Offa's Dyke (N) Day 0

Offa's Dyke - North

By Colin Walford A misplaced prologue Prev      Next

I was up at eight, packed and ready quickly, with Danny Baker's cheerful south-east London tones keeping me company on the radio. Today was going to be about nothing more than travelling to our destination — Bod, Jo and I — and settling in for the night. The walking would begin tomorrow. I drove to Ledbury just as the day was revealing itself to be a late summer cracker: all smiley blue skies and skin-kissing sunshine. My brother had warned me a couple of days before that the week ahead was set to be grim, with at least one moody weather system on its way. I was leaving my car parked outside a friend's house for the week and felt obliged to pop in for a sociable cup of coffee. This was fine, except that their baby son Alex was toddling around with an epic cold, sporting a constant stalactite of snot from his nose. I had spent the whole working week surrounded by people sneezing and snuffling and had slowly become convinced I was going to catch whatever they all had just in time to carry it into a week of walking. When Alex sneezed explosively into my hot drink, I felt that my fate was sealed.
I was given a lift to Ledbury train station, where I sat on a wall and bathed in the warmth of the morning, glancing around appreciatively at the prettiness of it all. The trains that took me first to Hereford and then to Shrewsbury were surprisingly tidy and, more remarkably, punctual. Things must have changed since I last used public transport, I thought. Sanity was reintroduced on the journey from Shrewsbury to Welshpool, where the train itself was a dog and the toilet I visited had a floor awash with the collective bladder contents of several men with very poor aim indeed. I assumed this to be the work of the male of the species — how a woman could have contrived to miss from a sitting position was beyond my comprehension.
As I stepped off the train I spied Bod, who had left the same train from a carriage behind mine. We walked into town together to find some lunch, and on the way Bod told me that he had a chest infection, dodgy guts, and had woken that morning with backache. He had arrived at last year's walk with an injured foot and now confided that he thought it was all psychosomatic. He didn't really like walking, and his mind was desperately trying to communicate this through his body. I considered this theory and decided not to examine it too closely, since we had five days of walking ahead of us and Bod was one of only three people doing it.
We had a curry and beers in a pub called the Angel, which was a very nice meal. I then phoned a taxi to take us to Little Brompton Farm — our first digs of the week.
The farmhouse was at a secluded rural spot about half a mile beyond the Brompton Crossroads, where we had ended our walk on the Offa's Dyke path back in July — the very point from which tomorrow's walking would begin. The place itself was a lovely seventeenth-century building and the couple who lived there were friendly and welcoming. I hadn't noticed the clouds gathering during the afternoon and, as we settled in, it began to spit rain. I did a little filming of the accommodation and Jo arrived after a couple of hours, famished, so we all took ourselves off to Mellington Hall for dinner — a place we had walked through at the very end of our last day on the trail in July. On the way, we passed the Bluebell Inn, where we had stopped to drink after nine hours on our feet from Knighton. Old Father Time was presumably still in there, preserving his ice. Mellington Hall was sumptuous and I felt my wallet lurch with pre-emptive fear as it contemplated the likely cost of a meal. The food was a little pricey but also tasty and very generous in volume — I had ordered a Ploughman's and found myself confronted with chunks of cheese like granite boulders. We laughed and chatted and then walked home through what had turned into a warm and very pleasant evening. Tawny Owls hooted challenges to each other across the woods and fields as we strode through the dark.
Back at Little Brompton Farm, Bod — who had a room to himself that night — took himself off to bed. Jo and I were sharing and watched a little television, mostly Family Guy, before sleep arrived without much further argument.
Tomorrow, the walking.

Daily Tweets

Twitter from @BabbleRouser (Jo)
Bouncing along on space hoppers during Worth Unlimited team building day hasn't done much to help my hips prepare for the week's walk!
Sep 4th via web

Twitter from @BabbleRouser (Jo)
Offa's Dyke by space hopper. Now there's a challenge!
Sep 4th via web

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