a Compeed plaster with two normal Elastoplast on top, then covering the whole arrangement with a tight bandage wound around my heel and ankle several times, the edges secured with micropore tape. A lot of micropore tape. Over all of this I pulled a length of tubigrip and then wore my walking sock on top. I hobbled an experimental length of the room and back. I could support my weight. Further improvement arrived when I put my trainers on rather than walking boots — Jo had suggested trainers for the first five miles of road walking and I had latched onto this idea with gratitude. I then attended to my inflamed thigh and dressed it with strips of micropore wound around the leg several times. This dressing was going nowhere.
Jo admitted to me over breakfast that his feet had been in such a bad state in the early hours that he'd thought he wouldn't be able to walk today. Fortunately — and he said this with a tone that acknowledged the word might be debatable — they had improved. He could tackle it.
Jo made our packed lunches while I dressed my foot. I left my coffee flask behind and took a water bottle and two isotonic drinks from Bod instead. I also ditched my walking pole; we had two demanding scrambles ahead and it would only get in the way. We left the apartment with a quietness hanging over all three of us.
Straight ahead to Machrihanish ....
Mark drove us to Campbeltown, off to Gigha himself today, but must have detected something in our faces because he told us confidently we would complete the twenty-two miles. We gathered our gear at the dockside. Jo nudged me and pointed, amused: a seagull had ensconced itself on the roof of a nearby van and was clearly roosting there, having apparently been in residence all night. Mark wished us luck, I did a little filming, and then there was nothing left to do but set off.
I informed the others that I would be lagging behind today. After each camera stop there was no possibility of running to catch up.
"I don't know how you did that yesterday," said Jo.
We left Campbeltown's busy centre behind and I was glad of it. After nearly a week walking quiet places I was finding it uncomfortable to dodge people and breathe traffic fumes. Groups of schoolgirls were pointing at the three of us and giggling. Dressed as we were, unshaven for a week, I was exceedingly aware that they probably weren't rating us for sexiness. Then the buildings thinned and fell away and the fields returned and I took deeper breaths.
A very long, very straight stretch of the B843 carried us west.
"I didn't know the Romans made it this far," Bod commented, idly.
I stopped to film this stretch and it was like the good old days — I had barely raised the camera when Jo, ten metres ahead, crouched to examine something on the ground. Two mice. Very shaky mice. I put my finger near one and it didn't flee or bite but merely sniffed at my fingertip while shivering continuously.
"Careful, Col," Jo warned, but I wasn't worried about being bitten. Something was wrong with these two. I suspected poison. We walked away after a moment and Jo looked back.
"Good luck," he said.
Further along, Jo pointed into a field. "Are those hoodies?"
Two hooded crows were flapping about before gliding up onto a wall. I took a moment to admire them — that grey mantle really was quite distinguished. We were still on the long straight stretch when we passed a field of cows and stopped laughing, briefly, because two formidable heifers were steaming into each other like Smackdown wrestlers. I had never seen two cows fight before. It looked playful enough. Amorous, even.
"Two butch cows," I said. "They were certainly built for the role."
"That's a lot of beef slamming around out there," I added.
It became ridiculous. Two scuffling cows became three, then four, and before you could say BSE there was a lumbering line of six beasts careering after each other down the field, egged on by the boisterous moos of two spectators.
"All it needs now is the Benny Hill theme," I said, shaking my head.
We left these preposterous creatures behind and passed a primary school near Drumlemble. We discussed the incongruity — to us city boys — of a school surrounded by open fields. You'd be seen a mile off if you tried to bunk. The road began to bend and Bod pointed out Machrihanish airport. Light aircraft skimmed in periodically, though nothing as large as the twice-daily flights to Glasgow.
The flat land around us is named for the river that runs through it — the Laggan, known for its trout and salmon. The B843 brought us abreast of the Links golf course at Machrihanish and I couldn't help laughing at the people attempting to play what is apparently the notorious first hole. They were leaning into a blast of fresh coastal wind as they tried to tee off, their clothes cracking against their bodies like pennants on a rampart.
"How far do you think they can hit in this?" I asked.
Bod pointed high into the air and then at the ground about twenty metres in front of him.
"I'd need a driver on the green," I agreed.
Machrihanish village had some affluent-looking architecture, though a number of the grand old buildings carried a jaded feel about them — the feel of money that had been here and moved on.
"You can tell where the wealth on Kintyre is," observed Bod.
Jo and I faced the inevitable and changed into our walking boots. I could feel my feet cringe as I forced them back into their prison. I may have heard them give a small snivel. My first tentative steps confirmed that yesterday's comprehensive catalogue of discomforts was eager to resume acquaintance. Oh well. Only another sixteen miles. I staved off a fit of listless weeping by doing some filming and, in the process, discovering that Jo has a cat. This is more startling than it sounds. I had been to his house many times over the years, sometimes for hours, and had never seen a cat, never detected the presence of one, never even suspected he had a liking for feline company. It emerged that Jo owns the most reclusive and neurotic creature since Greta Garbo — a cat that spends its days in a permanent state of low-level existential terror, skulking in the upstairs bedroom for years at a stretch and avoiding anything that draws breath or casts a shadow. I only found this out because we sat on a bench to delay the moment of moving on and a local cat approached and invited itself to be fussed, and we used it as a further delaying tactic until we admitted we were in danger of becoming totally craven.
Cnoc Moy ....
We got to our feet. The B843 guided us south past Lossit Ho and High Lossit and then onto an access road to Ballygroggan Farm. What a name. I do like this about travelling — coming across names that are unfamiliar to ear and tongue and testing them out for comfort.
The access road was steep. As we stolidly made our way upward, a large unkempt beard with a face attached to it slogged downhill towards us, accompanied by two dogs of indeterminate breed. Jo and I began casting uneasy glances at the approaching animals. The lead dog favoured us with a no-nonsense stare. I recognised that look. If a bloke in a pub had looked at me that way, I'd already be groping for an empty beer bottle or an exit sign. The correct procedure in such circumstances — I had read this somewhere — is to look away in a non-confrontational manner, which I duly did, though I always feel that this leaves me completely unprepared for a sudden vicious assault on my genitalia, whether from a dog or a bloke in a pub. As it happened, the pair trotted by without even a suspicious sniff, which was surprising given the pheromonal waves of thick invisible agitation we must have been emitting. The man — presumably the farmer — followed them and the unkempt beard parted just long enough to mutter a greeting.
We stopped briefly near the top to take on fluids and remove a layer of clothing. At which point we encountered a young woman coming down in the opposite direction, pushing a pram. This shouldn't have seemed odd and yet it did — possibly because we had begun to fancy ourselves as reckless adventurers entering the phase described in the literature as *genuinely remote country where there is little shelter and few facilities of any kind*, with dark warnings that map and compass skills would be essential and mists could suddenly roll in. The sight of a pretty woman in a summer dress greeting us cheerily while pushing a pram containing a gurgling baby rather deflated our heroic pretensions.
The track became less defined, more broken and occasional. We began to acquaint ourselves with mud in its various forms. We passed through Ballygroggan Farm — knocked-about buildings and small animal enclosures giving off the rich and strangely appealing smell of large animal dung, although Bod was walking ahead of us again and it may have been that he was the actual nucleus of this.
 |
|
The moors above Ballygroggan Farm |
I stopped to film and let Bod and Jo draw ahead, then set off in pursuit, crossing Craigaig Water and ascending a vigorous slope to join them at the top. I needed another drink and noticed I was getting through more fluids than usual. I should watch that, I thought.
"This is the kind of walking I like," said Bod, casting an eye around at the feral beauty of it all. He pointed toward a cleft between the two hills of Cnoc Moy — the Big Hill, or the hill of the plain depending on your translation — and Beinn na Faire, the Watch Hill. A body of water sparkled in the gap. "There's Ireland, over there." I gazed ahead and at first wasn't sure, but then there it was — low and obscure at a distance of a dozen miles or so.
"I've never been there. What part of Ireland is that?"
"Has to be the north tip, as Ireland's positioned lower than Kintyre," Bod answered. We were looking at the Antrim Mountains on the north-east coast of Northern Ireland — probably the peaks of Trostan and Knocklayd, as the highest points. Jo has links by marriage to Ireland and has been there a few times. We talked about his experiences and the Irish capacity for drink as we progressed over the bog and heather and corrugated ground that drew us around the flank of Cnoc Moy and into the green bosom of Innean Glen.
Cnoc Moy rose to our left and required my feet to negotiate familiar torment. Walking on an angle on its western slope, my right foot was being turned over at the ankle with each uneven footfall. My blisters made any counter-balancing pressure too painful to apply, so I was powerless against the rolling, pitching forward in an uncomfortable stagger. After the third time my ankle was throbbing and the language passing my lips was rich and inventive. I had a genuine fear of tearing a ligament — something I had done to that ankle before and had no interest in revisiting. We continued anyway. A narrow track briefly linked arms with the Innean Glen stream and then made a sudden quirky turn left, swooping down out of sight before kicking right again and reappearing, climbing parallel with the stream but forty metres back from its edge. Such a pretty scene that I stopped to film Bod and Jo completing it.
When Jo disappeared around the descent and didn't reappear for rather a long time, I began to suspect he had fallen asleep somewhere. My viewfinder focused on empty vegetation long enough for the operator to look foolish, before he reappeared, climbing steadily from left to right. I understood the delay when I approached the same section and found a chattering beck crossing the path. I spent some moments dithering, finally identified a wet boot-print left by one of the lads, and used the same precarious stepping stones they must have used. I caught up with my companions and we continued to climb along a single-file track lushly bordered with ferns so abundant that we had to swish them aside with our legs to make progress.
When the going gets tough ....
We found a lunch spot — a low array of rocks resembling a granite wall, with leafiness plunging down before us into a bay containing a strip of beach and a colony of rocks. We were looking at Earadale Point, where a lonely grave and a white cross marked the last resting place of the Unknown Mariner. The cross carries two plaques, one reading *God Knows* and the other giving the date 16th May 1917 — either the day God found out, or the date the mariner was buried here. The tourist board encourages a detour down into the bay. I am trying not to be churlish, but by this stage my feet had become the capital city of my body — a kind of Screaming Central, overcrowded and harassed and with a great deal of un-policed criminal activity going on in every nerve. My dangling legs caused my feet to throb in perfect rhythm with my heartbeat. I put them up on the wall with me and lay them straight out. The relief was immediate, as if a switch had been flicked. I unwrapped my sandwiches.
"There's some seals down there," I said, and pointed with a crust at a tablet of rock in the shallows below.
Bod gazed down. "Sure they're not birds?"
I scoffed. "Oh no — I've got the hang of them now." I had studied the seals at Ronachan Bay carefully. I had noted their small rounded heads, the distinctive way they lay with their tail-flippers raised as if hailing a taxi.
 |
|
The wild southern tip of Kintyre |
Then I panned silently to the right, onto the mariner's grave, lingering on the rounded stones laid out in a rectangle and the cross that had stood sentinel for ninety years. Then I lowered the binoculars.
"They were birds," I murmured.
Bod was silent, which somehow made more of a statement.
We rested for three quarters of an hour and then stood up to begin again. I was troubled by how much effort it took simply not to fall over. Jo looked reflective. "My feet were throbbing the whole time I was sat down," he said.
We moved off and within minutes the trail turned decisively upward. This was the first of the two difficult climbs Dean had warned us about. He wasn't kidding. It reached about a thousand feet without covering much horizontal distance, and the narrow track we were initially allowed became confused and then buried beneath a carpet of ferns clinging to a slope that only flies would feel truly comfortable on. I was soon reduced to grasping handfuls of fern stalks simply to avoid being propelled backwards by the weight of my backpack. I thrust upward through virginal clumps of root and bunched grass, brick-red and perspiring and losing, not long afterwards, my patience. I had to stop halfway up to suck in oxygen that suddenly seemed scarce.
"That was quite a pull," said Jo, arriving beside me, with a nonchalance I found instantly enviable. He was merely pointing out that it was hard work but that we were going along fine. I allowed my feet a moment of self-pity and let him go on ahead. When my vision had steadied and colours had re-emerged, I looked around. We had climbed rapidly and had a fine view of the open sea and more of the coast of Ireland. I set off again, my leg muscles burning with the specific, sustained fierceness of muscles taxed to discontent. I swore at the hill at intervals and lurched toward the sky. Occasionally I stopped to lean on a marker post and secretly assess how much I had left to offer. The posts wobbled freely in the moist earth like ski-poles in soft snow.
I caught up with Jo as he was examining one.
"Shall we pull them out and throw them away?" he asked. "We don't need them now and it'll make it more interesting for the next walkers."
I was too oxygen-deprived to reply but managed a nod and a thin smile. A few more gasping efforts and I emerged swaying at the top. Not the true top of Cnoc Moy — we were nestling into the neck of the beast, our route asking no more altitude of us at this point. We rested, drank, and appreciated the view. I drained an isotonic and put a worrying dent in my water supply. The arithmetic was not reassuring. I did a little filming and then we began descending the grassy slopes of Binnein Fithich — the high conical hill of ravens — and after about fifty metres I suddenly remembered that I had a rock to throw.
This isn't quite as odd as it sounds. A fortnight before, I had picked up a stone from the beach at Lyme Regis in Dorset, with the intention of carrying it the five hundred and seventy miles north to deposit it at the highest point of the Kintyre Way. Mark and I had done the same thing on the West Highland Way the previous year. I had nearly missed my cue, but recollected in time, turned back, and hurled my piece of Lyme Regis toward our high point. I watched it spin in the air and bound briefly among the tussocks before springing out of sight. I liked the thought that it might remain undiscovered for thousands of years, the last human hand to touch it before the natural forces wore it away. Alternatively, the next walker along could pick it up within days, having arrived from Lyme Regis himself in search of a Kintyre stone to take home. I gave it a brief wave as it disappeared.
"Seeya."
Then an unwholesome stench assaulted me. Tears sprang to my eyes. Sure enough — a colony of about a hundred feral goats. Why do they smell so flinchingly terrible? We had encountered their like on the West Highland Way and I had apparently built up no resistance in the intervening months. What worried me slightly was that they in turn detected me, exchanged what I can only describe as repulsed expressions, and backed away in a disapproving group. How bad must I have smelt to prompt distaste in a bunch of matted, feral goats? As their fleeing hindquarters passed from view I noticed they had left a residual pong in the air with an undertone of something sweet and slightly cloying — a faint coconut note, oddly. Altogether unpleasant.
We levelled out and turned east at the whim of the marker posts, the coast now at our backs. I had by now accepted that I was going forward like an automaton — head down, watching my fragile feet eat up the ground in front of me. Gone was any earlier enthusiasm for stop-and-stare moments. I merely wanted each section done and consigned to history. The land around me was still remote and beautiful, but my attention was only for the bumpy, hard and sporadically boggy strip immediately in front of my boots. I jumped across a small beck and over a sodden sheep pelt lying half-submerged in a ditch.
*A blow-up sheep for the farmer too ugly to get the real thing*, I thought, and hurried to catch up with Bod and Jo.
"Did you see that sheep pelt?" I asked. "You mean 'wool'?" Bod answered, with a sarcasm that knocked the bottom clean out of the pun before I'd delivered it. I shut up. We negotiated a skeletal gate. Jo turned to me. "That was the Largiebaan nature reserve we just came through."
"Yeah? Well, it's a f*ck of a place!" I responded, with some feeling.
Jo laughed, probably in surprise as much as anything. He knows I like wildlife. I encourage it to the garden, plant native species, watch BBC Springwatch without fail. He understood that screeching body parts had made me uncharitable.
At the next stop, Bod was consulting his map. I was bent double trying to stretch my back.
"Please tell me we only have about seven miles left," I said.
Bod gave me a faintly haunted look and shook his head slowly.
"How far then?"
"Guess."
"Nine miles?"
He nodded, with the same slow deliberation, and his eyes were beginning to leak sufferance.
Both isotonic drinks were now finished and on their way to my kidneys. I had a few mouthfuls of water remaining. I limited myself to one of them. We set off again, passing a meagre farm and at last finding a surface that didn't try to trip me up or wrap itself around my feet. Forest track, guiding us south-east. After about ten minutes the forest to our right ended abruptly, and shortly after that — to my deep consternation — so did the forest track. The new route on Bod's map required us to bear left, wade through deep mire, pass through another gate and hug the forest edge as we addressed the flank of Remuil Hill. A Kintyre Way sign confirmed it.
The sign also resolved a mystery we had been discussing all week: the emblem painted on each Kintyre Way marker post. We had been speculating — perhaps a Celtic symbol of masculinity and tribal togetherness? We had talked, after a few beers, about having it tattooed on our chests on completion. Bod had suggested our foreheads. It turned out to be a representation of a mountain reflected in a loch, turned on its end. I explained this to Bod, who had been out of earshot.
He listened patiently and gave me a tired look.
"You don't care, do you?" said Jo, amused.
"No," said Bod.
Amod Hill and the end is in sight ....
We walked on, once more angled on a slope, my right ankle being forced over with each footfall. The grass was even longer than before and more apt to tangle me up and deposit me into a hidden ditch, or invite me to snap my ankle on a concealed ridge. My progress became erratic and accompanied by commentary.
"This God-damned ground!"
"You bastard thing!" — as yet another mound of fescue expertly foot-rolled me.
"Where's the bloody path!?"
I limped the length of this stretch, stiffly conquered a stile, and looked ahead.
Amod Hill. Our second big climb of the day. A corridor of ravaged bracken rolling up its flank like a rough mat served as the path we were meant to take upward. I had to bite off a scream.
Jo and Bod began their ascent. I filmed their torment first — the acute angle of the incline, the pistons of their legs — then turned to do my own commentary, and found myself uttering dark words at the hill that I would not normally use out of doors, or perhaps at all. And then I turned to face the thing.
My exertions on Amod Hill were worse than on Cnoc Moy. That little bit more pain, that little bit more tiredness, the outpourings a lot more audible and inventive. I had to keep stopping to catch my breath, which I then used either to propel myself a few more metres forward or, if the impulse took me, to swear heartily at the hill for several seconds. In this manner I inched upward.
Jo and Bod appeared to have reached the summit. And yet they were still in laboured motion. Of course — the summit visible from below wasn't the true summit at all. It was an illusion, a promise of an end to torture that turned out, on arrival, to be a fiction. Amod the Merciless lolloped vertically on for a good way yet.
I had always thought the biblical phrase *weeping and gnashing of teeth* a silly piece of rhetoric. I understood it now in a very practical sense, and I paid for my eventual conquest of Amod Hill in the currency of pain, sweat and the loss of a little more heart. The descent of its other side toward Low Glenadale was a series of false descents — a brief trip downward, then back up over a hillock, then down again, an organic roller-coaster whose end never quite arrived when it promised to.
Finally, my feet yelling, I stood at the last crest. Jo and Bod were well ahead, Goretex beetles bobbing in the ferns and brambles. I managed some filming, made an effort to appreciate the valley of Low Glenadale opening to our right — framed by conifers, Glenadale Water worming through it like a broken vein
 |
|
On top of Cnoc Moy |
Together we regarded the surrounding cattle with particular attention to those lacking prominent udders. Thus enlightened, we were a pensive and watchful trio until we had exited the field.
A farm track offered itself — but even small pebbles felt like pliers clamped to the soles of my feet, so I abandoned it for the grass verge. Amod Farm, then a scene of scanty woodland and wide paths and the garrulous Breackerie Water. We crossed a bridge and the route turned south-east, and suddenly we were on tarmac. Road-walking was going to bring us home.
I waited for Bod to volunteer the remaining distance.
"Four miles," he said.
Four miles.
I tried to remember times when four miles had seemed like nothing. I have walked that in an hour, I told myself. I have done this many times.
Off we went; Bod, Jo, myself. The forest receded like a hairline. Sheep. The remains of my water went in one draw as I contemplated the final three miles. Jo and I walked in silence for a while, companions in torment. Then we looked at each other as we limped along and both started to laugh.
"I don't think I've ever been in such constant pain," said Jo, and then thought for a second. "Unless, perhaps, when I broke my leg getting run over as a child."
Our tittering continued.
"Oh well — at least we're still laughing about it," he finished.
Strangely, this shared moment gave me a boost of some kind. If we could find hilarity in it, it couldn't be that bad. We were going to complete this walk. We passed Ormsary — an unassuming flotsam of farm buildings. Bod was a little ahead and we watched him stride down one side of a road as a large lorry approached from the opposite direction. It was apparent that one of them had to give way. Bod had already decided who that should be and did not alter his course. The driver was forced to slow and pull over. Jo and I started laughing again.
"He wasn't moving for anyone then, was he?" Jo shook his head in wonder. "In six days his pace hasn't changed."
I observed Bod as Jo said this — head down, steady stride, not altered at all by pain or wound. I had the conviction that should we discover our walk wasn't ending at Dunaverty but required another fifteen miles, Bod would simply re-align his internal parameters, set his shoulders, and start counting: one — two — three. I watched him climb a rise in the road without slowing and felt most of my new-found vigour drain away.
We passed broken farm machinery scattered in a field like mammoth bones. Breackerie Water followed along on our right, broad now and dressed with trees and rushes. The route swerved away from it at North Carrine and then broadened onto another road. A curious caravan stood beside it — something covering its whole side that might have been extreme mud, or might have been a mural; we never got close enough to be certain either way.
We stopped briefly — long enough for my legs to seize up, which would have been about seven seconds — and turned onto a single-track road. My thirst was savage and becoming impossible to ignore.
Carskey Bay emerged to our front. The road ascended and gave us the sea as scenery again, along with some cliffs hollowed at their base by centuries of water. We stopped and I calculated that we must have less than two miles remaining. We had to.
The road rounded Keil Point and we were on the home straight.
The cliffs dropped away and we passed the crumbled ruin of St. Columba's church. I empathised with it, though at least it had received a visit from a Saint. My own ruinous condition could only expect fresh plasters and perhaps witch hazel once this was over. Columba, the legend holds, came over from Ireland in the sixth century and left his footprints in the rock. Actually, he left one footprint, as a local stone mason added the second in 1856 — presumably on the quite reasonable grounds that the image of a Saint delivering a heavenly message while hopping on the spot would not have sat well with the religious significance of the event. As the centuries roll on, this man's practical intervention may well become more historically important than the story of Columba itself. There is recorded proof of him doing it, and of when and why. Unless the whole thing gets entirely muddled over time and the legend emerges that St. Columba, the one-legged Saint, paid two visits to Kintyre — one in the sixth century, one in the nineteenth, having suddenly remembered an important part of the message he'd forgotten the first time round. Who knows. It's a crazy world where silly things happen.
Jo, peering ahead as we rounded the headland, made a remark.
"I think I can see one of the Way-markers, and I wish I hadn't bothered looking."
My heart sank to my feet, which could have done without the extra weight.
"Where?" I asked, not wanting to know.
Jo pointed. Near a line of caravans. A thin turquoise splinter a cruel distance away.
The road forged ahead and the land opened up around it. The cliffs ended in submission to open fields and Dunaverty Bay swept in on our right, with the small village of Southend visible behind a caravan park.
Ten minutes from the end of the Kintyre Way.
I gritted my teeth against each footfall until, unbelievably, we drew abreast of Dunaverty beach and found ourselves on the doorstep of the finish line. This should have been the moment of deep exhilaration and triumph. Instead, we faltered to a stop and exchanged puzzled looks. We couldn't find a Way-marker. Heads darted hither and thither. We peered along the road, along the beach, up toward the caravan park. Nothing. After brief consultation involving indecisive finger-jabbing in several directions, we took the tarmac road through the caravan park.
An idea arrived, born of desperation. Every caravan park had one. I began scanning the roadside.
"Oh Gods, will you look at that!" I declared, and hobbled toward a standpipe. "Is this drinking water?"
"Yes," said Bod, who promptly disappeared to the other side of the park on some business of his own.
I filled my water bottle with unsteady hands and drank deeply. I could feel the cells in my body blossom as they rehydrated. I made myself stop after several mouthfuls, wary of cramps and the spectacular consequence of drinking too fast on an empty stomach.
Three wrecks wash up in Southend ....
We stumbled almost accidentally onto the finishing point. No Way-marker appeared to announce it. We climbed a grass bank and scuffled along the spine of a ridge of grassy sand dunes, the ground undulating up and down in one final tease before depositing us at Dunaverty Bay and the journey's resting place.
An information board. And, vastly more useful, a wooden bench.
Bod and I sat down. Jo simply collapsed onto the ground, where he lay on his back and writhed with hurt and weariness. I ached everywhere. I filmed the final act of the play for posterity and then sat looking at the sun as it dipped toward the sea. Half past six in the evening. Dunaverty Bay was peaceful. My body was not, and I sat and listened to it groan and shriek — more so when I laboriously removed my walking boots for the last time, possibly forever. I had been afraid of what I might find inside them. They were unpleasantly moist with sweat and stank accordingly. My feet sighed as they were freed. I imagined them sizzling like bacon.
Bod phoned Dean to bring what he called the knacker van and collect three carcasses. Then Bod half-heartedly suggested an end-of-walk pint at the hotel in the middle distance. I would never have believed that a proposal to visit a bar could produce such active revulsion in me. I told him where to get off.
However, we had to move again regardless, because Dean needed to collect us in Southend itself. Bod strode off as stout as ever. It took me some moments to smooth out the contortions wracking me. Jo and I limped along some way behind as Bod marched ahead. I was willing Dean to appear and nearly shouted when his taxi swung into sight. He picked up Bod and trundled down toward us and we climbed aboard.
Dean had clearly witnessed Jo's and my careful progress. His face contained a reptilian smile.
"How did it go today?"
We did the usual thing: rolled our eyes, blew out our cheeks, laughed at the fact that we had willingly pitted ourselves against the ferocious business end of the Kintyre Peninsula, been given a comprehensive battering, and were about to spend a small fortune on a first aid kit.
That is, Bod and I performed this ritual.
Jo was asleep before we had pulled out of tiny Southend.
See Route on ......
|
|
|
|
|
Prev
Next
No comments:
Post a Comment