| The Wye Valley Way | |
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Missing apparel and rakish accessories ...
We pulled into the Moon Inn's empty car park at Mordiford mid-morning and took stock. I had driven from Birmingham with my waterproof coat packed in my gear and had then neglected to transfer it to my rucksack. Colin had managed a liner sock and a walking sock on one foot and only a liner sock on the other. Neither of us had noticed either omission until this moment. Colin's situation was manageable — a possible blister, nothing worse. Mine was more concerning, given the leaden sky overhead and the forecast, which had spent the previous week promising sunshine and light cloud before changing its mind on the eve of the walk and substituting sunny intervals and heavy belts of rain. I studied the clouds. The clouds offered nothing reassuring.
A builder pulled up alongside us and shrugged himself into a perfectly good weatherproof jacket. I offered, half-jokingly, to buy it from him.
He declined.
The rain began as we completed our stretches. We shouldered the packs and walked.
Mordiford is a small village, and once we crossed the low stone bridge over the Wye it was behind us — framed against its backdrop of steep wooded hills, which would have made a finer picture in better light. The first section of the day established its character quickly: raised green embankments, shaggy horses cropping the grass, the river somewhere to the left, a pleasant flat walk in the early morning before the day got ideas about itself.
We stopped briefly so I could retie Colin's bandana.
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The Wye at Mordiford. |
The rain blew away east and was replaced by blue sky and large floating clouds — the first promising weather of the morning. The embankments and horses continued pleasantly. Colin pointed out a great swathe of Himalayan Balsam that had colonised the bank, its pretty mauve flowers growing in billowing clouds across a large area that had previously supported a variety of native species. It is a smiling assassin, the Himalayan balsam — beloved by bees, destructive to everything that was there before it, leaving a monoculture where diversity existed. I was educating the camcorder about this when Colin laughed.
"Somebody has actually taken the time to plait that horse's tail."
He was right. A white horse in a field ahead switched a long tail that had been neatly Dutch-braided. Whether this is a recognised equine practice or the work of someone with time and a specific vision for how horses should present themselves is something we never established. It looked improbable and slightly fab.
Soaked and stampless in Hereford ...
The embankments gave way to more conventional field-and-hedgerow walking, the Wye sliding along to our left in gentle sunshine. I stopped to film the scene, fought off an aggressive wasp, dealt with a malfunctioning camera using a safety pin, and was mid-repair when Colin announced his satisfaction with the day. "Hey bro, this is great — us being out here together."
He was gazing approvingly at the view ahead while I squinted at the camera mechanism. I agreed wholeheartedly jabbed the reset and the camera beeped back into life.
The second bout of rain began as we entered Hereford.
The city takes its name from the Anglo-Saxon *here* — an army or formation of soldiers — and *ford*, a river crossing, which suggests it began as a place where armed men crossed the Wye. It has been crossing borders ever since: owned alternately by England and Wales since its founding in the seventh century, it sits sixteen miles from the current border and has the cathedral to justify its city status, a twelfth-century building whose tower dominates the centre. A population of around sixty thousand makes it modest for a city but substantial by the standards of everywhere we had walked so far, and the most populated place on the Wye Valley Walk.
We walked first through suburban streets of expensive houses and nursing homes. One business premises bore our surname — the Charlotte Walford Centre — which
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Embankments near Mordiford. |
The drizzle became more persistent as we regained the river and followed it upstream to a Victorian suspension bridge — slender ironwork and white paint, rather elegant — that crossed to King George V Memorial Park. A wide avenue of mature beeches offered some shelter as the rain got properly into its stride overhead. We stood under their canopy and waited, bemoaning the fact that five days into the Wye Valley Walk we had yet to experience a genuinely dry one.
Eventually we continued into the city centre, merging at the old Wye Bridge where a curiosity in the stonework arrests the eye if you know to look for it. The bridge was blown up during the English Civil War to prevent Parliamentarian forces crossing — the royalists held Hereford — and when the hostilities concluded and the bridge was repaired, the replacement arch was built in a style distinctly different from its older neighbours. Nobody subsequently corrected this. The mismatched arch has been there ever since, a visible seam in the city's history that the city has simply got on with.
We left the route briefly to find the Tourist Information Centre and collect our passport stamp. The cathedral square was pleasant and quiet on a Sunday — a few tourists, some sunshine that had broken through briefly, benches populated with people making the most of it. We assumed the TIC would be prominent and findable. We searched for it in an ever-widening circuit, separating at one point so that Colin worked the streets while I completed a full circuit of the cathedral itself, admiring the Gothic architecture and finding no TIC. We compared notes. Neither of us had found it. The Hereford Tourist Information Centre, it emerged, no longer existed. Another blank in the passport. We made a note and rejoined the river, following it out through the suburbs and back into open country — the city releasing us efficiently, as small cities do.
Taking the pee ...
The track narrowed along a barbed wire fence with the river below on one side and wide meadows on the other. A canoe party went by, bright colours and shouted conversation briefly disturbing the peace. A group of walkers fell in behind us, one of the men blessed with a loud and carrying voice that reached us clearly and persistently. They stopped eventually, or turned back, and the quiet returned.
Ten minutes later I rounded a bend and came upon a young woman squatting against a tree in the middle of a pee. My surprise was, I imagine, as nothing compared to hers, and since she was mid-flow she was not in a position to do very much about it except apologise — though why one should apologise for having been discovered rather than for doing the discovering is a philosophical question that the situation didn't invite us to explore. I raised a hand, looked away, and told her not to worry about it. Colin, a few yards behind me, came round the bend as she stood to adjust her clothing. She seemed unbothered by the encounter and could be heard laughing with friends who were waiting in canoes below on the river, which seemed like the right attitude.
A cool gust of air arrived.
"Hello," said Colin. "Here comes another rainstorm."
He was right. The third belt of rain fell suddenly and heavily from a bank of cloud that had rolled in from the west. We took shelter under a tree on the riverbank and watched a herd of brown cows in a nearby field graze stoically through the opening minutes of the squall. After a few minutes the rain intensified and the cows concluded that this was more than they had agreed to
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Hereford Cathedral above the Wye. |
Our tree was not doing enough. The rain found us. Once you are saturated past a certain point there is no further argument to be had about stopping, so we walked — sloshing along a track that had become slippery clay underfoot, pools of brown water in every depression. I went sideways into the barbed wire fence. I had time, landing in it, to consider the possibility of stitches. No scratch, no torn clothing. Some luck, at last.
It was a miserable section and I will say so plainly. The route along the river meadows had looked attractive on Google Maps, and on a fine day it probably is. On this particular afternoon it was cold, wet, and slippery, and I was wearing no waterproof.
The clouds rolled away. The sun returned. We found a natural clearing on the riverbank and stopped for a late lunch, spreading ourselves on the raised bank while the river sparkled below and the afternoon softened into something that felt almost forgiving. Three young men drifted past in canoes, deep in conversation about London property prices across their bows, the rearmost of them travelling backwards, dipping his paddle lazily. Colin noticed something break the surface near the bank and spent some time throwing small pieces of pastry at it to encourage an appearance. Nothing took the bait. I imagined a large carp sitting two feet below the surface, unmoved by Greggs steak bake, waiting for something more interesting.
On the borderline ...
We rose stiffly and left the river, crossing gently undulating meadows that rose persistently without ever becoming a proper climb, until we broke into a field with open views in all directions. East: the profile of the Malvern Hills on the horizon. West: a smudge of purple summits marking the Black Mountains. Somewhere ahead the walk would cross into Wales and stay there. The horse-themed nature of the day's livestock — few sheep, no cows, which suited me perfectly — continued into a small paddock where a single horse decided we were exactly what he had been hoping
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Near Breinton. |
In the middle of the meadow I heard hooves.
I turned to find the horse bearing down on us at a trot. Colin, behind me, reacted with a shout. The horse shied at the sound and veered away, slightly put out. We watched him retire to a corner of the meadow.
"He's taking a run-up at us," I offered.
We kept an eye on him until the gate. He was not, in retrospect, hostile — just large, enthusiastic, and hopeful about the rucksacks. But large and enthusiastic in a field where you are also present requires a certain alertness.
Somewhere on the higher ground, with the miles accumulating in our legs, we had the conversation that long walks produce at a certain stage of the afternoon — the one about fitness, about how distances that once felt manageable now require more negotiating. I declared an intention to address this properly in the coming year: alcohol reduction, dietary attention, gym visits, a six-month programme to arrive at the next walking season in better shape. Colin was immediately supportive. We made a pact. It felt both genuine and achievable, which is the best a pact made on tired legs in a Herefordshire field can aspire to.
Cloudburst at Bishopstone ...
The last few miles were easy enough in terms of terrain, and the route was straightforward — except for a point where Colin, who held the guidebook, became distracted by hops growing in a hedgerow, and we had walked some distance down the wrong road before my route-radar registered dissatisfaction. A missed stile somewhere behind us. We retraced and found it. Pleasant walking, all things considered, just not in the direction intended.
What was not pleasant was the weather approaching from the west.
We saw it coming for some time before it arrived: a uniform dark blue bank of cloud stretching across the entire sky, already trailing silvery curtains of rain down the flanks of the hills ahead. We calculated the distance remaining to Bishopstone and the car, and the speed of the approaching front, and concluded we were not going to finish before it reached us.
The first houses of Bishopstone appeared. I directed us right along a side road. The cool gust arrived.
"Here comes—" Colin began.
The rain came down. Not gradually — it committed immediately and completely, the kind of rain that saturates within thirty seconds and treats waterproof clothing as irrelevant. Within seconds the road became a swift stream, ankle deep. We walked through it, passing the houses and bungalows of Bishopstone, heads down, both of us laughing and swearing in roughly equal measure, because there is a specific quality of absurdity to being completely drenched at the end of a day when you have been wet for most of it anyway, and all you have left is laughter.
The car appeared. Dripping, we got in.
Hot showers, dry clothes, and by the time darkness arrived the storm had moved on and left a clear sky full of stars behind it. Tomorrow's weather, apparently, would be better.
Colin had one set of walking clothes, now comprehensively soaked, drying on the rack with the optimism of a man with limited options and I contemplated my waterproof coat, hanging on the bedroom door where it had spent the entire day. Dry. Unused. Exactly as waterproof as the day I bought it.
Common sense told me I would have to pack it tomorrow.
Sod's Law told me I wouldn't need it once.
Both were right.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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