For "The Walk to Wales 2019" see the other pages on this blog.
See the front page for "The Walk to Beccles 2021"
This page covers what everyone knows has been the most unusual year imaginable, a year which began with hopes of normality, went completely and tragically off the rails, and is ending still in the wilderness, but with hope, and paradoxically with some ambitions achieved.
At the start of the year I had no plans for another long cross-country check. Instead I had dreamed up two shorter journeys, each about a week long, with hopes for both, but happiness if only one could be done. The first came from a jokey comment from one of my sons. We have relatives in Suffolk and Norfolk, in the eastern part of England which the sun reaches first every morning, and we are very familiar with the 125-mile road trip, for the most part big roads and not very scenic. My son quipped that maybe I should walk to Suffolk, but when I looked more closely the idea did not seem that daft at all. While there are few hills, the terrain along a more or less straight line is very rural, and dotted with villages and small towns, some of them picturesque. The walking distance is around 130-140 miles, so a week would do it. For the second trip I thought maybe Dorset, heading south west, again about a week away. Then to plan another big journey perhaps for 2021.
Along came coronavirus, and all that thinking and planning went to dust.
Early days – January-February
I had resolved not to let regular daily distances slip, keeping the “motor” in trim so that lengthy training for the next trek would not be needed, so despite dodgy weather I was out and about on most days, staying on local routes and clocking anything from four to ten miles each time. Little did I realise that those local routes would become my only stamping ground for months!
The weather at the start of 2020 varied from cold and bracing to endless wetness. I watched in sadness as places through which I had strolled in the sunshine a few months earlier were swallowed by floodwater. Some of my own routes became very soggy too, but they were still passable. God bless Gore-Tex!
By the end of February the rumble of the virus was getting louder and closer, and way before it became an official guideline I began keeping a good distance from anyone else I met on a walk.
Into lockdown – March-April
March began grey and wet. On the 23rd the pressure to act against Covid-19 became too great even for the British government to resist and a lockdown was announced. Almost instantly the sun came out and the sky turned blue.
Lockdown conditions permitted going out once a day for exercise, so in theory my activities were still safe as long as sensible precautions were taken. However, on the 29th March a government minister was asked on TV how long he thought daily exercise should be: he suggested an hour’s walk “should be enough”. This was not a rule, just an opinion, but it flashed across the nation’s media as if it were rigid. I devised a couple of routes of just under 5 miles each, figuring that nobody would notice if I was out for 80 minutes. One of the routes was very rural, the other mostly urban, crossing what were by now almost deserted main roads. April will live in my memory for the frequent screaming of ambulance sirens. Despite fine weather, it felt like a very gloomy time, especially as I found myself in a “vulnerable” category purely on grounds of age. If I had been vulnerable to anything before it was usually my own fault, so this hurt!
Spring walks into summer – May-June
As stricter Covid rules were gradually relaxed I reverted to my mixed pattern of routes, and settled back into a regular rhythm. I got out to walk almost every day during this time, sometimes for only 4 miles, sometimes 5 or 6, sometimes 9 or more. The need to train hard up to 16, 18 and 20 miles, as in last year’s preparations for the walk to Wales, was not there, but then last year I was not walking daily.
My favourite circular route, much trampled in these two months, sets out along exactly the same path as the walk to Wales, following a route known locally as the Dollis Valley Green Walk. A generally good path, mostly hard surfaced, tracks the Dollis Brook northward upstream to Barnet and beyond. My route leaves the brook to climb south up a hill to Totteridge, then descends over the fields towards Mill Hill before circling back through woods towards home. It is a nine-mile circuit, takes about 2 hours 25, and can thus be done before breakfast if I set out early. There is nothing quite like a deserted summer Sunday morning, up and about while most folk are still happily snoring!
One of my shorter routes starts the same way but cuts off part of the loop to reduce the distance to just under 5 miles, while the other 5-mile route circles eastward, through some local nature reserves but otherwise on streets.
The finer weather and the optimism about Covid set my mind back on to planning. Perhaps, just perhaps, I really could get one shorter trek and a longer one squeezed into 2021… Many an hour of walking was spent musing about getting back on the road.
In mid-June the local authority announced the closure and replacement of the first bridge over Dollis Brook on my route – this is the bridge where I met my friend at the start of Day 1 of the walk to Wales. It is, or was, a delightful little wooden arch, popular with children playing Pooh Sticks.
A little research showed that the plans were to replace it with a steel bridge – there are several along the path – apparently because it was in need of too much maintenance, and because it was slippery in icy weather. This was all rubbish: the real reason was that its design did not match the bureaucrats’ obsession with encouraging cycling, as it was less than 2.5m wide. The four-week project took almost four months, with several periods of route diversions, to reach an unsatisfactory end: the new bridge was incorrectly installed and can never have a proper tarred surface. The bare metal flooded with every rain shower, but has been bent and bodged to keep it dry. The old structure had the last laugh: its perfectly healthy timbers took the contractors twice as long to cut and remove as they had planned.
New discoveries – July-August
Apparently in the UK during the Covid pandemic the number of people taking up recreational walking has soared. This was obvious on my daily strolls: paths which were previously easy could become intolerably crowded on sunny weekends, while other places which had been the preserve of the more adventurous were quickly discovered. It cannot be a bad thing that more people are getting out to use their legs, but at times it can be a pain! My early walks were rarely troubled, and I learned to avoid weekend afternoons, where few among the crowds even bothered to remember there was still a nasty little virus afoot.
The weather was gorgeous: long periods of settled, dry, sunny days, one sequence hot enough to qualify as a heatwave. The mud of winter was baked hard and forgotten, and the brook dwindled to a trickle. Luckily my favourite summer routes have long stretches with tree cover for shade.
In this time I wandered a little more widely, enlarging my usual 9-mile loop occasionally to around 11 miles or so, and exploring more of the spaces between the paths I had by now trodden so often. Buried in the valley south of Totteridge, for example, is Darlands Lake, now a large and shallow brownish puddle, but once the artificially-created boating lake of a large estate. On Totteridge Lane, these days lined with the secretive mansions of the very wealthy, the entrance to Copped Hall can still be traced. The old hall, rebuilt in the 18th Century, faced downhill across manicured gardens rolling down to the boating lake. It had a rather chequered ownership and was finally demolished in 1928. What had been the gardens reverted to natural state. There are still rhododendrons, now growing wild, and the circular copse planted in 1810 to mark the golden jubilee of George III can still be seen, but much has been recaptured by brambles. They spare the lines of the old garden paths, which gave me ample opportunity to explore.
So on towards 3000 – September-October
At the beginning of September my wife and I took a short break in a rented cottage in Dorset. It was good to get away from London even briefly, although the rental process was complicated by Covid precautions. It was fun, but we were everywhere horrified by the crowds, and by the scant regard for any thought of the virus. The good weather continued through this little jaunt and beyond, putting me in mind of where I had been at the same time last year.
I took a little moment to look up some of the places I had stayed on the walk to Wales, especially the pubs and B&Bs which might be at most risk of failing in the pandemic. They all seemed still to be operating, if with limited facilities and reductions in capacity, which was comforting.
Otherwise I continued my near-daily strolls and could not get the idea of planning more long journeys for 2021 out of my head. During September it also became clear that my total walking mileage for this year was very likely to match, or even beat, the 3,013 miles I had covered in 2019. In that year I began quite slowly, walked less during holidays, but stepped up sharply for training and of course for the walk to Wales itself. I allowed myself a break after that, only ramping up again close to the end of the year. By contrast this year I had just continued to plod on regardless, and held to a fairly good daily average of about 8½ miles, enough to match the 2019 total if I could keep it up.
Mists and dampness – November-December
After such a good summer, autumn was a very colourful display, although the rains returned, sometimes heavy and prolonged. Routes which had been an easy trot just a month earlier became quagmires, or simply flooded – conditions in some places which I had not seen since February. Where the paths were still heavily walked some became just plain unpleasant, so I admitted defeat and treated those sections as closed for now.
When the sun did shine, especially in the early mornings, the light could be amazing, and the simple experience of being outdoors transcended the sticky mess underfoot.
Even flooded areas took on a new look, in places resembling a mangrove swamp, right here in North London!
On the nerdy side – I passed 3,000 miles this year in early December, and finished on just over 3,150 (3,152.8 to be precise!), so there is satisfaction in small things.
In the background the Covid pandemic came back with a vengeance, with a sharp rise in cases in London and new restrictions placed on what used to be called normal life – though thankfully not on exercise. It might be difficult to judge from the numbers of people out and about, filling the parks and playgrounds and joining up in groups, but we end the year in a public health crisis. For 2021 the only way is up. Who knows what it will bring, but with luck and a vaccine, I can be back on the road again properly soon.
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