The Walk to Wales 2019 - the full story

The Walk to Wales 2019 – the full story

After completing the trek from London to Aberystwyth in August and September 2019, and using this blog as a rolling diary of my travels as they happened, I resolved that I would scribble down the whole story in detail. This is as much to protect my own memories as for the entertainment of others! It has taken a few months, but here is the result. I hope you enjoy it.

Preamble…

“And where are you off to, striding along so purposefully?” The very polite question came from a smiling elderly lady in an old-fashioned straw hat, picking blackberries into an equally old-fashioned basket. It stopped me short. “Princes Risborough”, I mumbled – my destination for the day, still about eight miles distant. She looked at me, clearly not fully satisfied with my answer. As I explained to her that I had walked from London and was not intending to stop until I reached Wales, incredulity spread across her face. She wished me good luck.

The encounter had taken me aback. It was not the first, and far from the last time I would be asked why I was wandering the landscape with a large blue backpack, but it put the whole exploit into sharp focus, and this only on the afternoon of the second day. Just why had I left my front door with a plan to cover over two hundred and forty miles in two weeks, London to Aberystwyth on lanes, tracks and footpaths? Was there a good reason why nobody else seemed to have followed that route? More to the point, and regardless of the weeks and months of training, could I do it? I put these challenges to the back of my mind and strolled onward.

My love of walking began early in my teenage years when I first got hold of a proper Ordnance Survey map of my home area and, after six miles, then ten, then more, I was hooked, for good. I soon learned to shun unreliable buses for trustworthy feet, and when I started work, I moved north, where I could cut my more adventurous teeth on the moors of the Peak District and the mountains of the Lakes and Wales. Over time much more followed. The excitement never dies, even if the opportunities later on become more limited. Many (many) years later, retired and living in North London, it seems a waste not to make use of the time while my energy is up to it.

For a long time I had cherished a nerdy fascination with a red line on the map classified as “A44”. Whoever first traced this road officially in 1923, from Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire across the Cotswolds, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and right across mid Wales to the coast at Aberystwyth must have had a twinkle in his eye. Scenic route does not really do it justice. Today it starts close to Oxford and various sections have been bent and diverted, but that big diagonal line across the middle of England and Wales is still an attraction. What if it could be joined to my front door by a continuation over the Chilterns and across Oxfordshire, to make a single route? What then if it could be followed, but studiously avoided, by stringing together lanes, footpaths and tracks all the way? Could the whole line be walked in two weeks? At the time I was still working, so squeezing the time was important. I worked it out in detail. Yes to all my questions. My daily little two-, three or four-mile strolls became a taster for the start of “The Walk to Wales”.

It came as quite a surprise just how much planning was needed to get this idea underway. I traced the route, mile by mile, on computerised large-scale maps, and worked out more or less where I would need to find a bed for each night. Then I did it all again. And again.  I decided that the best time window would be at the end of the summer holiday period, right at the beginning of September, and comforted myself by confirming that the weather along my route had been pretty good at that time every year for the last decade. I was not planning to rough it, so I based my planned overnight stops on hotels or B&Bs, and soon discovered that in some locations the options were limited. Quite often to just one option. In January, a full eight or more months ahead of the start, I booked every planned stop.

It was also in January that I began what I called “training”. If I was going to cover twenty miles a day I had to get my body used to it. Luckily the north of London is blessed with a lot of green space, indeed only twenty minutes from my door can feel like the real countryside. There are open fields and woods between Mill Hill and Totteridge preserved from the plague of dreary streets by the campaigning zeal of residents since the 1930s, and yet more, closer to Barnet, protected by precarious respect for the Green Belt. To the south, less than an hour away on foot, lies Hampstead Heath, nudging the woods by Highgate. There are thus options for routes which do not depend on pounding the pavements. I worked out a series of loops from  my front door, seven, eight, nine, ten miles, plus a shorter circuit of four miles devised by my wife (and thus forever to be known as the “Sue 4”). Done singly or in combination I could challenge myself over a whole range of distances, all the way up to the magic twenty miles. At the same time I began testing what to wear on my feet, trying and discarding a raft of different shoes and expensive socks before settling on what worked for me. I gradually acquired the rest of the gear I would need, with the focus on minimal weight for everything. Saving kilos is not cheap, but I knew it would pay dividends.

The walk was offered to friends as a sharing experience, but one by one they saw – perhaps - the rigours of the training required and decided against joining me. In one way that was sad, as companionship can be great on a long trek, but several times on the real journey I had reason to be grateful only to be moaning to myself.

By April I was comfortable with the distance, so after a short holiday break I started again, this time with a full pack. I loaded my backpack with old clothes and some of my son’s training weights to get it to around twelve kilos, which is what I expected to be carrying for the journey. It was a very different experience: even the first trip round the “Sue 4” made me question again the wisdom of the whole thing, but a week or so after that first plod I was back up to a regular nine miles and feeling good about it. Long story short, in a few weeks, and with yet another revision to my footwear, I was on track. I had expected to get some comments as I strolled the streets carrying a full pack, but this is London, so I was largely ignored.

I even had a sort of medical endorsement, which was comforting given that I hit 70 years in June. Chatting to my doctor about unrelated issues I confessed what I was about to do and asked if I should be taking any special precautions. She told me to get on with it and enjoy it. Fair enough.

In the introduction to “Journey through Europe” (1974) one of my great walking muses, John Hillaby, describes how he was asked what it is that makes long-distance walking worthwhile. “Independence, I said. Walking means no pre-ordained schedules, no hanging about waiting for transport, for other people to depart. Alone with a pack on your back you can set off at any time, anywhere, and change your plans on the way if you want to.” I second that. The pages which follow will, I hope, bring those thoughts to life.  

First day out: wonderful Watford

The approach to my departure day had not been entirely smooth: a week or so ahead I had toppled over on a training walk and collected a beautiful black eye. Perhaps it was a warning not to be in a crazy hurry, even on familiar territory.

My neighbours had got wind of my expedition and promised to be around to wave me off, and one old friend had chosen to meet with me for almost all of the first day. To bring an even bigger smile the weather forecast for the first two or three days was excellent: calm, dry, warm but not hot, and sunny.

Mid-morning on Thursday 29^th August – and this was it. Fuelled by a good breakfast and cheered on by a small group at the front door I set off. It felt odd. The start was along the same line as dozens of training walks, and hundreds of strolls over the years, but this time it really was the route to Wales. It was too much to process just yet how many miles lay ahead.

I stepped out along Lover’s Walk, “a footpath which never made it to a thoroughfare”, as one local document puts it. Within a few minutes it is tree-lined and not at all like an urban path, and a little further on it crosses Dollis Brook and joins a route known as the Greenwalk. It was here that my friend was waiting, so for the rest of the day I did not need to think so hard about what I was starting.

Dollis Brook rises beyond Mill Hill and helps to define the landscapes of Barnet and Totteridge before joining the River Brent, itself a tributary of the Thames. The brook is generally calm, especially on warm August days, although I have seen it in greyish foaming winter spate, and it is home to much wildlife, including herons and the shy white little egret, which I have spotted only a couple of times.

In the 1930s, when the brook marked part of the boundary of the old Borough of Finchley, an enterprising local councillor by the name of Pike proposed the “Brookside Walk” to run by the waterside northward to Barnet, and even bought a parcel of land from neighbouring Hendon to ensure it could be completed. Today’s Barnet Council is rightly castigated for many things, but the development of the route into a waymarked path, much of it surfaced and some of it widened to share with cyclists, is mostly to be applauded. In several parts, dressed with woods and meadows, it is quite hard to remember that this is all within London postcodes.

Close to High Barnet the Greenway turns west and loses its tarmac, becoming nothing more than a line on the map across manicured recreation grounds, and then a field path. Here it joins with the London Loop, the 150-mile orbital footpath route around London created in the 1990s and finally completed in 2001. At least the waymarking is very good, even though at one point the Ordnance Survey map has the path on the wrong side of the brook. The fields here are still worked, and the area really feels like the countryside.

In past times these were all hay fields, providing fodder for London’s vast army of working horses. It is estimated that in 1893 there were around 300,000 of them in all. The Great Northern Railway, for example, had around 1,000 horses at work at any one time, many involved in transporting coal all over London from the yards close to Kings Cross. The removals company Pickford’s had around 1,600 horses in service at about the same time, and even built a Turkish bath for them close to their Finchley depot. A lot of hay would have been needed.

We turned away from the paths, leaving the London Loop to avoid its convoluted twists and turns at this point, and followed roads for a short distance to reach the roundabout at Stirling Corner, where my route to Wales crossed the busy six-lane A1 dual carriageway. I admit I had worried for a while about this crossing, but in the event it was straightforward. After years of lobbying, a new cyclist- and pedestrian-friendly crossing is planned for 2020, rather too late for my journey. The junction is apparently named after a Mr Stirling, who owned a garage nearby, and it was part of a 1920s upgrade to what was then the main road from London to the North.

A mile or so more road-trudging brought us close to Elstree, a name made famous by studios which are nowhere near the village itself. We took to a little-used and brambly footpath – my friend loved it, at last the real countryside – to bypass the village, then crossed a delightful meadow to reach Aldenham Reservoir. The big sheet of water in front of us (it measures 55 acres) was built in 1795-97 for the Grand Junction Canal Company, to control the flow of water in the River Colne. It is a little humbling to discover that it was hand-dug by French prisoners of war. Apparently they did not do a brilliant job, as the dam had to be repaired, and the size of the reservoir reduced, only a few years later.

Today it is the centrepiece of a busy country park, which plays host, amid all the family fun and study centres, to a very welcome little café. Eleven miles into the journey, a fresh sandwich and a cup of tea were very welcome.

From Aldenham we took to a shady straight track, with another reservoir on the left mostly hidden behind the trees and Elstree Aerodrome on the right. The reservoir – Hilfield Park – is bigger but much younger than Aldenham (1953) and is a nature reserve closed to the general public. The contrast with the strip of tarmac on the other side of the track could not have been greater. Elstree prides itself on being the closest general aviation site to central London, and on that fine Thursday afternoon it was certainly very busy. Soon after, we crossed fields on a good path and reached the noise of the A41 trunk road. We were beside it just long enough to tick off the crossing of the M1 motorway on a bridge, then took a scrubby little path leading to Tyler’s Farm and Bushey.

I have a dislike of landowners who take no care of footpath routes across their land, and my dislike will recur quite a lot in the course of this journey. This was the first example. With no other obvious option we climbed over a gate and found ourselves right in the farm’s back yard, so we took to the only driveway to reach the road. At the end of the drive we were confronted by a very tall and forbidding steel gate with an electronic keypad. While I checked maps to see how to avoid it, rather by magic it opened. We dashed through it before it changed its mind. The correct route apparently runs along the other side of a hedge, but heaven knows how to find it.

A short trot through the suburbs of Bushey brought us to the main thoroughfare leading to Watford, and to what the map shows as a church, but is actually now a “venue”. Despite such disappointments and some scruffy shops Bushey retains something of a villagey feel. We paused at the Red Lion, a big old pub on a corner, for a well-earned pint. I got some very odd looks with my large pack as we entered the main bar, but we settled in a quiet back room. My friend chatted with an elderly couple on a neighbouring table and explained that our packs were of very different sizes because he was walking to Watford while I was walking to Wales. The response was an uncomprehending “Oh” and a slightly glazed look. I was going to see that many times in the next two weeks.

The approach to Watford is urban jungle with all its accompanying noise and traffic, spared by the brief oasis of Oxhey Park, and back without relent on the new and very sterile link road behind the town’s huge hospital. This is not wonderful walking, but it had to be done.

We strolled on for another half a mile before parting ways, my friend towards a station for his journey back to London, while I continued through unlovely streets to my bed for the night. My friend had enjoyed the day despite collecting a couple of blisters – he had not spent months and a small fortune on shoes and socks to avoid those nasties – and commented that he was glad to have chosen only the first day.

As the afternoon faded, I arrived at my first stop, a budget chain hotel surrounded by ring roads and roundabouts, but my room was large, quiet and comfortable. I had tried to imagine how this first day’s end would feel, thinking perhaps of sitting outside in the sunshine with suitable refreshment, but the sun was hiding and the outside seats were on the edge of a car park, so – perhaps not. I consoled myself with the thought that I could feel hardly any effects of the first seventeen miles of my journey, filled up on classic chain restaurant food and slipped off to rest

 

Over the Chilterns: day two

I thought I should be ready for this and woke feeling calm and confident. I had never yet walked as much in one day as this stage would demand (the map said twenty-three miles) but I had come close, and I had several times walked two big days in a row. So in theory nothing to fear. The day would decide, and it started non-committal and grey. I took on board a “full English breakfast” from the rather plastic restaurant attached to the hotel and set out across  the complex maze of pedestrian crossings just outside. In less than ten minutes I was back into Watford’s suburbia and getting into a proper rhythm.

Croxley Green is a place of different characters: the first part of my route was through bland residential streets, then alongside slightly scruffy recreation grounds, passing a little south of the green itself before reaching a distinctly rural footpath leading down to the River Chess. The former village was part of a manor bought by John Keys, otherwise Caius, in the 16^th century, one of three manors purchased for the astronomical sum of £23 and subsequently donated to support his old college, Gonville Hall in Cambridge, renamed Gonville and Caius College in his honour. The village was also home, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to one of John Dickinson’s paper mills. Those of us of a certain age can remember Croxley Script as a posh paper for writing important letters. Just imagine, writing letters.

I crossed a field, avoiding the unwanted attentions of a large and poorly-controlled dog (do not get me started on those, or their owners) and joined the Chess Valley Walk, a locally well-known route which would lead me through the next nine miles or so to Chesham. In reality it is a mixture of good paths, bad paths, tracks and hopeful signposts, but it is waymarked for its full distance.   

The first stage showed promise, clear paths, stiles and pleasant enough rural scenes, but where the route passes between Rickmansworth and Loudwater it battles with dereliction, nettles, scruffy yards and tall intimidating fences before shimmying up to a bridge over the M25 motorway. Crossing this six-lane noise monster was something of a moment – finally I was leaving behind everything connected with London. Beyond it the Chess Valley Walk seems to take a breath and start again, meandering through little woods and fields below the village of Sarratt, and with occasional glimpses of the river after which it is named. In the peace of Frogmore Meadow, a nature reserve noted for its many different wild flowers, I rested my feet for a few minutes, ticked the box for crossing into Buckinghamshire, and enjoyed the arrival of warm sunshine. Maybe the forecast for the day was true after all.

While training for the trip I had frequently had fun with weather forecasts. I am not one to turn back at the first spot of rain, but I resist setting out in the really wet stuff and will tune a route to avoid a downpour if I can. Comparing more than one forecast for the same time and place can be frustrating: if there is rain on the way it is rare for them to agree, even to come close, in their predictions of when it might arrive. The first day my full waterproof kit got its first test I had set out based on a fair consensus of dryness for two or three hours ahead, only to be forced into a quick change just five minutes from home. I walked for an hour in it before retreating: during that time both my favourite forecast sources changed their minds to “heavy rain”. What did they do – look out of the window?

By the hamlet of Latimer the marked path climbs a hill and follows the edge of woodland, offering superb views back down to the river valley. At last, this really was the Chiltern landscape at full throttle, all the better that the urban straggle of Amersham and Chalfont on the opposite horizon was hidden from view. Things went a little downhill – literally – for the forgettable last couple of miles into Chesham, but my spirits were raised enough to see me through scruffy paths lined with nettles.

I had made a rough estimate of the time and distance of the main stages of the journey, but at this point I was still experimenting with how it would work. How fast would I really travel? How many stops would I need? How often would route confusion add to the time? At Chesham, eleven or so miles from the day’s starting point, I was about forty minutes behind what I had planned in the comfort of my home office. I shrugged shoulders and mentally reworked the rest of the day.

Chesham, the furthest outpost of the London Underground, is pleasant enough but unremarkable. I bought something for lunch in a shop attached to a petrol station and did not stay to explore. The town has some ancient roots, as there has been some kind of settlement here since prehistoric times, and contrary to popular belief the river is named after the town, not the other way around. On that Friday its streets were blighted by lots of traffic.

If the entry to the town had been underwhelming, the exit was uplifting. The western side of the town is overlooked by St Mary’s church, standing in a fine situation on a slight hill. Parts of the church date back to the 12^th century, but it has been remodelled a few times since then, most notably by George Gilbert Scott in the 1860s. My route went along a little lane and across the end of the churchyard to join a footpath leading straight up a very green hill. For the next two or three miles I followed the line of the Chiltern Link, an eight-mile footpath based on an old trading route between Chesham and Wendover. The first part, up that hill, lifted me swiftly away from the noise of the town and into meadows, to an ideal spot to rest for lunch.

After crossing fields full of quite inquisitive sheep, my journey continued along a track, entering a long and quiet valley unglamorously named Herbert’s Hole. It is not recorded who Herbert was, but the valley was a delightful and peaceful walk between fields and small woods. Apparently it forms part of a popular long-distance running route. For about half an hour I saw only two people. Delightful.

The track becomes a lane which soon joins a bland broad road through the settlement of South Heath, about as exciting as its name, then finally a sharp descent leads into Great Missenden, tunnelling under two main roads on the way. By this time, sixteen miles into the day, I was seriously fancying a pint of beer, or at least a chilled soft drink, and confident that I would find a source of one or the other in the village. I was wrong. Here on a sunny Friday afternoon I walked up and down the main street and found nowhere open for business. Except that is for the idiosyncratic Roald Dahl Museum, where a small bottle of something sweet and fizzy cost me as much as I had paid for my lunch.

Great Missenden, with early mediaeval roots, has the recent distinction of being defined as the most affluent place in England, and has long counted writers, entertainers and politicians among its notable residents. It lost its status as a coaching stop in the 1890s, when the railway arrived, and now a fast and frequent service into London assures attraction to wealthy commuters. The children’s author Roald Dahl lived at Gipsy House, on the outskirts, from 1954 until he died in 1990, and the village does not hesitate to profit from the connection, which brings me back to the “Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious” museum and story centre on the main street.

I passed by Dahl’s house on the way out of the village. It is in private ownership and is surrounded by high hedges and forbidding fences to deter prying eyes, but apparently it has been lovingly preserved behind its barriers. I was not as prepared as I might have been for the very steep hill which came next, but it offered good views across the valley, rather blighted by the scars of workings for the HS2 railway route from London to Birmingham, before the path buried itself in Anglers Spring Wood, where Dahl is supposed to have strolled for inspiration. The encounter related at the very beginning of this tale, meeting up with the happy soul picking her blackberries, came as I left the wood and passed into Prestwood, a sprawling village with ancient origins but little modern character, sitting over 600 feet up on a plateau.

Leaving the village on the curiously-named Honor End Lane I passed by Nanfans Farm, where much of the wreckage fell from the skies when two Wellington bombers collided while on exercises in August 1944, and turned west to follow a path along the line of Grim’s Ditch. England has several Grim’s Ditches or Dykes, but there is no agreement on how they got their name. This one is traceable here and there across a 19-mile span right across the Chilterns and sometimes shows itself as a distinctive earthwork. It is thought to date from the Iron Age. No doubt those who dug it out would not mind that I sat on it for a while to rest my feet, with about seven miles still to go.

The path runs very straight, following the earthwork, to reach the peaceful enclave of Great Hampden. Here I came to a gate. Now, walkers quickly become familiar with all sorts of gates, some that open, some that should open but are left locked, some that carry friendly signs, and some wrapped up in barbed wire. This was the first time I found one which politely asked walkers to press a button to gain entry and opened automatically and smoothly when I did. Beyond it stood the pretty church of Hampden, surrounded by well-tended lawns, facing Hampden House across a neat gravel track.

The church is dedicated to St Mary Magdalene and dates from the 13^th century, although much of it has been rebuilt piece-by-piece since then. The house, on a site occupied since before the Norman Conquest, has an Elizabethan core, but the main part of the building dates from the 18^th century. For centuries it was home to the Hampden family, notably John Hampden, who gained notoriety for refusing to pay land taxes imposed by Charles I, and who after his prosecution became known as “The Patriot”. He died in the Civil War, fighting on the Roundhead side. Over the centuries the family, like many others, experienced financial problems, and in 1938 they decided to let the house, firstly to a private Girls’ School. Much later, in 1979, and much more interestingly, Hammer Films took up residence. They used it as an appropriately Gothic location in the “Hammer House of Horrors” TV series.  In the 1980s the freehold was finally sold to an insurance and finance company, which carried out much-needed repairs and restoration: the house now makes a living as a wedding venue.

Beyond Hampden my path continued along the line of Grim’s Ditch until the earthwork made a sharp left turn and I carried straight on into the woods. After the bustle of Prestwood I had not seen a soul since I left the road, which emphasised the rather spooky nature of the next section. Here the path twisted and dipped between tall old trees, their dense canopy shading out the sunlight. All the same the route was very clear, no risk of wandering off into the undergrowth. A little further on I crossed the Ridgeway, the National Trail clearly marked by a large wooden signpost, and quietly congratulated myself on having completed the crossing of the Chiltern Hills. The notable top of Whiteleaf Hill, with its chalk cross and its views, was a few hundred yards to the north, but I wanted to reach my destination, so I passed it by, stepping gingerly down a very steep little path to reach the road to Whiteleaf village.

Apart from a lovely setting, there is little of note in Whiteleaf – except perhaps for the crossroads with a little road designated “Upper Icknield Way”. There is no clue on the map, but this is a significant line across England. The Icknield Way is recognised as (probably) the oldest road in the country, certainly pre-Roman and possibly prehistoric, and runs from Dorset or Devon to Norfolk, according to whichever arguable account you  choose to believe. Along the foot of the Chilterns it has two variants – Upper and Lower – much of both now followed by roads. At the bottom of chalk escarpments it is not uncommon to find more than one route option: depending on weather, dangerous local fauna, or equally dangerous local people the ancients could decide to travel in the valley or higher up the slope.

In Monks Risborough I hurried across a main road and followed the long, winding and rather tedious Mill Lane, consoled by knowing that my destination was only a mile or so away. Monks Risborough, like its larger neighbour Princes Risborough, is recorded since before the Normans arrived, but the scattering of prehistoric sites in the area suggests it has long been a settlement. When I first sketched out my route plan it was clear that I would need an overnight stop in this area, but I was quite surprised to find how limited my options were.

On then to the Lower Icknield Way, today a B-road with a link to the M40. On that Friday afternoon the 300 yards or so that I had to walk on it were simply dreadful. It was clearly still the local rush hour, the 50 mph speed limit was not much respected, and there was no real verge for a walker to use. I turned gratefully to the drive leading to my farm bed and breakfast retreat.

Imagine how it feels to reach a destination, booking confirmed and guaranteed, only to find a closed door, and no answer from the doorbell. Luckily my sinking feeling was soon restored, and my bivouac for the night turned out to be very comfortable.

On the advice of my host I took a taxi for the one mile into the next village to find some dinner, not wishing to risk that road again. This qualifies as the one and only time in the whole trip that I did not walk, but it was not part of the route! Refreshed with wonderful fish and chips and a very good pint I did walk back – it was less frantic by then – and settled down to prepare for the next day.

This second day had totalled twenty-four miles, with around two thousand feet of ascent, which was more by both measures than I had done on any training day, but I felt good, no aches, no sore feet, just good.

Fun and frustrations: day three

Over the weeks before starting out I had suffered many a premonition about the third day of the journey. This would be, physically at least, something for which I had not rehearsed: a long day, showing as twenty-three miles or so on the map, coming on top of two full days. Scenically day three seemed to offer few high spots. Psychologically it could perhaps be tough. I had turned all these thoughts around many times, finally here I was. At least the sun was shining.

I shared a chat with my host over an otherwise solitary but enormous breakfast. It emerged that he had divided his childhood between the Chilterns and Rhayader, a destination for me many days still ahead. I promised to text when I got there. To avoid the rush hour horrors of the main road he guided me out of the farm by a back route, straight on to the lane which marked the start of my day’s journey.

My spirits were buoyed by clear and easy field paths across to the straggly settlement of Longwick, then further to Ilmer, passing under the railway line from London Marylebone. This is commuter country, only about an hour from the capital, although sadly Ilmer lost its halt in the railway cuts of the early 1960s. Today the village is tiny, just a few houses, a couple of big farms, and a charming little church, topped with a timber bellcote. The church dates from the 12^th century, although much restored in Victorian times, and the three bells in that wooden tower construction are five hundred years old. Wherever you are in England there is always a heap of history nearby. Unfortunately on this day there was also a heap of building work going on, which rather spoiled what might have been picturesque.

Between Ilmer and Towersey, where I joined the road to Thame, I met with some annoyances, paths left to hide in undergrowth, random diversions across ploughed fields, and a series of scary notices warning of shooting nearby. I think the notices were more about “keep off my land” than pointing shotguns at a few rabbits, and I concluded that the local landowners were not so friendly. Somewhere along this path I passed into Oxfordshire, the fourth county so far.

Towersey spreads along the straight road to Thame with an air of quiet prosperity, even the churchyard was well tended, watched over by a sturdy square tower. This time the three bells are just four hundred years old, mere striplings.

On this first section I had begun to feel quite weary, which worried me a little, given the concerns I had about the day. I reasoned that I needed an energy boost. My full breakfast had been satisfying but limited in carbohydrates: I resolved to put some serious chocolate and sugar inside me. It was a lesson well learned, and which carried forward to the rest of the whole journey. It was also a very good excuse to scoff chocolate every day.

The old market town of Thame now sprawls outward to meet the ring roads which encircle it, and my approach was rather drab. The town centre has some fine old buildings, many of them it seems were refaced with brick during the 18^th century. For me the town brought a big smile, as it boasts an excellent supermarket right on my route. By now I was very accustomed to the curious, sometimes irritated looks I would get as I toured the aisles carefully with my backpack, trying my best not to knock anything off the shelves or to injure anyone. I stocked up, including that much-needed sugar ration, and headed out of the town. On the cricket ground which sits in front of the church there was a lot of activity, probably preparing for a Saturday afternoon match. Sorry folks, it is not my fault if the public footpath goes right across the pitch!

The parish church, dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, dates from the 13^th century, but various changes and rebuilding has been carried out over time. Beyond it, across a leafy little road known as Priestend, sits the ancient Prebendal House, which also dates from the 13^th century. A little road, now only a footway, heads from there over the old bridge, which was once the main way, out of the town to the north. As it crosses the river Thame there is a cast iron marker for the boundary between Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire: for several miles after this point my feet would be dipping in and out of both counties.

After crossing the inevitable ring road, this time the main route between Aylesbury and Oxford, I took to a footpath across fields. I had high hopes of this one, as on the map it came with two “way” names, and it started out with a clear line and a good series of stiles. After slogging across a large field which was still being ploughed my enthusiasm waned as all the good news turned into long grass and a need to navigate using GPS: the first time, little did I know that it would be far from the last. The landscape was flat but pleasant, broken with rows of trees, the sun was out and the sky was blue, so I paused for a leisurely lunch.

I had planned from here to string together the next three or four villages with a series of footpaths, but by now I had lost time wandering in undergrowth, so I took to the road to reach Shabbington, the first village, and resolved to stay on tarmac. Including a section where there would be no choice but to follow roads it meant around six miles of sharing with cars, but so be it. From Shabbington passing by Ickford and Worminghall the road ran straight, the landscape was undistinguished, and the sky faded until its grey almost matched the surface in front of me. On the bright side there was little traffic, but I was passed by several cyclists, each of them happy to exchange a wave and a greeting – an experience which was to be repeated often throughout my journey.

The road crossed the M40, the thrum of six lanes of traffic audible for some hundreds of yards either side of the bridge, and arrived at a rather desolate crossroads which the map calls Menmarsh Guide Post, despite the absence of any posts at all. The wandering county boundary twists away northwards here, so finally I was back in Oxfordshire to stay. From the crossroads I joined the Oxfordshire Way for a short distance, following a track to a farm and a thistle-filled field path around it. I had intended to take a path directly across towards the next village, but that route was obliterated by ploughing, as was the nearest alternative. And it rained. Not heavily, but it was enough for me to don my jacket for the first time on the whole trip. I retraced my steps, feeling quite annoyed, and took a longer route to join the road to Beckley, just a mile or so further on.

Paths which have been ploughed up or covered in crops were to become a recurrent theme on this journey. The legal position is clear; if a path is ploughed up but not sown over it must be reinstated and clearly marked within twenty-four hours of ploughing. If it is cultivated the landowner has fourteen days to put the path back. Enforcement however is weak and seems to vary enormously from one county to the next. I tried not to plan routes which had do-or-die paths included, but sometimes there was no alternative. Coming to a few hundred yards of muddy furrows with no signage, and in the rain, is no joke, as any British walker will readily confirm.

When I reached Beckley the rain had stopped, and weak sunlight lit up the mixture of golden stone and thatched roofs which make this little village a delight. This was the first real taste of the sort of warm stone colours which would follow me from here right across the Cotswolds. With only about six more miles to go I resisted a strong temptation to drop in at the Abingdon Arms, and headed north out of the village to rejoin the Oxfordshire Way. Beckley stands on a hilltop, some 400 feet up, and from the northern end of the village there are superb views back east over Buckinghamshire and north towards Bicester.

The path makes a steep descent to reach the edge of Otmoor. This four hundred or so acres of flat land, around two hundred feet up in the middle of Oxfordshire, is a very atmospheric oddity. Before the 19^th century it was largely just flood-prone marshland but was partially drained after an Enclosure Act passed in 1815. It seems that local farmers felt disadvantaged by the process, and there were some civil disturbances at the end of the 1820s, known as the “Otmoor Riots”. A century later the RAF used it as a bombing range, and there remains some military use today. For the rest it is a nature and bird reserve.

Looking across from the path at the western edge it felt huge, deserted and quite eerie. The atmosphere of the place is very powerful. But today this is a battlefield, sadly not for the first time. Three decades ago, a group of conservation bodies fought a successful campaign to divert the M40 motorway away from Otmoor. Today there are proposals for an “Oxford-Cambridge Arc” to include a new major road, new railway, and many thousands of new homes. Desirable as that may be, the fight is back on to keep it all well away from Otmoor. Having seen the moor at close hand, I hope this battle can also be won.

I walked past the most amazing crop of elderberries – Autumn already on its way – and left the moor behind to reach the hamlet of Noke, known as one of the “seven towns of Otmoor”. It is a tiny place, clustered around a single twisting lane which winds up a hill past the solid square church of St Giles. The sun was out, the sky was blue, and the happier character of the route since Beckley had changed my mood for the better. At the top of the hill I re-joined the Oxfordshire Way, which continued the uphill trend across a field of stubble. Here the path was an object lesson in how to do things correctly, a very clear band of trodden soil stretching across the fields.

A little way on I realised that the top of one foot was hurting a little. I am a great believer in the words of John Hillaby on this one: “I treat my feet like premature twins. The moment I feel even a slight twinge of discomfort I stop and put it right” (Journey through Britain, 1968). That is what I did. A slightly misplaced tongue of one shoe had rubbed the skin, quickly sorted with a couple of sticking plasters, problem solved in fact for the rest of the entire journey.

The path descends from its hill to the next village, Islip. This is an ancient settlement of narrow streets and stone houses, fronted by a bridge across the River Ray, and the riverside Swan Inn. There is no surprise that it is much loved by film and TV producers. It is reputed to be the birthplace of Edward the Confessor (1004), and its river crossing by ford or bridge, on the old mediaeval route from London to Worcester, has been strategic for centuries. In my original plan I had marked it as an overnight destination, but as I could not find anywhere suitable to stay I added a couple more miles to my route to reach my next stop. I threaded my way through narrow Kings Head Lane, and past the inviting-looking Red Lion on High Street to leave the village on the road towards Kidlington.

I had low expectations for the last steps of my day, making my crossing of the busy A34 as it shoots away from Oxford by way of a small maze of slip roads and bridges, and I was not disappointed. At least there were places to walk safely, even if one path was blessed with the rotting corpse of a small deer. As I finished the last stretch of road to the pub where I was to spend the night I tried to push that image from my mind, and resolved to avoid venison if it was on the dinner menu.

This night’s stay was something of an indulgence, as the bed and breakfast rate was the most expensive of the whole trip, and the noteworthy restaurant, I already knew, would not come cheap either. But why not? What I did find a little strange was that, on my arrival with my big pack on my back into a place normally accessible only by car, I got no reaction at all from any of the reception staff. Not even a raised eyebrow. I suppose that was better than being treated like an outcast. My room in the eaves was smart and well-provided, but it was very small.

I calculated the day at twenty-five miles, just one more than in the plan, congratulated myself on surviving and even enjoying the third day out, and washed the road out of my thoughts with a good pint while I waited for dinner. Suffice it to say that the meal was excellent, although of course on a busy Saturday night in a popular eating place it was not a very private experience. I turned to my bed reassured that the next day would be less strenuous than the last two, and slept well.

The Salt Way: day four

The full breakfast lived up to the standard of the previous evening’s meal, and although I left my lodgings substantially poorer I was well prepared for the day. The sun shone beautifully and the sky was blue as I walked through Hampton Poyle’s one village street. By the little church (13^th century, inevitably restored in Victorian times) I crossed a stile and followed a very clear path over the fields towards another Hampton – Hampton Gay, today really identified only by its church. There has been a place of worship on this site since the 11^th century, although the present square-towered little building dates from the 18^th. It sits above the River Cherwell and seems to be difficult to reach except on foot. My path, the “Oxford Greenbelt Way” passed close to the river and under the Oxford-Banbury railway line before arriving at Shipton-on-Cherwell. The route is apparently a 50-mile circular path created to celebrate 50 years of Oxford’s greenbelt. Long may it stay green.

From Shipton I followed a series of rather scruffy paths and tracks in a straight line westward to the edge of Woodstock, then some unremarkable streets into the centre of the town. I was rather counting on Woodstock, as this was a Sunday, and here was the only source of food supplies for the rest of my day’s journey. In that regard it did not let me down, its one bustling little supermarket offering some good things to put into my pack.

The little old stone town today conceals its own wide historical connections to become a front for Blenheim Palace, less than half a mile to the west. Old industries such as glove-making and fine quality steel products are all gone, replaced by tourism. I saw it on a quiet day, but it was easy to imagine what is must look like drowning under summer hordes. The palace was built in the early 18^th century and has long been the home of the Dukes of Marlborough. It profits from the Churchill connection – Winston was born here – to charge a whopping admission fee, just under £30 for standard adult entry. I was happy to see it from a distance across the park which surrounds it.

I had a clear route planned through Blenheim Park, all of it on supposedly waymarked paths, and trusted that an estate as grand as this would take care to make directions clear. It did not work out quite so well, so badly in fact that at a few points I had to resort to GPS to find the path. I passed close to the Column of Victory, built in 1727-30 to commemorate the military successes of the Duke of Marlborough, skirted the rather grand Park Farm, and struggled a little in the fields and woods behind it to find a junction with the Oxfordshire Way. Escape from Blenheim Park is made, perhaps fittingly, by wooden ladders over a stone wall, after which the paths were much easier to follow.

On the map at least this part of the route dances between three named footpath routes, although waymarking is erratic so it is not always easy to follow on the ground the bold lines accorded to them by the Ordnance Survey. The Oxfordshire Way is the best of the bunch, as I had already discovered around Otmoor. It takes on a 67 mile long traverse of the Cotswolds and the Chilterns from Bourton-on-the-water to Henley-on-Thames. Shakespeare’s Way, which I had struggled to follow in Blenheim Park, takes a wandering route of over 140 miles from the birthplace of the bard in Stratford-on-Avon to London’s Globe Theatre. The Wychwood Way, on which I now found myself, is more local, a circular route of just 37 miles. It could end up being a lot longer for the walker who relied on finding its waymarks.

I walked a short stretch of road before joining a delightful footpath alongside woods, passing to the north of the village of Stonesfield. This place made its name in the past from quarrying for a particular kind of Cotswold stone much used for roofing, known as Stonesfield slate. It can be found on older buildings in the whole region, and even on some of Oxford’s colleges.

Just near the main road from Charlbury to Woodstock the Wychwood Way and I joined an ancient route known as the Salt Way. It is one of those very useful ancient routes which carves a very sensible line across the countryside, and this one would take me almost to the end of today’s travels. A short distance along a grassy wooded track there was a fading sign indicating that the path passed through a nature reserve. And then it rained. From a few spots to a downpour in a matter of seconds. I took what shelter I could find among the trees and waited: although well equipped with waterproof gear I had no wish to get wetter than necessary, and my patience was rewarded, as the sharp shower lasted only five minutes or so.

The Salt Way, so called because apparently it was once part of a network of routes used for transporting salt from the Midlands and the North West to the demanding tables of London, studiously avoids passing through anywhere for half a dozen miles. It may be far more ancient than its salty heritage, and in less distant times it was a drovers’ route, of which much more later in this journey. It certainly has its scenic charms, as it runs on a high flat ridge between two river valleys and offers fine expansive views. The sunshine returned, and indeed stayed around for the rest of the day.

I had intended to stay with the Wychwood Way as it turned northward, but both it and an alternative path were ploughed to death, so I trudged along a road for a short distance before joining another section of the Salt Way. Still gnashing my teeth at the random ploughing I found myself on a very pretty – and very clear – path over meadows and a stream to Glyme, and from there in just a short hop I approached my destination for the day.

The old market town of Chipping Norton oozes Cotswold prosperity even today, centuries after the decline of the wool trade which made fortunes for many settlements in the region in the Middle Ages, and long after the shutdown of a range of local industries from glove-making to brewing. It boasts a range of shops and amenities which make it something of a focal point, some of the shops ranged along its unusual split-level main street. One of those, now in very different hands, brought me to the town almost fifty years ago, while on training for my very first job, but that is another story. For this journey it was the first point at which I made contact with the A44 road, which would be slipping in and out of my itinerary from here all the way to my final destination. I walked the length of that charming main street to reach my bed for the night, in a new rather basic hotel at the north end of the town.

On a Sunday night the options for eating were limited, so I dined in, quenched my thirst, relaxed after a pleasant day of just over eighteen miles, fourteen of them a solitary delight, and slept well, in preparation for the next day’s journey over the Cotswold Hills.

Cotswold country: day five

I confess to a liking for the good old Full English Breakfast. Bad health on a plate – bacon, fried eggs, sausages, and a host of other obesity-inducing options. At this stage in my journey the repetitive morning menu had not begun to pale, and for my sins, obesity is not coming the way of my meagre body any time soon. This morning, however, I learned something. In the world of budget hotel mass catering the humble fried egg is not flopped around in a frying pan. Instead it comes along with dozens of others in a sort of oversize cupcake tin. Very bizarre, but it tasted fine!

I left Chipping Norton, after provisioning in a little supermarket, westward along New Street, in fact on the A44. Just a short distance down the hill is an icon of modern music: the old British Schools building here was once the home of Chipping Norton Studios. Some of the biggest names in British pop music passed through here between 1971 and 1999, when the studios closed. A blue plaque marks the passing of an era.

After a moment’s confusion in a children’s playground I found a rusty gate marking the start of my next stage, a fine clear path which crossed a brook then climbed a gentle hill, from where the view down to the village of Salford and far beyond was superb. The path – part of Shakespeare’s Way, although not very well marked as such – descended in a straight line towards the village, growing as it went from field path to track. Despite the clear route I had to climb over a locked gate to reach Salford, not something to be expected on a public path, but better I suppose than a mile of ploughed furrows.

Beyond Salford I had to brave a very short distance along the A44 again to reach the next path, a little overgrown and damp but comfortable, towards Cornwell. The approach, now in warm sunshine, took me through the churchyard, where I traded happy waves with a man having great fun on a ride-on mower, and along a track behind the manor house of Cornwell. Here there is a curious architectural connection. The house was built in the 17^th century, modified a little in the 18^th, but in 1939 it was restored by the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, the man behind the Italianate village of Portmeirion in North Wales. Williams-Ellis also had a hand in the restoration of some of the 17^th-century cottages in the village.

Cornwell was en fête – clearly preparing for an event and expecting cars and crowds out of proportion to its population of fewer than a hundred souls. I left them to it and took to a little road which climbed northwest out of the village to join the main road heading for Stow-on-the-Wold. I crossed it to a path and climbed a little higher to reach the remains of Chastleton barrow, a circular hillfort thought to date from the late Bronze Age. The outline of its ramparts, marking a flat space roughly four hundred feet across, is discernible among the trees and field edges. The reason for its existence is clear, because just beyond the fort the views from the 800-foot top of Adlestrop Hill stretched for miles. In spite of the dance I had to do to avoid stepping in large quantities of the stuff cows make best, it was a lovely spot for a short rest. At last I had a good reason to remember Adlestrop, and it had nothing to do with the poem by Edward Thomas drummed into me in fourth-year English lessons. Thomas recalled a brief train stop in the summer of 1914 at Adlestrop station, long since closed, on the railway between Worcester and Oxford. His short sixteen line poem was enough to make sure nobody ever forgot the name of Adlestrop for many years after school.

A short step along paths and lanes brought me downhill to the next village, heralded by its little square-towered church and, right next door, the magnificent frontage of Chastleton House. The house was built between 1607 and 1612 on the site of an earlier residence and was originally the home of Walter Jones. He made his money from the law, but the heritage was, appropriately for this area, from the buying and selling of wool. Chastleton lives on the story of Walter’s grandson, Arthur, who was on the wrong side at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, the last battle of the Civil War, and fled Roundhead pursuit to reach his family home. So the story goes, his wife concealed him in a secret room. When the Roundhead soldiers arrived she offered them beer spiked with laudanum, and organised her husband’s escape while they dozed. The lovely Cotswold stone house is in the care of the National Trust, but they do not open it on Mondays or Tuesdays, so as this was a Monday I could only peer at it through the gateway.

Beyond the house the village offers a few classically pretty stone houses. I turned westward again to continue my tour of the villages, taking a broad winding track and, crossing into Gloucestershire, a long straight field path to cover the couple of miles on to Evenlode. My route at this point was deliberately following a line between the towns of Stow-on-the-Wold and Moreton-in-Marsh, the latter straddling the A44, thus avoiding tourist crowds and Cotswold stereotypes in favour of quiet lanes and fields. Here, however, civilisation reappeared, as Evenlode was bedecked with yellow diversion signs and orange plastic barriers. Much of the village seemed to have been dug up for the joy of the water company, and – according to the signs – was likely to be so for many weeks to come. I am always left wondering why it can take months to do what see to be very straightforward jobs, but perhaps it is not right to ask!

Luckily the orgy of coloured plastic left my path out of the village clear, a hedge-lined bridleway which apparently forms part of the “Diamond Way”, a local path of 66 miles joining many villages together. I travelled with it for a mile or so, crossing the twin tracks of the Oxford to Worcester railway line before going west where the diamonds headed north. Another straight field path took me to the Fosse Way, once the Roman road from Exeter to Lincoln, here a very busy main road: I was glad to leave it behind me, even though the next mile followed a boringly straight lane up a gentle hill.

Some walkers swear by “Ten miles before lunchtime”, and at my ten mile mark on this day I reached Longborough, the largest of the villages so far, blessed with a few shops, and, like a mirage in the desert, the Coach and Horses pub. My heart sank when I saw the crowded outdoor space at the front, but I breathed in and took my backpack inside. Here it was cooler, and quite empty. The golden beer comes from a local brewery and the huge doorstop sandwich was perfect for the moment. I lingered for a happy half hour or so, thanked the very friendly young man who had served me, and headed out, straight on to a short steep hill. This, and another main road crossing at the top of the hill, marked the start of a seven-mile section with no civilisation except for a few scattered farms. The first of those, on the high ridge of Hans Hill, turned out to be derelict, but my straight path here offered some superb views over fields, copses and little valleys, altogether a very English scene. The path dropped very steeply into the narrow valley of Debdene, before climbing equally steeply on the other side, but the scenery was so fine I even forgave a short section of ploughed-up path at the top of the next hill, where an old barrow mound hid in the trees. Downhill again from here led me to Hinchwick Manor, a large farmhouse dating from the 1820s, and not to be confused with another older farm of the same name a short distance to the south.

This part of the route had fascinated me from the moment I had planned it at home on the computerised maps. Here there was a bridleway which twisted for two miles along the floor of a valley, unfettered by any farm, habitation, or buildings at all. Now, in reality, it was exactly that. A broad grassy track followed the floor of this long valley quite religiously, passing through a few gates on the way, some of them marked with signs for horse riders – “This is a bridleway, not a gallop”. Quite so, it would have been a little unsafe to gallop on such an uneven path. The higher parts of the valley were deeper and barren of trees. The only sound came from circling hawk-like birds, although my ornithological skills were not up to identifying what they were. As if to intensify the silent isolation the weather darkened under grey clouds. The experience was unworldly, mitigated by the final few hundred yards under trees, before the path gave on to a little lane.

I passed a farm, then left the lane on to another path, not quite as intimidating as the last, which passed through a nature reserve by the curiously-named Shippy Plantation. I rested by a dry stone wall and congratulated myself on reaching the one hundred mile point in my journey. Only 145 more to go then! The two cars which passed me on the final mile of narrow lane to Snowshill were the first signs of humanity I had seen since the main road by Longborough, almost two hours before. I constantly read that our country is “full to bursting”: clearly not in this part of Gloucestershire. That lane also passed over an unmemorable lump of 908 feet, the highest point of the route so far.

On this day the little village of Snowshill was relatively quiet, although it was easy to imagine how crowded it must be on warm summer weekends. It nestles in a twist at the top of the Cotswold escarpment, perfectly placed for views over the hills rolling to the west. The one main street is a picturesque line of classic Cotswold houses. Then there is Snowshill Manor. Once again, the National Trust does not open the house on Mondays in September, but I doubt I would have lingered. The house is a square Cotswold manor house, originally from the mid-16^th century, renowned for the eclectic mixture of objects collected by the architect Charles Wade, who bought the house in 1919 and restored it in order to store his collection inside. When Wade died in 1951 and the house passed to the National Trust the collection ran to more than 20,000 items.

A short way down the hill from the village I left the road and took a clear path wandering among the sheep – and their deposits – marked as a link to the Cotswold Way. In this case what went down, quite a long way to cross a stream, then went very steeply up again, but with steadily improving fine views back towards Snowshill. On the top of the ridge the main path follows a bold track, helping me to make good time on the last lap towards Broadway, my destination for the day. The Cotswold Way is a national trail running for a hundred miles from Chipping Camden in the north to Bath. I was grateful that this meant excellent waymarking, especially where the route suddenly shot off to the right, away from the track, across fields. This was also the point where my route entered Worcestershire, county number six along the way. The final descent into Broadway offered an aerial view of the village before arriving at its southern end.

Broadway has the dubious honour of being one of the most visited of Cotswold locations, main attractions are the many honey-coloured stone buildings, the wide main street which gives the village its name, and a range of shops and eateries. Signs of settlement here are indeterminate, but it certainly existed long before the Domesday Book. Its fortunes have come and gone over the centuries. It became a borough in the 13^th century, and three hundred or so years later prospered along with other Cotswold villages from the riches of the wool trade. As a staging post on the coach route from London to Worcester it prospered again until the coming of the railway in 1852 removed its stagecoach significance, only to enjoy yet another rebirth as a home to the Arts and Crafts movement. Finally, and persistently, came tourism.

Station Road, which was part of the A44 until the village was bypassed, heads out of the town north westward towards Evesham, and the road turned out to be a long succession of B&Bs of all sorts of shapes and sizes. Mine would be here somewhere; in fact it was towards the end of the line. Finding accommodation in Broadway had been problematic, as it is a tourist honeypot. I had hunted for a reasonably-priced option and booked many months ahead. It came as a shock then to find, on arrival, that there had been a booking mix-up, and that mine had somehow been lost. All the same, I was offered a large ground floor room, and settled myself in front of a very large TV while the day’s twenty-one miles wound down.

I took my host’s advice on where to eat and strolled back into the village to compare options. As this was a Monday night I knew that choice would be limited: Mondays can these days be as difficult as Sundays for eating out, and indeed most of the restaurants were closed. The village has three pubs, however (there was a time when it had thirty-three). I paused by The Swan, which presents itself as a newly-updated gastropub, but could not bring myself to spend what I would have been asked for a main course, even if the crowds inside seemed to be enjoying their food. I settled instead for the more prosaic Crown and Trumpet, where I enjoyed superb fish and chips, and wrote up my online notes while I sipped a couple of very fine pints. The online presence, in the form of a quick daily diary with some photos, was in response to various friends who had asked me to keep in touch. It was easier to do it all on one website rather than shipping out the same material in individual messages.

Back in my room I realised that the temperature was more autumn than summer, but it was too early to expect the heating to be switched on, so I warmed my hands with a hairdryer before climbing into bed for what proved to be a very comfortable night. The thought of the next day was weighing on my mind a little: this would be the first of two long days on this trip, each planned at around twenty-six miles and each with some significant ascents. By now I was in no doubt I could do it, but there were some choices to be made. I fell asleep before I decided anything, it could all wait until the morning.

Fun and frustration: day six

Over an early breakfast I thought through my day. In the plan, I was to take a series of footpaths cross-country to the eastern end of Bredon Hill, then loop over the summit before heading northward towards Pershore and Worcester. The first question was whether the traverse of the hill was a good idea, because it made the route much longer and included some heavy-duty ups and downs. The sunshine decided for me, together with the thought that I may never get another good chance to stroll over Bredon Hill. The second question was whether to risk a footpath route to reach the hill, thinking about the fun and games I had already had trying to navigate poorly-marked paths. To gain some time, and partly because the walk to the base of the hill was unlikely to be very scenic, I decided to take a road route for the first eight miles, and to climb the hill by a direct path on the north side.

I had a brief conversation with my lady host about where I had come from and where I was headed, the lack of detail on my part quite deliberate and the surprise on hers now fully expected, then said my farewells and headed back towards Broadway to start my day. Both the old and the new plans took me through the edge of the village and out again on a little road towards the sprawling settlement of Childswickham. The old heart of the village apparently boasts a Norman church and some classic half-timbered houses: out on the main road there were only modern estates and an incongruous holiday camp. As I passed the start of the path I had originally planned to use I was consoled to see that I was making a good decision; a brambly overgrown struggle was well avoided. The road cut a straight line across the almost flat land of the Vale of Evesham, passing by just a couple of farmsteads in the first four miles or so. There was some passing traffic, as this looks to be a back road into Pershore and onward, but nothing to trouble a pedestrian. Near Hinton I crossed the A46 road, which if you follow it all the way runs from Bath right across England to Lincolnshire, but by now the big shoulders of Bredon Hill were becoming steadily more dominant ahead. My little byway travelled on without passing much of note, although at one point it crossed a track shown on the map as “Salt Way” – not the same one as I had travelled in Oxfordshire I think! From a slight rise above the village of Elmley Castle the view towards the hill was superb, well worth a rest.

Elmley Castle village is a hotchpotch of half-timber and thatch, which would have been really photogenic but for the cars and vans parked in the main street. Its community website describes it as “five miles from anywhere”, which is accurate enough. It is an attractive little place but with no incentive for me to linger. Only earthworks remain of the Norman castle which gave it its name, higher on the slopes of the hill to the south. It is indeed Bredon Hill which dominates, the large green lump a backdrop to the village. I followed the unimaginatively named Hill Lane, which climbs steeply towards the hill before offering itself to a choice of paths across the steep grassy slopes. Here I passed an elderly couple, fully equipped with clumpy boots and walking poles, and exchanged friendly greetings. Big boots were never on my list for this trek: during my long period of preparation I had tried and tested four or five different footwear options and also toyed with the idea of walking poles, but I read that their biggest advantages came on steep descents and uncertain terrain. Not much of that featured on my route, so considering the extra few hundred grammes to carry, and the risk that I might take out someone’s eye with the poles stuck to my pack, I decided against.

Taking the direct path towards the top of Bredon Hill, a path which climbs five hundred feet in less than half a mile, I discovered one of the real high spots of my entire journey. The path was good, the terrain challenging but fun, and the views were simply superb. I met with the path from Aston-under-Hill, which would have been my planned way up, then continued to climb to the top of Bredon’s ridge, which rises to 981 feet at its highest point. Geologically Bredon Hill is an outlier of the Cotswolds, but its isolation from the main ridge means that the vistas from all sides are uninterrupted and far-reaching. It is crowned by the Banbury Stone Tower, or Parsons Folly, built for John Parsons MP in the mid-18^th century as a summerhouse and viewpoint. The top of the tower takes the altitude to just over 1,000 feet, in much the same way as the Leith Hill Tower in Surrey. Today it is closed and locked behind a steel door and carries an unsightly mobile phone mast.

The Wychavon Way runs across the summit ridge of Bredon Hill; it is a forty-mile route between Droitwich and Broadway, and the sections on the hill are well marked. I followed it from the Banbury Tower, then through a sharp turn northward and downward to leave the hill behind. The views to the west here are dominated by the shapely line of the Malvern Hills, a silhouette which would become very familiar to me over the next few days. Soon the roofline of old Woollas Hall came into view. I decided to take a much closer look.

My maternal grandmother was born in Uppingham, in Rutland, in 1883, and both her parents were in service, my great-grandfather as a gardener, his wife as a lady’s maid. At some time in Grandma’s early years the family moved to Worcestershire, and her parents took up similar employment here in Woollas Hall. In my youth I was treated to stories of the local villages, of Wick, Eckington, Great Comberton, Defford and Nafford. As a young girl, Grandma was frequently scolded for dirtying her clothes clambering around on Bredon Hill, and at about the age of seven, somewhere on the hill, she fell from a tree and broke her arm. She grew up in the area, and apparently met my grandfather, who was an engineer with the Great Western Railway, at a dance in Pershore. I had whizzed through the area several times, but never seen it in such close focus.

The house is a three-storey stone mansion, L-shaped in plan, and fronted by a tall porch and three distinctive gables. It was built in 1611 for John Hanford and remained in the family for more than four centuries. It is perhaps a little sad that the grand old house, together with the adjoining stables and brewhouse, is now divided into desirable apartments, but at least this means that it is well maintained.

I carried on downhill to Woollas Hall Farm: I had intended to stay on the Wychavon Way but it was no longer clear where it went, so the farm lane was a better bet. All the same I proved I had learned nothing, as I took what looked like a shortcut footpath diagonally across a field and ended up struggling to find a bramble covered stile to rejoin the road at the other end. Something of a long cut. The lane led me down to Great Comberton, a prosperous-looking little place with a fine square-towered church, apparently rebuilt in the 15^th century and hardly touched since, but sadly devoid of a pub. I really could have enjoyed a decent pint in a quiet corner, but it was not to be: at least I knew in advance, so there was no big disappointment.

Past the village war memorial I followed a little road down to the banks of the River Avon and traced the riverside on a path known as Shakespeare’s Avon Way.  This path shares its start point with the river itself, in the village of Naseby, Northamptonshire. The source is marked with an iron cone dated 1822, to all accounts not so easy to find. The river finds its fame as it flows south-westward through Warwick, and on to Shakespeare’s Stratford before reaching Worcestershire, passing through Evesham and Pershore – and Great Comberton – to Tewkesbury, where it joins the Severn. I followed it for only a few hundred yards: it was broad and tranquil under the steadily greying skies.

The promisingly waymarked stretch of the footpath headed away from the river, losing itself for a moment among some overgrowing bushes, then diverting on to a stony track, avoiding the Ordnance Survey’s route straight across a ploughed field. There were a few raindrops, but thankfully they came to nothing. My track grew into a lane, which joined another, leading to a gentle descent back to the Avon at Pershore Bridge. There has been a bridge on this site since the 15^th century, and today there are two. The old bridge was “remodelled”, as Historic England chooses to describe it, during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, in part using stone from the ruins of Elmley Castle, some miles behind me now. It was taken out of service with the arrival of a new road bridge in 1926, and today it is open to pedestrians only. On this day it was festooned with ugly orange traffic cones which crushed its ancient loveliness. I continued into the centre of Pershore.

The fine Georgian market town of Pershore, the town where my grandparents first met, was likewise rather too full of modern life. The High Street, and the short square which leads towards the abbey, are overlooked by some very handsome red-brick Georgian buildings, but also stuffed full of parked cars and vans. Instead of pulling my camera from my backpack I bought lunch in a little supermarket and made my way to a quiet bench in the grounds of the abbey. The peaceful site traces its ecclesiastical origins back to Saxon times, and the original abbey may have been refounded more than once before the Normans arrived. Today’s parish church is only a small remnant of the Benedictine foundation, on which building began in the 12^th century. The abbey was dissolved and largely dismantled in the 16^th century, while the remaining church has been subjected to repairs and restorations ever since, including some work by the ubiquitous George Gilbert Scott in the 1860s. The quiet green where I sat with my sandwich and iced tea is edged with pretty cottages on its north side, marking my route out of town.

I left Pershore on a long sloping street called the Holloway, with nine miles in the plan to reach Worcester, and little of great scenic interest expected in between. At least I was not condemned to walk on many main roads. I crossed Besford Bridge, where the road dipped through a sharp bend which might not have been much fun in a car, and about fifty minutes from Pershore I came to Wadborough. The village was quite possibly asleep, as I saw not a single soul, and the one pub was closed for the afternoon. A rather grubby flag, the cross of St George, hung limply from a pole in one front garden, but whether that was about football, politics or both was not clear.

Wadborough lost its railway station in 1965, but trains still rush past regularly on the Birmingham to Bristol line, and my little road followed the railway tracks northward for a while, until they went east and I went west into Littleworth. Here, and in the adjoining village of Norton, it was clear that I had entered Worcester’s suburbia, with a scattering of different modern house designs and a noticeable increase in traffic along little roads which had suddenly grown pavements. I passed under a bridge beneath the M5 motorway and turned off on a narrow lane marked as leading to a sports club, and unusually also to a gun club, which turned out to be hidden from sight behind tall hedges.

Half a mile on, I had proof that no amount of planning, studying maps, online satellite images or street views can guarantee success. According to my maps, the lane would end at a couple of footpaths, each of which took a short dive through subways under Worcester’s southern ring road to lead to the edge of the city. Instead I was met by a large building site, the paths buried under what looked like an unfinished road leading to an equally unfinished bridge. A laminated paper sign pinned to a lamppost announced that the paths were closed and that “no alternative route is available”. Love and kisses, Worcestershire County Council. There was no choice but to retrace my steps and think of a diversion. With theoretically less than two miles to go in a day which was calculating at nearly twenty-six miles a long diversion was quite a body blow. It is little consolation, as I write these words a few months later, to know that the brand new Crookbarrow Bridge is now a key part of Worcester’s pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure. Long diversions there are a thing of the past.

For me, I turned south-westward, through a utilitarian ex-army housing estate, then north, to cross the wretched ring road at a vast roundabout confused by roadworks, then west for half a mile or so on urban footpaths through to the Bath Road. For anyone who loves relentlessly straight busy long boring main roads as an approach to a city I strongly recommend Bath Road. I was on it for about one and a half miles, aware that every inch was adding to my original plan for the day.

My annoyance eased as I reached the pedestrianised High Street, lined with shops I knew my wife would love, and reached the fairly posh hotel I had booked, just a stone’s throw from Worcester’s Foregate station. A little under nine hours, and twenty-seven and a half miles from Broadway, the day’s journey was done.

From quite early in the planning, my wife Sue had suggested that she could meet up along the way, and as I had Worcester earmarked as a good place for a rest day it made sense to come together here, six days and 130 miles into the journey. After the travails at the end of the day it was great to have a good welcome! Not only that, she had driven from London with some changes of clothes for me, so for once I could step out wearing something other than technical walking gear, and in such a city we had a great choice of places to eat that evening, transcending what I had been finding in hotels and pubs along the way.

A tourist in Worcester: day seven

Not many years before this journey we had passed through Worcester, hoping to pause and look round, but could find nowhere to park, so we gave up and drove on. Not so this time, with a whole day to explore, and joined by a couple of friends who live further east in the Midlands.

Worcester is one of those ancient English cities which has always been strategically important, in this case as a crossing point over the River Severn, and as a node for many major routes running north-south and east-west, not least among them the trade route to mid-Wales which eventually became the A44 main road. As a settlement around the Severn crossing it can look back to Neolithic origins, but it has featured in one way or another in every chapter of English history ever since. It was in one of its ancient streets that we found an excellent coffee house, a very good way to start a day as tourists.

Perhaps the finest of those ancient streets is that which contains the half-timbered Greyfriars House, and the delightfully non-level buildings opposite. Greyfriars, for more than fifty years in the care of the National Trust, dates from the 15^th century, and may have been either a merchant’s house or the guesthouse for the nearby friary, dissolved and destroyed a century later. We took a guided tour, which is not usually my preference, but in this case the guide was knowledgeable and thankfully modest.

The inevitable star of the show is the large cathedral, hanging its shadow over the river and dominating much of the city centre. Although founded in Saxon times, the present magnificent building dates from the 11^th to the 16^th centuries and displays almost every architectural style from those times. Like good tourists we congregated around the tomb of King John, which has been here since 1216, and the tomb of Arthur Tudor, the eldest son of Henry VII, whose untimely death opened the way for Henry VIII to take the throne. How England might have been different had Arthur survived to be king is the source of endless speculation. Touristing done, we left the cathedral on the river side and marvelled at the many swans crowding the opposite bank of the Severn, apparently they are a famous feature of Worcester life.

We returned to the delights of the city, including those enticing shops on the High Street, and later ended a good day with a superb Turkish dinner just a few yards from the hotel. For a walker the statistics of the day are quite dreadful, but that was hardly the point of a rest day after all.

Elgar and Herefordshire: day eight

The next morning, after the now almost obligatory cooked breakfast, I bade Sue farewell and watched her little red car head out of the hotel car park before turning to start my journey once more. The day began grey, the streets of Worcester seemed equally toneless, and I confess to feeling quite flat, even though the day ahead would be the least challenging section so far at only about sixteen miles. Perhaps the contrast of the rest day, meeting friends and wife, had somehow derailed my determination. I threaded through Angel Street to the Severn, walked a riverside path for a while before crossing the Sabrina footbridge, built in 1992 and given the Roman name of the river. A few minutes of drab industrial landscape brought me to a steep little alley up to Oldbury Road, my escape route from the city for the next mile or so. The road wound its way through suburban houses, little to hold the attention here except a few signs marking it as the route of an upcoming half-marathon. At the end of the houses, the edge of the city, the road gave way to a track, and my journey returned to the countryside, if for the moment a rather scruffy sort of edge-of-town landscape. It drizzled a little.

The scenery and the track improved, despite a local landowner’s obvious obsession with posting “private” signs all over the place, and quite suddenly, about three miles out, I reached a road, and the museum of Elgar’s birthplace. The Firs, the house in which the composer was born in 1857, sits on one side of the track I had been following, while the modern museum is opposite. This is National Trust territory, so my membership card secured me a conversation with the lady on the reception desk, who seemed bemused by what I told her of my trip. I stowed my backpack in a staff cupboard and explored. The museum is well done, but the little redbrick house is the star of the show. I was the only visitor when I entered, so I benefited from all the knowledge which the two elderly gentlemen there were ready to share. It is true that Elgar was only two when the family left the house for Worcester, but he returned as a boy for holidays, and visited on occasions throughout his life. The house is preserved as far as possible in its original state, except for some rooms set out with display cases. One of these, I was told, had contained some medals, but these had been stolen very recently, to the bewilderment of the volunteer staff, since they would have had no more than historical value. Such is life.

My route from Worcester had been part of the Three Choirs Way, a footpath which links the cathedrals of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester, but I was happy to leave it alone when I saw – or rather could not find – the point where it left the road to wriggle over fields westward. Instead I followed a good little road running parallel to the paths, through pleasant countryside for three miles or so to hamlet called Want’s Green, where I turned on to a much smaller lane. One green followed another for the next mile along a road lined with tall hedges, from Want’s Green to Munn’s Green and on to Haynes Green, the last strangely with no apostrophe. I took to an even smaller lane, barely surfaced and ridged with grass in the middle, to go very steeply down, then very steeply up again to find the Worcestershire Way. As a more significant footpath this one was easy to find and very well waymarked.  Running gently along a field edge the path suddenly opened up a splendid view back to the Malvern Hills, still dominant in much of the scenery of this day, then dived into woodland to begin a steady climb towards Ankerdine Hill.

At this point the map shows a spring curiously named Nipple Well – I could not see it, and could later find no explanation for the name, but it raised a smile at the time. The path emerged into sunshine where it touched a road, then dived back into woodland at the top of the hill, crowned by a nature reserve and touristy benches and bins. Were it not for the trees the view would probably have been extensive. The marked path makes a zigzag steep descent to rejoin the road below, parts of it so steep I was reminded of the tiptoe descent of the Chiltern scarp several days before. A short length of road took me to my lunchtime target, the Talbot Inn at Knightwick. Here, while I mulled over a choice of four draught beers, I got into a cheery conversation with a cyclist who had passed me half an hour or so before, and who congratulated me on making such good progress. I told him I had an incentive, chose my pint, and settled with an amazingly good smoked salmon sandwich. I had not realised it, but the Talbot is home to its own brewery, literally in the back yard, which also supplies beer to a number of locations across the area.

I crossed the River Teme on a footbridge, once the only crossing but now replaced by a modern road bridge nearby, and met up once more with the A44. In truth it had never been far away since Broadway. Its original route through Pershore is now scorned for a northern bypass, and it forms part of the Worcester ring road before running west more or less parallel to my steps to this point, making haste where I was taking my time to reach Bromyard. I tried unsuccessfully to find a path across fields at Knightwick Manor, defeated by tall fences, and returned to the road until I could turn on to a clear track a little further along. This passed very close to the house, an impressive Georgian gentleman’s residence in dark red brick. A few yards beyond it, just before joining the next lane, I passed unnoticed into Herefordshire, county number seven on the journey. In the “England” edition of one of the best-known travel guides the entire county merits only four pages, three of them devoted to the city of Hereford. This is quite unjust.

For the next couple of miles I followed a little road past hamlets and farmsteads completely hidden away in the rolling countryside – Elmores End, Clayfoot, Tiblands, Deabley and more besides. The road switchbacked over hills and twisted between fields and little woods, how very idyllically English it seemed in the sunshine. At Linley Green, a name on the map with little to show for it on the ground, I turned on to a path which climbed straight up a hill, rising to about six hundred feet, and – inevitably – once again putting the Malverns on full display behind me. The path was an attempt to avoid a long stretch of busy-looking road, and all went very well with it for a mile or so. If I was encouraged by a sign marking part of my path as one of Bromyard’s “Leisure walks” then I was soon deceived, as I found myself waist-deep in bracken. The dreaded fern is harmless enough, although it can be full of heat and flies in summer, but its capacity to obscure footpaths is well known. I pushed on just long enough to find a farm track, and followed that to escape to the road, once more the A44. I tolerated the whizzing traffic for just a couple of hundred yards before turning off on to a much quieter lane across Bromyard Downs. The downs are a scrubby piece of sloping access land to the east of the town, rising to eight hundred feet or so: from the road, a hundred feet lower down, the view to the west was inviting. Beyond the roofs of Bromyard the country rolled away in waves of different greens, while further in the distance a line of soft blue declared the hills of Wales, in sight for the first time on the journey.

I battled through some more bracken to descend to the curiously named Burying Lane, and then joined the road coming in from the north east, from Kidderminster and Birmingham, for the last mile. In the fields to the left big preparations were under way for the Bromyard Folk Festival in the coming weekend: I hoped this would not mean the place would be overrun, or worse that there might be problems with my accommodation, despite advance booking. In fact, apart from some interesting characters in the hotel bar later, all was calm.

Bromyard is a pleasant old town, mentioned in documents going back to the 9^th century, and for hundreds of years famous for its market. The two almost parallel main streets include several half-timbered buildings, and are spared the plague of traffic since the A44 was diverted away to the south. My inn for the night was one of the more noteworthy half-timbered edifices, standing boldly on a street corner. When I arrived the place was very quiet, and I was welcomed at the reception desk by a personable young lady who was clearly intrigued by this strange character with a large blue backpack. She showed me to my room, which was small but looked comfortable, and which boasted ancient beams exposed in the roughly-formed uneven walls. Back downstairs in the bar I sipped a cool pint, served without question even though it was half an hour before official opening time. More company arrived gradually in ones and twos, some quite weirdly dressed, and the accents of the English Midlands and the southern United States mingled in the bar: I guessed a connection with the weekend’s activities.

The real adventure here began later in the evening. The dinner menu looked interesting, but almost as soon as I had made my choices I was led quickly through to the dining room by a rather brusque young man, and my first course arrived a few seconds later. It was, sad to say, awful. So too was the main course, a mixture of shades of grey and brown, floating in greasy gravy, and barely edible. I consoled myself with a large glass of red wine to flush it down.

Then came the consolation. The table next to mine was occupied by a group of perhaps eight people, one of whom was holding forth loudly in a strong Birmingham accent. The stretched and rounded tones of the West Midlands are often unfairly damned as concealing refinement, but in this case there was nothing to hide. It did not help my prejudices that he was full of praise for the quality of the food, while his companions did not seem to share his enthusiasm. I ordered a second glass of red and relaxed into the entertainment. The crowning glory came when he sang the praises of “a caravan in Mablethorpe” as the perfect holiday destination for a young couple somewhere in the family tree. Mablethorpe, on the Lincolnshire coast, is home to thousands of caravans, and it is a total dump, as I know from experience. This was a place where the street stalls sold fizzy drinks but no water, where the tea we drank by the messy beach was grey and tasteless, and where I could swear the pavements were coated in chip fat. I buried my sniggers inside my glass, and left the room for my bed as the conversation moved on to politics.

Hidden England: day nine

The night in that ancient room was indeed very comfortable, and my full breakfast next morning was at least better than the dinner, although it is a very long time since I have seen tinned mushrooms on a plate. I paid my dues and headed out into a chilly grey Friday morning. Bromyard was very quiet, perhaps still asleep at nine o’clock. I left the town on a B-road which goes northward towards Tenbury Wells and the Shropshire border. In my plan I had included a stretch of the Herefordshire Trail footpath to avoid a slog along the road, but experience told me that the massively overgrown start of the path was not a good idea, so I stayed on the tarmac. There was little traffic, and even less to distract me for the mile or two I passed on that road.

Just before the scattered settlement of Edwyn Ralph, which has an entry in the Domesday Book but not much else to say for itself, I turned on to a smaller road and once more headed westward. Opposite the turning was the end of the footpath which I had planned to use. There was nothing to be seen of it except for a “Public Footpath” sign pointing straight into a field densely planted with maize. I was once more relieved not to have trusted to Herefordshire’s path network. My little road led me to another, even narrower, this one forming part of a riding and walking route known as the Three Rivers Ride. I reasoned that if it was good enough for horses it should suit me, so I had high hopes of it being easy to follow. I entered a landscape of hills and valleys which, on the map, is a collection of Butterleys. Butterley Mill, Lower Butterley, Butterley Brook, Butterley Court, Butterley Orles and more. The name also features in the Domesday Book, so it seems these are the remnants of an ancient settlement.

Beyond Lower Butterley the lane turned north and became a clear track, climbing a gentle hill for half a mile or so, to a top of about seven hundred feet, and calling an encore for the Malvern Hills now far to the east. More lanes, a thistle-plagued but mercifully short field path and a broader road brought me to the village sign for Hatfield. There is no village as such, the settlement lingers along the road and it is almost two miles to the sign marking the end of it. Along the way I passed a house which clearly used to be the local school, and next door the squat church of St Leonard. This lays claim to be one of the oldest in Herefordshire, and still has some Saxon remains as well as bells from the 13^th and 14^th centuries. In all I followed that road for about four miles, passing only a handful of human habitations, plus one delivery driver enjoying his lunch in his van. The landscape was stereotypical English countryside, a patchwork of fields, hedges and little woods, dug out by little valleys and rising to rounded hills. I confess to enjoying being the only creature walking through it. Almost the only creature: at one point I was shadowed by a little bird, scurrying along the road in front of me and dragging one wing, I suppose pretending to be injured so as to divert me away from the nest. It was very persistent, and took maybe three minutes to decide that I was no threat after all, and to dive into the hedge.

My road was destined to join the A44 road some distance east of the next town, so I turned off on another lane and followed the route of the Three Rivers Ride once more, down a short driveway to a house marked on the map as The Batches. Some building work was going on here but the three or four men busy with their bricks took no notice of me as I passed through their site. A battered “Bridleway” sign on a rusty old gate gave me some confidence, but in the sloping meadow beyond it my hopes evaporated. In theory the path goes down to cross a stream, but all I found was an unbroken fence and no sign of a gap in the trees behind it, let alone any kind of bridge. I turned back, was ignored a second time by the workmen, and began a diverted route through the lanes. I was by now getting used to this kind of frustration, but it was still annoying to have to add almost an extra mile to the day’s journey. I crossed the Whyle Brook about half a mile north of The Batches, grateful that I had not tried to force my way through that fence, because the brook was a good ten feet wide. A mile or so further on I abandoned plans to use footpaths to reach Leominster, not even the “Herefordshire Trail” on the map could tempt me, and took a little road over the delightfully named Tick Bridge to reach the A44 just above the town.

From here I could see a path just across the main road, apparently going down to the riverbank opposite the town. A moment’s glee at finding a newish metal kissing gate soon faded away in a mass of bracken and undergrowth. No sign of any path. With the second big sigh in an hour, I returned to the A44 and steeled myself for a half-mile trek by the traffic, ducking on to the lumpy verge to avoid passing lorries. At least the final approach to the town along a path beside the River Lugg and over the railway was clear enough, finally welcome to Leominster. The Lugg rises in Wales, threads its way through the little town of Presteigne and on to Leominster, where on this day it looked slow and dark green, before heading south to join the Wye close to Hereford.

The old market town – its name is pronounced “Lemster” – is the largest town in Herefordshire after Hereford itself, with a population of just under 12,000. Like so many other settlements in the area it has existed since Saxon times. Raided from the east by the Vikings in the 8^th and 9^th centuries, and from the west by the Welsh in the 11^th it wears its battle scars well. Modern traffic is prevented from raiding and wrecking its centre by a bypass and ring roads, so the intersection of two very major roads, the A49 running north-south and the A44 going east-west, leaves the town in peace. It has a criss-cross of old streets and several half-timbered buildings, but sadly a rather tired and worn air to it. I bought some lunch, which I ate on a bench in West Street before heading out again. There was some good news: the day had started cold and grey, but by now the sun had reappeared and the temperature was much more comfortable.

It took a few minutes to cross and re-cross the incredibly busy and noisy roads on the edge of town, and a few more minutes walking the A44 before I could escape to quieter routes. On the way I passed a little street called “Perseverance Road”, which seemed to me very apt indeed. Further up the hill I turned on to Ginhall Lane and, for the moment at least, left the traffic behind. I had planned to use a string of footpaths to cover the next three miles or so of my journey, but by now it will be no surprise that I opted instead to stay with the roads, following two B-roads to reach the next village. As the first of these was a link through to a more important road I hoped that the traffic would leave me when I turned on to the second, but no, they all seemed to want to follow me.

Over the miles I had been able to watch driver behaviour closely. When faced with a walker on the road carrying a large backpack there were a variety of reactions. As the rules dictate, and for common sense, I walk on the right side of the road, facing the oncoming traffic, so that the vehicles I cannot see coming up behind me can pass by harmlessly on the other side. The oncoming ones react in one of four different ways. There are the sensible ones, who move over just a yard or so, giving me comfortable room without lurching across the road. There are some who do lurch, sometimes right across to the far side, perhaps imagining that I might suddenly leap into their path. Next come the murderous ones who hardly budge at all, threatening to bounce me into the verge. The last category is for the nervous ones who brake sharply when they see me, and creep past very cautiously as if I were a horse. With practice it was usually possible to identify the type before they got close. All four types were alive and well on the road out of Leominster that Friday afternoon. What I feared most by now were blind right-hand bends with no verges, which gave little time for drivers or me to spot each other, but luckily there was none on this stretch of road.

At the hamlet of Cobnash the road makes a sharp right turn, which slowed down at least some of the cars, and then continues more sedately, crossing the remnants of the old Leominster to Kington railway line, which closed to passengers in 1955 after 98 years of service, before a sharp left turn at the entry to Kingsland village. This is a long sprawling village stretching along a mile or so of the road, blessed with one highly-regarded pub, a 13^th-century church and a noteworthy rugby team. I arrived at the local primary school closing time so had to weave in and out of a convoy of mothers and pushchairs, but the children seemed to be happy enough to be starting their weekend. Kingsland also boasts some fine black-and-white half-timbered houses, very representative of the local style. I turned out of the village, endured a short stretch of the main road going to Hereford, then set off along a narrow road with just a couple of miles left to my destination.

This little road seemed to go randomly up and down hills, and to veer left and right as it pleased, but the sun was shining and the three or four people I met along the way all greeted me with a smile, so the afternoon was ending on a happy note. I passed through the cluster of houses known as Ledicot, which the Domesday Book records as having just four households. Today it might be twice that size. A little way further I turned on to a broader road and reached Shobdon. Until I had begun researching accommodation for this journey I must admit I had never heard of this village, but it was home to one of only two places to stay between Bromyard and my next destination over the Welsh border, so it soon came into focus. The one pub with rooms advertises a welcome for bikers, which put me on guard until I checked the reviews. Such is ancient prejudice!

All the same I had arrived about forty minutes ahead of the advertised check-in time, and it was obvious that some sort of event was going on inside the pub. Shobdon does however have a point or two of interest, so I decided to see what I could, even though denied the chance to drop off my pack first.  The gates to Shobdon Park are directly opposite the pub, and from there a long drive goes uphill through manicured parkland, mown grass and little lakes, to Shobdon Court and to the church. Shobdon Court was an 18^th-century country house in Palladian style, long held by the Bateman family whose name is remembered in the title of the pub. The house was demolished in 1933, but the former stable block and outbuildings remain, and are converted into apartments. The church, dedicated to St John, was rebuilt in 1749-52 on the site of an earlier 13^th-century edifice. The rebuilding was carried out in collusion with Horace Walpole, a friend of the Bateman family, and others of his circle of taste, of whom at least one designed the interior. While the outside is nothing special, just a squat stone church with a square tower, the interior is reputed to be a fascinating example of English rococo, so-called “Strawberry Hill Gothick”, all white with pale blue accents. I should have liked to confirm that description, but on that Friday afternoon the church was locked.

Instead I carried on up the hill, this time on a grassy path, to reach the Shobdon Arches. This is a trio of mediaeval stone arches rescued from the original church and reassembled up on this hill simply as a folly. The old stones have struggled a little with centuries of weather, but the view back across the countryside from this six-hundred-foot perch was sublime. I went back down to the pub, where the event seemed to be winding down, with a lot of empty glasses and coffee cups lurking alongside the remains of a sandwich buffet. It was past check-in time, so all was well. The rooms are in a separate block, perhaps a converted barn, behind the main building, and I was led through to an upstairs room which immediately looked welcoming and comfortable. It was a large room with sloping ceilings and a window at floor level, obviously untouched from its original position. And the heating was working, which would prove to be a blessing later in the night. I relaxed for a while before dinner. The day had been a little longer than planned, twenty-three miles excluding my little jaunt up to the Arches and back, extended by the diversions I had made to avoid dodgy footpaths. All the same by now I was not giving my legs or feet a thought. They were happy to get on with the job without complaining, while I could enjoy the journey to the full.

All trace of the afternoon’s gathering had been cleared away by the time I went to eat, and it was an absolute pleasure to enjoy really good pub grub and tasty beer, served by an attentive and enthusiastic young group. The contrast with the previous night’s meal was striking. The room did  not let me down, I slept comfortably and well, and woke to more sunshine.

 

Hergest Ridge – into Wales: day ten.

A little excitement attached itself to this day – the “walk to Wales” was about to enter the Principality at last. I knew that the prize would not be won without some tedium, especially the first two or three miles of unyielding straight road, and the eleven miles which separated me from Kington, but the edge of England was in sight.

My breakfast, back in the almost empty pub dining room, was excellent, a good match for the previous day’s dinner. I left the old stone pub very much ready for the journey ahead. Away from the delights of the Church and the Arches, Shobdon is a one-street village with little to lift the heart. At its end the road divides, the larger road going northwest towards Presteigne and Knighton, the other southwest towards Kington. A choice then between the “Knight’s town”, the “Priest’s Town” and the “King’s town”. The king won, for my journey at least. The nondescript road goes gently downhill to Milton Cross, where off to the left an industrial estate and Shobdon Airfield are signposted, both sounding incongruous amid all the greenery. The airfield was originally a British Army reception point for WW2 casualties, its first arrivals coming just after the Battle of Dunkirk. The US Army took it over in 1943, and together with the RAF they added a runway used for glider training. In 1953 it passed to Herefordshire County Council, and it is now the home of Herefordshire Aero Club.

A mile further on I had the choice to stay on the same road and cross the River Arrow on the Noke Bridge, or to turn off at a crossroads and use the Gig Bridge instead. Always one for a good gig… The turning took me towards Staunton-on-Arrow, its church sitting proudly on top of a little hill, and so to the footpath to the bridge. Gig bridge turned out to be about three feet wide, a useful little footbridge even if the path beyond it was overgrown and indistinct through to the metal gate which joins it with Noke Lane. This little road, no connection by name with the village of Noke many days earlier in the journey, would be my companion for the next four miles or so. It runs westward, roughly parallel to the A44 main road to the south, and to the river on the north side. Our friendship began with a long slow uphill, but the wooded scenery was a welcome change from the first hour of my day. There are few signs of human habitation here, one or two wealthy-looking houses and a scattering of small farmsteads. As the road levelled it narrowed, with a strip of grass growing in the centre, and on and on it wandered. It was purposeful, it was easy going, and the isolated peace was delightful. As a final flourish it crossed the Arrow once more, and after a short sharp hill joined the larger road which links Kington with Presteigne. In my original plan I had sought to avoid part of the three road miles to the town on a series of paths, but once again I decided it was better to stay on the road. Just before the farm and lake at Flintsham Court the road crosses Offa’s Dyke, so in Saxon terms I was already in Wales. The road stops climbing at a house known as Cabbage Hall, about six hundred feet up, and then makes a gentle descent into Kington.

The town, the last outpost of England, may have been on the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke, the 8^th-century earthwork boundary between Saxon Mercia and Welsh Powys traditionally attributed to King Offa of Mercia, but Kington has been English for a thousand years. The long straight street which leads into the town, and which goes by three different names in less than half a mile, nevertheless has some very Welsh-looking white buildings with characteristic black stone window outlines. It has for centuries been a market town, its prosperity much dependent on agriculture, and for a time on passing drovers moving their stock from Wales to the markets of England. Today that dependency on agriculture is precarious, and the town makes the most of its position for tourism. It is a major stopping point on the Offa’s Dyke National Trail, which runs for 173 miles from the Severn to the Mersey, and a crossroads for other long-distance walking routes. It was due to host its very own Walks Festival a couple of weeks after I passed through. I made my way to a tiny walking shop on the High Street, a singular place which is both shop and B&B, run by a very keen walker. She helped me to choose a second lightweight long-sleeved top. I had brought only one and was using it every evening, so I feared having to wear it during the day as well and not being able to wash it. On from there to buy something for lunch in a little supermarket, and then I set out for Hergest Ridge.

Music fans will know that name. It is the title of the second album by multi-talented composer and musician Mike Oldfield, who lived on Bradnor Hill to the north of the town for some time in the 1970s. The story goes that he retreated to Herefordshire to work in peace on the follow-up to his hugely successful first album “Tubular Bells”. The house is now a guest house, but it still attracts Oldfield pilgrims from across the world. Bradnor Hill is also distinguished as the home to Britain’s highest golf club. There is always something of interest wherever we travel.

Departure from Kington was up a short steep rise to the churchyard, then on to a little road known unimaginatively as Ridgebourne Road. This is all part of the Offa’s Dyke Trail, but there were no obvious signs so far. I am sure that helps sell the route guide books! The little road goes west in a straight line, always climbing. It passes Hergest Croft, a large series of gardens spreading over seventy acres of the hillside, and open to the public, otherwise its climb is shrouded in woodland right up to the point where road becomes track. Here, nudging the thousand-foot contour, a metal gate marks the transition from town to hill, and from woods to moorland, and the slopes of Hergest Ridge are clear to see ahead. The name is apparently pronounced “Hargest”, with a hard “g”.

Where earlier there were few, now there was a multitude of Offa’s Dyke waymarks, and, compared with much of the one-hundred-and-seventy or so miles which brought me this far, it was quite busy. I passed several walkers in ones and twos and overtook a very large group taking a break with their drinks and lunch. A little higher up, on an improvised bench, I sat and followed their example, but they were moving so slowly that I had finished eating before they caught up. Perhaps I am a little antisocial. Just perhaps. The path was a broad grassy line between clumps of gorse and bracken, and the views back towards Kington and east across to Bradnor Hill were very fine. Just below the top of the elongated rounded hill which makes up the bulk of the ridge the remnants of a 19^th-century racecourse can still be seen. This was a high spot of Kington, in more ways than one, from 1825 until the middle of the century, and racing here continued until the 1880s. Perhaps it is rather fitting then that the top of the hill is roamed by some handsome wild ponies. The path passes a few yards north of the summit point, touching 1,350 feet. This, the highest part of my journey so far, was an arid place, quite flat, and because of the rounded shape of the hill its summit misses the best of the views – they come later. A few minutes of duller weather and a brief threat of rain urged me to hurry, but it soon passed. About four hundred yards further, and on the edge of a steep little cleft in the slope, I reached the border with Wales, and the sunshine came back.

I do not take “selfies”, indeed I take a dim view of those who travel to some marvellous place only to picture themselves blocking the view of it, but one of my sons had asked me to mark my entry into Wales with just such a picture. I used GPS to position myself with one foot in each country as accurately as I could, and I did the deed.

The descent from Hergest Ridge on the Welsh side is a scenic joy. Even from the border line the landscape to the west, into Powys, is suddenly very different, a patchwork of little green fields, copses and gentle brownish hills which could only ever be Wales. It is to the south and southwest however that the grandeur shines through. South is the dark blue bulk of the Black Mountains, while further west the graceful silhouette of the Brecon Beacons, the highest mountains south of Snowdonia, holds the eye. The view moderates, but always dominates, as the path turns stony and steep on the descent. The people also seemed to have disappeared from this side of the hill. A short lane leads down to the first port of call in Wales, the village of Gladestry. Here the Offa’s Dyke Path turns south towards Hay-on-Wye and the Black Mountains, while my route headed north through the village. There is a pub, the Royal Oak, which has recently been updated and much improved, but which was for a long time renowned for its idiosyncratic opening hours – more often closed than open, apparently if there was a thirsty group and the hour was reasonable it would consider opening for a knock on the door. I still had a way to go, so I passed by although it was tantalisingly open that Saturday afternoon.

I went past the school, which numbers about fifty pupils, and the little church, and left the village on a lane which give access to a farm and some houses, but otherwise, for cars at least, goes nowhere. It was quite a surprise then to be bombarded by a string of motorbikes, the cross-country variety, hurtling down in the opposite direction, perhaps a dozen of them in all. At the top of a hill the lane gave up, a farm track going off to the left, my route, on a much smaller track, going straight ahead. From the marks on the ground it seemed the bikes had come through the way I was headed, so I was grateful not to have been here ten minutes earlier. The track, which had started level and stony, soon pitched downhill steeply and broke into a series of clefted slippery flat boulders. Here I knew there was no phone signal, and the local bike club probably would not pass by for another fortnight, so I went down very gingerly to the stream at the bottom, where thankfully there was a little footbridge alongside the ford taken by the track. Uphill once more, then the route levelled off for a few hundred yards before joining a little lane. It would be quite difficult to describe to a stranger exactly where this all is, because it is not “near” anywhere of note. This was, in truth, the patchwork landscape I had surveyed on the Welsh side of Hergest Ridge. I followed the lane, going west again, past the farmsteads of Trewern and Sunnybank, the latter well named as the afternoon was now truly glorious, and turned on to a track to cross the flanks of Burl Hill.

When walking alone in such empty places there is always something to give a little shudder. Perhaps I have watched too many programmes about rural detectives, but as I passed a derelict quarry on the left I could not help thinking that a body in there would never be discovered. I hurried past. To the left, the moorland slopes of the hill: it is hardly known compared with Hergest Ridge, but its altitude is much the same. To the right a slope down into a pretty little wooded valley, with a white house nestling among the trees near the bottom. I was passed by a lady driving an elderly 4x4 – she smiled and waved, so did the two small children in the back. I waved back, then watched her make bouncing progress along the track and down towards the white house. Where she had turned right to go downhill, my track went left, and steeply uphill to join another on the top of a long green ridge. There were several galvanised iron gates along the way, each carrying a bilingual sign from Powys County Council asking drivers of vehicles and riders of horses to keep them closed. I mused exactly what kind of vehicle would make it along these tracks without tearing out its underparts, but I supposed it must be feasible to drive here. This nondescript ridge, shown on the map as Pentre Tump, took me to yet another highest point in my route, at 1,360 feet, before I began the descent towards Radnor. The views were impressive, rolling hills and fresh-looking countryside to the south, looking back from where I had come, a bird’s eye view of the A44 to the north, threading its way between this ridge and the bulk of Radnor Forest beyond.

Together with Shobdon the day before, this was an area in which accommodation is very limited and where I had taken the trouble months earlier to secure my bed for the night. Close to New Radnor, more precisely in Llanfihangel-nant-Melan, there are just two options, both inns, and within a mile of each other. I chose the one closer to the next stopping point, even though it added a mile to this day. My track descended, and I passed two ladies on horseback, just at a point where I could handle one of the gates for them in return for a very polite thank you. The track became a lane next to the first habitation for a couple of miles, and wandered on gently, passing the Llynheilyn lake before reaching a larger road. Two minutes from there I arrived at my destination.

The Fforest Inn stands at the junction of the A44 and a lesser road leading to Builth Wells, and at more than eleven hundred feet above the sea. It is a classic old Welsh hostelry, dating from the 16^th century, white-walled with those characteristic black window surrounds. In the past it would have served the drovers, today it depends on passing tourists and walkers exploring the hills all around it. In the sunshine it looked truly welcoming. The walk had not been so long, at just over nineteen miles, but it had included over two thousand five hundred feet of uphill, so I was in hope of a rest and a good pint. I was not disappointed. In the old and rather dark bar I was welcomed by the lady of the house, who led me to my room. I dumped my bag and changed out of my walking shoes, then returned to the bar for that refreshment. Later in the adjoining dining room I met my host and tucked into a delicious dinner.

The dining room entertainment this time could not quite match the standard of Bromyard, but it put up a good fight. On one of the tables behind me there was a group of about six, apparently celebrating a family event. Just as before, one of the group, a middle-aged man, seem to have very loud control of the conversation, which went through a series of unremarkable topics. That is until this man, even more loudly than before, opened up at full throttle. By now it was common knowledge that the political turmoil surrounding Britain’s impending exit from the European Union was not a fit subject for dinner conversation, but this man ploughed on regardless. Even when he realised that everyone else had gone silent and was quietly attempting to hide under the table he did not stop. I had just witnessed a ruined evening. I retired to my cosy old-fashioned bedroom and slept really deeply.

In the steps of the drovers: day eleven

In the original planning for the trip I had toyed with the idea of taking a day out from the Fforest Inn to explore Radnor Forest. This is no longer a mass of trees, but a compact group of hills, just to the north of the inn and the A44, rising to 2,165 feet and divided by some steep-sided valleys, or “dingles”. The main summit is Great Rhos, but there are a number of other tops of similar altitude, one of which, Black Mixen, has the distinction of being the only Nuttall (peak in England or Wales over two thousand feet high) which is crowned by a radio transmitter.

According to legend, one of those wonderful Welsh legends, four churches built around the edge of the forest were all constructed expressly to contain the last dragon in Wales, which lay sleeping on the hills. All four, including the one just down the road from the Fforest Inn, are dedicated to St Michael, victor over Satan’s armies and, by extension, victor over the dragon. The legend suggests that the dragon might reawaken if any of the four churches were to be destroyed. The theory has thankfully not been field-tested.

While the area is undoubtedly grand walking country I decided against exploring it this time, and placed my extra day further down the way. As I sat alone for breakfast, the only one taking on food before nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, I plotted my day ahead and rejoiced at the glorious sunshine streaming through the windows.

And what a breakfast! It was cooked by my host, who told me that he was aware of my travels so he had piled my plate high. He invited me to eat as much as I could, and told me not to be ashamed if three sausages, a heap of bacon, two eggs and more were too much for me. The ingredients were all from local suppliers, and the sausages, appropriately named “Red dragon”, delivered a spicy kick. While I did battle with my plateful we talked. It transpired that he and his wife had moved from Surrey to take on the challenge of the inn some five years before, and were gradually updating and upgrading it – with apologies that the process had not yet reached my bedroom. Bringing the restaurant up to scratch and promoting the inn was paying off, although it was a source of annoyance that the other inn, the Red Dragon (him again) just down the main road, had won the Welsh “pub of the year” award. His regulars were scathing about that, he said, claiming that the competitor was tiny and scruffy, and no match for the Fforest. Maybe next year, I ventured. Naturally we talked weather, because clearly the blue skies and sunshine outside were not a guaranteed blessing in these parts, especially since the inn stands at altitude.

As I left I made a change to my route plan, which had included some twisting footpath routes to avoid walking the A44. The road was very quiet that morning, and with only about three miles of it to cover I decided it was easier just to stick to it. I could not see the supposed start to my first footpath across the fields in any case. I had been warned that the sunshine would bring out the bikers, but I had almost reached the end of my three miles before I saw anyone on a motorcycle. The road runs high here, and to the west the valleys were still full of white mist; no blue skies down there, I thought. I reached my turn-off, a little lane going downhill to a cottage marked as Pye Corner. From here my route would go westward for most of the day, using high-level tracks to reach the town of Llandrindod Wells by lunchtime, then on footpaths and more tracks through to the approach to Rhayader, my next stop.

Much of this was along the line of old drove roads, along which cattle and other livestock would have been driven from the settlements in the west towards the profitable markets of England. The principal drove roads can be traced for most of their length, but it is here in mid-Wales that they are at their most evident, and, it must be said, their most evocative. Many (if not this one) are carefully recorded in a book published in 1977, “The Drovers’ Roads of Wales”, by Shirley Toulson, illustrated superbly by the black-and-white photography of Fay Godwin. The book was well reviewed when it first appeared, but it was another quarter century before I got round to buying a copy. Fay’s name will probably be known to anyone keen on landscape photography, but she was also president of the Ramblers’ Association from 1987 to 1990 and became a driving force for access rights, the pressure which resulted in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000. Sadly she died in 2005 aged just 74.

My first track crossed the little River Edw, which rises not far north of this point and grows as it travels southward to join the Wye near Builth Wells, and climbed gently alongside woods, with magnificent views of Radnor Forest behind me. Around me the countryside was many shades of green, with rolling gentle hills mixed with larger tops, all of it blessed by beautiful sunshine. It was a day to rejoice for just being in that place. If there was a downside it was the occasional need to dance through the parts most frequented by sheep, but watching my footing was a small price to pay. The track climbed a short sharp hill to Bwlch Llwyn Bank, touching the twelve hundred feet contour again, briefly shared a tarred lane, then climbed further, across the flanks of Pawl Hir hill. Further up the slope to the left I watched a shepherd at work with his two dogs, a reminder of the importance of sheep on these hills. It is humbling to think that there are three times as many sheep in Wales as there are people, and that a third of the entire British flock is farmed in the Principality. In uncertain political times the risks to sheep farming here, and thus to eighty percent of Welsh agriculture, are very real. Long may the man and his dogs on Pawl Hir continue the ancient tradition.

From this high point, almost as high as the tops of yesterday, my route began a long descent to Llandrindod Wells, still four miles distant. My track passed a cluster of little lakes, and a couple of isolated derelict houses, before going down very steeply, and over some slippery loose stones, to join a tiny road at the hamlet of Llanoley. This is a secretive country of little lanes and paths wrapped around woods and hills, probably unknown even to most locals. It was hot as the lane climbed back up, and I began to look forward to my lunch. The road joined another, which passed the club house of Llandrindod Golf Club before wriggling downhill to the town’s lake. This is a boating lake created in the 1870s, the centrepiece of a pleasant little park. At first the lake was buried in tall reeds, but then it revealed itself, and its little café, a happy place very popular on this sunny Sunday. I walked up through the town centre. It has a sense of faded glory, many proud and solid Victorian buildings now looking a little sad. The town began life as a spa in the 18^th century, but experienced a genuine boom after the coming of the railway in the 1860s. It was the largest town in the former county of Radnorshire, although its population is just a little over 5,000. I had been in Llandrindod on a Sunday before, so I knew that it would be pretty much closed for business. However, just beyond the railway station and into a more industrial area it offers an enormous supermarket, so there I went, incongruous in my walking gear and carrying my big blue backpack, to stock up for lunch and beyond. Somewhere near here I passed the two hundred mile mark of the journey, although I did not work this out until later, so there was no on-the-spot celebration.

From the supermarket I walked through a dreary area of small industrial units and boxy little houses to the western edge of the town and the main road heading for Rhayader. I had been dreading the next half mile along this busy road with its dangerous bends and dips, but the resourceful local council had anticipated the problem. A pedestrian and cycle track had been built, twisting along to the north of the road, all the way to the village of Llanyre, where it, and I, turned away from the traffic. I was putting my trust, for the next few miles, in a footpath route over the hills which separate Llandrindod from the A44 and Rhayader, hoping that it would work because the alternatives were poor, involving miles of main roads. My route went west out of the village on a little lane, which went past some incongruous modern bungalows before ending at a gate into a field. From here a clear track began a gentle climb up to the farm of Fron-Serth, where apparently they breed alpacas: none in sight near my path.  The name translates as “steep rounded hill”, and it was soon proving itself true. Track gave way to footpath at a stile, and the climb continued steeply alongside a hedge of trees. A little further up I paused to eat the lunch I had bought in Llandrindod and took in the expansive view back over the town to the hills I had crossed earlier.

The path levelled for a while before climbing again towards a very obvious TV mast on the top of the ridge ahead. I took confidence from the succession of stiles, even though the path was a little erratic, and finally reached its highest point, close to the top of Rhiw Gwraith. For the purists this was just ten feet higher than yesterday’s maximum, and thus technically the highest point of the route so far, at 1,370 feet. I came to the next stile, which crossed a dry stone wall just below the top, and my heart sank. Ahead all I could see was shoulder-high bracken. Earlier encounters in Herefordshire were nothing compared with this one. My path was supposed to go diagonally across  the dreaded tall fern for almost a quarter of a mile. There was no going back now, so I plunged into the greenery and took to the GPS on my electronic phone map to help me through to where, in theory, the path entered a wood. There were some points where it cleared a little, perhaps from a previous traveller’s battles with it, but possibly from sheep: neither could be relied on to have followed the correct route.

After about fifteen minutes I made it to the wire fence at the edge of the wood, and thrashed about for only a few more minutes before spotting a stile. A battered and little-used rotten collection of timbers, yes, but all the same, a stile. Inside the wood progress was easier and I hoped the worst was over. I was wrong. The path joined a stony forestry track which deceived me for a while: only by clambering down a steep bank and fighting through undergrowth did I – and the GPS – match up to the next stile, almost buried under brambles. This led me into a small field – no path and several very boggy patches, but the route across and into the next part of the wood was clear. I was nearly through to the track which I expected would lead me out into easier ground, but my hopes were once again dashed. This piece of woodland was clearly work-in-progress for the forestry folk. Some of it had been cut down, and then cut up, burying the ground feet-deep in shredded branches and small timber. Some of it was gouged by the tyre tracks of heavy machinery, leaving deep holes mostly now full of water. The rest was mostly mud, thick, sticky and deep. This was probably the first moment of the whole journey where I seriously questioned my sanity. There was no mobile signal for security, clearly nobody much used the path I had been following, and it was far from obvious how to traverse this mess. I thought of going back a short step and trespassing the nearby farm, but decided first to give the route a try. I thrashed around in that tangle of mud and timber for perhaps twenty minutes before I finally came to a broad forestry track. There was only one problem, namely a deep and very wet ditch between me and that firm hopeful escape route: as it happened I was not alone after all, because someone had kindly dropped a couple of skinny branches across it. I tightrope-walked across to the track. I could have bent down and kissed it (but I did not).

As well as all the confusion, this messing around had added perhaps forty minutes to my journey, so I was grateful now to up my pace, not even caring that the next mile or so would not be very scenic. The track went more or less northward, crossed a road at Bryn Canol, then onward for another mile before becoming a lane by the curiously-named farm of Betting. A little way beyond here it joined up with a larger road which led me westward into the final three miles or so to Rhayader. This road switchbacked up and down, with some pretty rural views, and ran parallel with the A44 just to the north – the first time I had come close to it since the beginning of the day’s journey. I had to join up with it for the very last section. Just at this point, in a layby, I met up with a group of bikers having quite a heated discussion. One of them, a short, stocky bearded man, fiftyish, in leathers which looked like he had owned them for a very long time, came across to me and asked me if I knew how they could get to Builth Wells. I showed him on the phone map, suggesting they head back into Rhayader and take a left turn in the centre. He thanked me profusely – he seemed to have won the argument with his companions. A few moments later as I strolled along the broad grass verge they passed me, tooted and waved. Friendly people.

Rhayader – the Welsh name translates as “waterfall on the Wye” – is the first town on the River Wye, some twenty miles downstream from its source. It has been a settlement of some kind since well before the Romans came: they built a stopover camp further up the Elan Valley. Later it stood on a route used by monks travelling between the abbeys of Strata Florida and Abbeycwmhir, and later still it provided board and refreshment for the drovers. The building of the castle in 1177 provides the first documentary evidence of the market town, although of the castle only a mound remains, enclosed in a little riverside park. Today it lives very much on tourism, and is the starting point for tours of the Elan Valley and its reservoirs, which lie just to the west. I had visited the town only two years before as one of those many tourists.  The four main reservoirs in the Elan Valley were built over ten years from 1894, to supply clean water to Birmingham, seventy miles away. A fifth reservoir, filling the Claerwen valley, was added later: the official opening in 1952 was one of the Queen’s first duties as monarch. Water is carried through a cut-and-cover aqueduct which runs for seventy-three miles to Frankley, near Birmingham. Apparently the natural gradient obviates the need for any pumps, but the water takes more than two days to cover the journey. A scenic drive along the little road which threads the valley beside the artificial lakes is a tourist essential here.

Arrival in Rhayader is also a good moment to mention the red kite, since Gilgrin Farm, one of the better-known breeding and feeding stations sit on the outskirts of the town. The birds were persecuted almost to extinction for a century or so, from the 1850s to the late 1950s because they were believed to prey on game and domestic animals, although in fact the kite is a scavenger, not a killer. The reintroduction to Britain of this handsome bird has been a conservation success story, and they can now be seen well beyond their mid-Wales heartland, in Scotland and in the Chilterns, for example. There is an estimated population exceeding two thousand birds: turn up at one of Gilgrin’s daily feeding shows and you could well believe every one of them had come to dinner. I had seen them in ones and twos since entering Wales, but around their food source in Rhayader they are a common sight.

The town is a crossroads of the A44, running between the English border and Cardigan Bay, and the A470, going north/south through Wales from Conwy to Cardiff – via Builth Wells, as my biker friends would have discovered. The crossroads is marked by a handsome clock tower and war memorial, dating from 1924, and the four streets which run away from it are helpfully named East Street, North Street, West Street and South Street. My bed for the night was in East Street, in a place which sounded very much like a pub. It looked like a pub, more or less. I rang the doorbell and was admitted to what looked like a pub bar. But it all had an air of unreality. Until recently it had been a pub, but now it was just a B&B. I was led quickly through the former bar, to the back of the building, and into a smart new block of bedrooms. My room was very new and very well-equipped, and apart from a view through the window of just a shed roof, it was all I could have wanted. From Radnor I had covered just nineteen miles, but with, yet again, over two thousand five hundred feet of ups and downs. It felt good to sit and relax, and to consider my options for the next day, since the weather forecast was persistently dire, in total contrast with this day of sunshine: more about that later. As I had promised I texted my host from all that time ago in the Chilterns to confirm that I had reached Rhayader: he replied from a beach in Portugal, so perhaps that explains his room rate! I went out to stroll the town for a while, although as this was late on a Sunday afternoon almost everywhere was closed. Rhayader’s tourist significance has brought it a range of interesting independent shops, several good restaurants, and a few pubs, beyond my ex-pub that is.

Next door to my base was an Indian restaurant which we had sampled, and enjoyed, on that earlier visit, but when I set out to find some dinner it looked closed, so I headed back into the town and settled on fish and chips and a pint (or two) in a busy little pub in North Street. Once again, as I ate, I was treated to a little cameo performance from a group of people of a certain age occupying one whole corner of the bar area. I should explain that we have friends who for a long time have owned a house in the middle of France which they visit for a few weeks twice a year. In and around their village there is a cluster of English ex-pats whose lives are fascinating, if only for their mediocrity. Among this group there are only one or two who can master a conversation in French, one speaks no French at all despite having lived there for fifteen years. They inhabit much the same circuit of bars, inns and restaurants most of the time, and the highlight of the week will be an impromptu bingo night or quiz in one of the usual locations. Here, in this pub in Wales, I met the same species all over again. In a town where more than half the native population has Welsh as first language, the harsh sounds of Estuary English cut the air. The conversation confirmed that these were not tourists but residents, especially a long discussion about the quest for a decent local plumber. One strident voice declared that she thought she might have been charged less if she had spoken Welsh. Quite possibly so. The whole group was clearly left well alone by all the locals in the pub: it was not difficult to see why. I lingered over my second pint, then walked back to my room for what was a very warm and comfortable night.

Splendid isolation: day twelve

I woke to the sound of rain on that shed roof just beyond my window, and pulled back the blind to reveal a miserable grey sky. At least this was true to the forecast, which predicted a very wet start to the day, gradually becoming more changeable. That word “changeable” is weather forecast speak for not having a clue, but it is rarely good news. I had accepted that I would face one or more wet days on my journey, so this was going to be the first. It provoked a sharp change of route plan. My idea had been to follow the Wye valley upstream, on a little road which doubles as a cycle path, then from near Llangurig to head westward on tracks and footpaths alongside the river, next looping over some hill country on moorland paths before returning to tracks and roads to reach Ponterwyd, my next destination. The line of the route was parallel to the A44 almost all the way. It was to be another very long day, about twenty-six miles, and it would have been quite horrid in the rain. I decided instead to stay further south, using a mountain road over the hills to Cwmystwyth, then north via Devils Bridge to Ponterwyd, perhaps three or more miles shorter and far easier to navigate.

I ate a good, if solitary breakfast back in what had been the bar of the pub, then prepared to set out. Thankfully by now the heavy rain had eased to a sad persistent drizzle, but now came the true test of my wet weather gear. All had been tried during training, and in some evil rain, but never for an entire day. I donned my super-lightweight waterproof jacket and overtrousers, and fitted the lurid lime green raincover over my pack. I left Rhayader via East Street and West Street, crossed the bridge over the Wye, and soon afterwards turned on to a small road which headed  north west up a gentle hill. For those who drive the circular route past the four main reservoirs right to the end this road is the return to the town. I knew that it was five miles to the junction with the reservoir road, and another nine from there to Cwmystwyth, and calculated that would take me altogether about four and a half hours. All I needed to do was keep walking. Do the day job, one foot in front of the other, until the destination. About half a mile on I passed the turning which I would have taken to follow the Wye on my original route, after which the road began to climb in earnest, tracing the northern side of a broad valley. Had I been able to see it through the drizzle I think it was probably very pretty, a mixture of woods and fields with the taller hills as a backdrop. After maybe two more miles the road left the woods behind and climbed more steeply into moorland. The drizzle had stopped, but the grey dampness enhanced the barren nature of that place, alleviated only by the stream descending to the left of the road over a series of small waterfalls. Although on the map the road passes the site of the Roman camp mentioned earlier there are no signs up there of human habitation, and on this gloomy Monday morning there was only a handful of passing cars. Uphill again went the tarmac, and at about the four mile mark out of Rhayader I passed the highest point of the entire route, at 1,680 feet, ironically almost exactly the same altitude as the topmost point of the route I had originally planned. There were a few wild ponies up there but they were not given to conversation. Ahead of me now was a view down towards the highest of the reservoirs, the Craig Goch, and to the junction of the valley road with mine. 

About a mile further on down the hill I reached that junction, just above the Pont ar Elan bridge, and the relative civilisation of about three parked cars and a van. The broader road went left for the tourists, while a narrower road  bore right, marked by a rusting sign indicating “Mountain road to Aberystwyth”.

Welsh mountain roads deserve a brief description. There are many of them in the principality, especially here in the central spine of the Cambrian Mountains. All of them are driveable in most small vehicles, but they can be very narrow, the surface often loses the battle between the weather and infrequent maintenance, and they will not bother to avoid steep hills or sharp corners, preferring to attack them head on. What they can be like in winter conditions is best left to the imagination. This one at least takes a fairly direct line for the nine miles to Cwmystwyth, but the sign was a little optimistic, as it is more than twenty miles further to Aberystwyth from there.

From Pont ar Elan the road follows the left bank of the river Elan before going over a little pass into the Ystwyth valley, and downhill from there. There are suspicions that this route between Rhayader and the coast may have been in use since ancient times, but in any case it was the principal road route in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, becoming a turnpike road in 1790. Only in the 1830s was it replaced by the more sheltered road through Ponterwyd and Llangurig, today’s A44 and A470. Another ancient trackway route leaves the road just a few yards along: this is the so-called Monks Way, which crosses the hills to the southwest and eventually lands close to Strata Florida Abbey. Apparently much of the fifteen miles of the route is degraded and eroded, and can be very muddy, so clearly not an option in wet weather. I walked on into the upper Elan valley, one of the most remote parts of the land known in Welsh, with Tolkien-like undertones, as Elenydd, the wildest region of the Cambrian Mountains.

In the four miles between Pont ar Elan and the top of the pass there are just three farmsteads, the first of which, Aber Glanhirin, comes up on the far side of the river after about a mile. There is, in truth, a fourth settlement, Glanhirin, a mile beyond this one but it is hidden in up in the hills. The riverside buildings are no older than the 19^th century, with a modern bungalow, but the settlement in the hills is first recorded two hundred years earlier. One word – sheep – explains their existence. The second settlement, Abergwngu (pronounce it “aber-goon-ghee”) is just over a mile further on, and a quarter of a mile off the road across the river. Some weeks after the journey I found that this old farmstead had been up for rental. The perfect escape from the rat race – accessible only by footbridge or ford, electricity by generator, water and drainage self-contained, oil-fired central heating, assuming the deliveries could cross the ford, and “internet connection possible by satellite”. All this for just £600 per month. Quite how well Amazon Prime deliveries manage here was not clear. Just under a mile further upstream, this time on the north side of the road, sits the third of the settlements, a farmstead known as Bodtalog. Although the current buildings date from the 19^th century there has been a holding here since medieval times, guarding the junction of this road with another ancient hilltop route going north to Llangurig. Bodtalog makes internet fame for just one video, a family movie from 1962 at the time of a sheep-shearing nearby. The landscape does not appear to have changed much since then.

For some reason the Ordnance Survey map delights in showing multiple rain gauges in this area. On this day the justification was obvious. I briefly considered taking off my overtrousers and jacket, as the rain seemed to have halted, but the slopes ahead of me were gently fading behind mist, so I stayed as I was: it was to prove a wise decision. Beyond Bodtalog the trace of the Elan river is absorbed into an enormous bog, the Gors Lwyd, which stretches along the roadside almost up to the top of the pass a mile or so further on. I mused that this is where Birmingham’s water is filtered through the sphagnum before it arrives in the reservoirs. The Elan rises a couple of miles south-west of the bog, and four hundred feet higher up, in an area which declares no paths, tracks, roads or habitations anywhere near. At the top of the little pass, unadventurously named Blaen-y-Cwm (head of the valley) the road makes a turn to the left, changing direction from north-west to south-west, and starts its descent from 1,260 feet, steeply at first into a little ravine. It began to rain, at first gently and mistily, then more aggressively, forcing me to concentrate on the road rather than the scenery. I think on a better day this part of the route might just have been stunning, but this time it was not to be.  The valley here was deep and green, with the young river Ystwyth rushing westward along below me. I had crossed the watershed, but at that moment most of the water was being shed by the sky. If this was a gear test for my waterproofs, however, they passed with flying colours, as inside I was warm, dry and comfortable. The heavy shower stopped after perhaps twenty minutes, long enough to see me to the valley floor.

Beyond the first sign of human life, a farm also confusingly named Blaen-y-Cwm, the valley opens out. I paused at a bridge over the Ystwyth to admire its rapids, and to enjoy the arrival of sunshine: always welcome, even if briefly. Civilisation returned rapidly now, passing a house which proudly announced it could be rented as holiday cottages, then a farm which clearly made its living from a large campsite behind it. After this comes a moving experience, spread over the remaining two and a half miles down to Cwmystwyth. Here the river is quite wide, and on either side of it the hills rise to sixteen hundred feet and more. On the north side, all along the road, the slopes are scarred by the remnants of old mines. The entire site has been declared a Scheduled Ancient Monument, the most important non-ferrous metal mining area in Wales, and bears the signs of mining from the Bronze Age right through to the early 20^th century. Silver, zinc, copper and lead have been mined here since the time of the Romans, but it is lead which has been the most significant, with activity peaking in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The ruins of some of the buildings of those times, including the mine office, a dressing mill and some cottages, add an eerie note to the heavily-worked slopes. Economically the mine suffered many setbacks and passed through various ownerships in its final 150 years. Everything closed down in the 1930s, but for a brief attempt to reopen some of the mine after the Second World War. The human cost is incalculable. Hours were long, the work perilous and harsh, and the life expectancy of miners working for lead was just 32. With the growth of the South Wales coal mines, where the pay was better and the work less hazardous, it is no wonder than many miners took their skills elsewhere, let alone those who sought their fortune across the Atlantic.

A short way past the end of the mine workings the valley opens out, and the road turns a corner into what there is of Cwmystwyth village, just a few scattered buildings and a row of houses, barely enough to justify the name on the map. The little road which had been my companion all the way from Rhayader here joins a bigger road coming up from Pontrhyfendigaid and Tregaron to the south. There was a bench. I stopped and took off my pack, for the first time since setting out, four hours and twenty minutes ago. All that, and I was ten minutes ahead of my estimate – hooray!

My mobile phone started to buzz anxiously, finally hitting a signal at this point. My wife had been worrying, not without reason as I had been literally off the radar for four hours. While I was training for this trip, we had tried out various tracking apps, simply so that she would know if I did not appear where I should, and in an emergency could raise the alarm. We joked that it would also tell her when I was parked in a pub garden, but such is life. While the technology is quite sound it does depend on some kind of connection, of which there is none in the crossing of the Cambrian Mountains here. I reassured her, and after a brief rest set out for Devil’s Bridge, not just four miles away, but over yet another high ridge. The road climbed steadily, mostly through woods, and after about a mile it reached its high point at The Arch (Y Bwa). Built in 1810 by Thomas Johnes, owner of the nearby Hafod estate, to mark the Golden Jubilee of George III, the rough stone arch once straddled the turnpike road here. Today the road passes to one side, but the site is provided with a car park, a few picnic tables, and some marked circular walking trails. At almost thirteen hundred feet it is an airy place with some good views, but it also signalled for me the start, at last, of a long downhill. The descent goes through some more woodland before revealing a large boggy area off to one side with hills beyond. Finally there is a soft bend to the left as the road looks down into the valley of the Mynach river and drops down to join a larger road next to the hotel in Devil’s Bridge.

Geographically Devil’s Bridge marked the point where I completed the crossing of the Cambrian Mountains, a traverse which began just after leaving Radnor almost two days before. The prosaic Welsh name Pontarfynach is descriptive – “Bridge over the Mynach”. This is the point where the River Mynach, coming from the east, meets the Rheidol coming from the north, and does so in spectacular fashion, tumbling over a shelf in a series of powerful waterfalls, five steps and more than three hundred feet down to the confluence below. The bridge is in fact three bridges, one on top of the other. The lowest is mediaeval, possibly 12^th century, over which a replacement was built in 1753 as the old crossing was becoming unstable. The crossing used by the road is the top bridge, built in 1901. The origin of the English name lies inevitably in legend. So the story goes, an old woman had lost her cow, but saw it grazing on the other side of the river Mynach. The Devil appeared, as he tends to do in such situations, and offered to build a bridge in return for the soul of the first living thing to cross it. The old woman agreed, but when the Devil had completed the bridge, she threw a crust of bread across it, and her dog ran across after the bread. One lost dog soul, one cheated Devil.

There is little surprise that this spot is a tourist magnet, especially adding in the nearby terminus station of the Vale of Rheidol narrow-gauge railway coming up from Aberystwyth. I had visited it several times before, so I had no need to linger this time. Given that I had made the journey from Rhayader supported only by two energy bars and some chocolate I might have been tempted to stop for lunch, but the one hotel was the only place on offer: the last time I was here, with my wife, we had stopped for coffee. It was the very worst coffee we had ever been served. I was not tempted this time. The little village also has connections with George Borrow, writer, missionary and author of “Wild Wales” (1854), who visited on his long pedestrian tour, of which more later. Wordsworth penned a poem about the falls, and Turner painted the bridges. Much more recently it featured in the TV detective series “Hinterland”, where among other appearances it was the scene of a dramatic murder. I suppose I could claim to be in good cultural company.

Just a few steps past the entrance to the waterfalls it began to rain, at first gently, but even before I had left the village it poured. Once again I was grateful that I had not bothered to take off jacket or overtrousers, I zipped up more tightly and carried on. One of the disadvantages of my choice of route was that the final three miles or more would have to be on a main road, the continuation of the road which comes up from Aberystwyth to Devil’s Bridge, then goes north to join the A44 road close to Ponterwyd. The advantage however proved to be that in pouring rain such a route needs very little navigation. I passed a tearoom to the right, and was briefly tempted, but decided that the weather probably was not going to ease so it was better just to keep trudging. I learned to spot the bigger puddles, and to make sure I was nowhere near them whenever a car went past. After about a mile and a quarter, which seemed much further, I passed the farm of Erw Barfe, which has a large campsite. Forty years earlier I had spent a long weekend there: it had rained then too. I remember that on the Sunday my companions and I had put in some effort to find the places where locals went to drink in private on the Sabbath, as at that time it was far more difficult than it is today. The rain dappled my spectacle lenses as I passed through the little hamlet of Ysbyty Cynfyn, its little square 19^th-century church looking forlorn in the dull greyness. Perhaps sooner than I had expected I was entering the village of Ponterwyd, which may be an unremarkable place in terms of architecture but for me at that moment it was a shining light. Just a short walk along the busier and more dangerous A44 brought me to the George Borrow Hotel, my destination for the day. I stood in the porch by the side entrance and removed my dripping overtrousers, jacket, and backpack raincover before going to check in.

The George Borrow Hotel at Ponterwyd started life as a coaching inn during the 17^th century, and was known as the Gogerddan Arms Hotel until sometime in the 20^th. It was renamed in honour of the 19^th-century author, who describes a stay in the place during his tours of the country in 1852. Borrow had walked to Ponterwyd from Machynlleth, to the north, crossing hills and moorlands which even today would be challenging. Borrow stumbled upon a lead mine to the north of the village and there recruited a young guide to help him through the last few miles. The exact location of the Pontosi mine at Esgyrn Hirion is lost to history, but many old workings can still be traced. At the inn, Borrow describes a spacious kitchen, centred on a very large open fire, around which various people were seated. What appears to be the oldest part of the current building, including the front bar, certainly incorporates a huge ancient fireplace. My welcome at the reception area was much friendlier than that accorded to the author a hundred and sixty years ago, however – Borrow met with a rather prickly landlord and had to insist that his young guide received some sustenance, while I was greeted warmly and led upstairs to my attic bedroom.

As I removed the dripping raincover from my pack and hung my waterproofs up to dry the rain outside continued relentlessly. I was doubly happy now that I had changed my plans from paths to roads. In the day I had covered twenty-two miles, about four fewer than the original plan, but the total ups and downs of around 3,000 feet were much the same as the longer route. I joined the little group of locals in the bar and lingered over my pint. Much of the discussion was about the very first car rally to have been held in this area just a few days earlier. I had seen a map of the route and did not envy the drivers over some of the little tracks and lanes. From the bar I slipped into the dining room and made up for my lack of a proper lunch with an enormous and very tasty pie. By the time I settled for the night the rain had finally stopped, and I slept peacefully.

What to do on a day off: day thirteen

I had chosen to stay for a day in Ponterwyd because Plynlimon (or Pumlumon, to keep the Ordnance Survey happy) is so close. The big rounded lump rises to 2,468 feet and is the crowning glory of the Cambrian Mountains. On its flanks rise the Severn, the Wye, and more locally the Rheidol rivers, and – as I knew from my only previous visit almost fifty years earlier – the views from the summit spread across Wales from Brecon to Snowdon. Tempting to try it again. Unfortunately the heavy rain of the day before, which came back to rattle my bedroom window during the night, would have rendered its soggy summit an unpleasant bog trot, if it was accessible at all in my walking shoes, so I decided to make other plans for the day. It seemed from the map that a long and isolated track some miles north of the village could give access to the source of the Rheidol, a lake which sits underneath the steep northern side of the mountain. In any case it would be an adventure worthy of my rest day. The landscape to the north of Ponterwyd is largely an empty space of hills and some woodlands, criss-crossed by paths which seem to have chosen their directions at random: the journey on foot from Machynlleth, as undertaken by Borrow, would bring its own challenges even today, especially for a lone walker. It is perhaps lucky then that some of this wild place has succumbed to the reservoir builders, because at least they have to build usable roads as part of their projects. So it was for much of my day.

In complete contrast to the previous day, this one started bright, blue-skied and sunny. I breakfasted back in the hotel’s rather dated dining room, collected the packed lunch I had ordered – there are no easy food options near here – and headed out. For days such as this I had bought a very small and light day-pack, and it felt quite odd to be carrying so little for once. Just behind the hotel the river Rheidol cascades noisily through a little ravine, and I paused to admire it before facing up to the few hundred yards of the A44 into the village. The little primary school is dedicated to the memory of Sir John Rhys, son of a Ponterwyd lead miner and farmer and his wife. Rhys was a Welsh scholar, who travelled and lectured extensively, and who in 1877 became the first professor of Celtic studies at Oxford, He was one of the founding fathers of the British Academy, and was knighted in 1907, eight years before his death.

From the school the little road turns north and begins a steady climb of half a mile or so before revealing a splendid view of the Dinas reservoir. This, and the much larger Nant-y-Moch reservoir further up the valley  are parts of the extensive Rheidol hydroelectric power system, constructed in the early 1960s. The flow of the river is harnessed through its journey from the slopes of Plynlimon all the way down past Devil’s Bridge through two power stations providing sustainable electricity to the region. The Rheidol Power Station further downstream boasts a visitor centre. For Dinas and its neighbouring reservoir there is the added benefit of restocking with brown trout, some of it commercially farmed, some available to individual anglers. Regardless, the Dinas reservoir is very attractive. The road runs along the east side of the valley, more or less straight for the next leg to the farmstead at Hirnant, where it zigzags over a vigorous stream. In theory from here there is a trackway heading up towards Plynlimon summit, but in practice it looked like a very muddy little footpath. Perhaps it improves higher up, but to me it vindicated my decision to give the mountain a miss. The gently rising road continues its straight line for another couple of miles, reaching thirteen hundred feet at the point where the Nant-y-Moch dam comes into view. This sheet of water is much larger than Dinas, and wilder, surrounded by treeless open moorland. I was passed by a couple of ancient motorbikes and a Land Rover with another in a trailer, all whizzing urgently down the road towards the dam. I did not see them again that day, so their mission remains a mystery. As I turned off to follow a lane to the reservoir edge I passed another car parked in a layby: the last humans I would see for the next couple of hours.

The little road from here lasts only another mile, to a final farmstead, before degenerating to a track, then to a footpath. Beyond that point there is literally nothing but hills, streams, moorland, some forestry work, and a maze of paths and tracks for at least four miles in any direction. This may be the closest approximation to the Highlands of Scotland anywhere in Wales. I passed a group of those beautiful sandy-brown cows with large horns, too busy with relaxing to be bothered by me, and a pumping station. This had a satellite dish on its roof, presumably for remote control, a reminder that – once again – there is no hope of any mobile phone signal up here. I turned off on to the stony track I had discovered on the map the night before. This is not technically a public path, but there was nobody there to care. It is also part of the watery infrastructure, as the lake at its end is tamed into a reservoir, but it did not look as if there was ever much need to drive up it. It climbed steadily eastward away from Nant-y-Moch, offering great views on the way, then levelled off at around the fifteen hundred feet mark to contour round the bulk of Pumlumon Bach, “Little Plynlimon”, the north-western flank of the main peak. Half a mile further brought me to the first of three small lakes, sitting on a levelling of the hillside with a deep green valley as their backdrop.

It is quite a thought that, even in a rarely-trodden isolated spot like this, everything has a name. Almost everything, as only one of the lakes, Llyn Pen-cor-maen, was actually named on the map. The “maen” in the name, meaning “stone”, refers to an ancient standing stone a little way downhill, yet another reminder that man had been in these places thousands of years before my feet met the puddles up there. My track rounded the hill and turned south, suddenly opening up the view of Plynlimon’s steepest side, its slopes wrapping round a corrie above the lake, Llyn Llygad Rheidol, where the river Rheidol begins its journey to the sea. I scrambled up the slope to one side to avoid a long stretch of flooded track, but perhaps four hundred yards further the track disappeared under water again, this time surrounded by a huge bog. Although it would have been good to reach the lake, just a few hundred yards ahead, I decided against it, especially since I was here alone, the nearest human now about two miles away, and with no phone or tracker contact in support. On top of that I would have had to traverse the same bog on the way back. At least the view was superb and the sun was shining. I paused to take it all in, at the same time recognising that this was another high point in my two weeks of travel, at 1,650 feet, not quite matching the highest point of the journey itself.

I returned to the three little lakes and squatted among the rocks to eat my packed lunch. Opposite me the big rounded hills rolled away in waves, with the distinctive silhouette of Cader Idris rising above them, seventeen miles away to the north. The “Cader” is the most southerly big mountain in Snowdonia, at 2,927 feet, and the classic very steep approach from Minfordd to its south-east is a delightful scramble.  Lunch done, I headed back down the stony track, once again reminded that this would be a very awkward place for a tumble – one and a half miles back to the road, another mile back to the Nant-y-Moch dam with only those horned cows for company. The rest of the four-mile journey back to Ponterwyd was in brilliant afternoon sunshine, setting the scenery off at its best. If only I could have seen yesterday’s hills and moors in such beautiful light. Part way down the road the map shows another standing stone off to the right, named as Garn Lwyd, but try as I might I could not see any sign of it.  Later I was indebted to the excellent Coflein website, powered by data from the National Monuments Register of Wales, to see details and one photo, revealing it as only a remnant, a stone lump about one foot by two. Back in Ponterwyd I made a short diversion to cross the Hen Bont, the old narrow stone humped bridge over the Rheidol, which dates from the 18^th century. It was replaced in 1812 when the new turnpike road from Aberystwyth to Llangurig was built, and a modern version of its replacement now carries the thundering traffic of the A44 past the centre of the village.

Close to the hotel an information board described in more detail the business of cattle droving, since Ponterwyd was a sort of hub, to which local farmers would bring their livestock to be prepared for the journey to markets in England. What caught my eye in the short text was a mention of Barnet Fair as one of the major destinations: perhaps Barnet and Ponterwyd were after all connected by a defined route. No such clear connection today, it seems, other than by my walking shoes. The little black Welsh cattle were especially prized in London, apparently, and herds of three or four hundred cattle would be guided by the drovers through their long journey, taking perhaps several weeks. Feeding, watering and caring for such a herd clearly required expertise and support all the way, and over the centuries the system became more sophisticated. In the 16^th century, more than two hundred years after the earliest documentary records of Welsh drovers, regulation and licensing were introduced. 

Arrangements for paying the drovers, for prepaying the places in which they stayed, and for covering the cost of supporting the herds also evolved. Not only that, but by the 18^th century the drovers were also acting as government financial agents, and carrying rent money from Welsh tenants to their English landlords. At the turn of the 19^th century the drovers’ own bank, the Black Ox Bank, was established in Llandovery. It survived until 1909, when it was absorbed by Lloyds Bank. By then, however, the business of droving was dead, superseded by the railways, which could complete in a matter of hours a journey which previously had taken weeks. The last large-scale drove from Wales to England was recorded in 1870. In Wales the traces of the drovers remain – there are countless “Drover’s Arms”, especially in mid-Wales, and many of their routes can be traced on the ground, just like those I had walked to reach Llandrindod a couple of days earlier. Further on, the drove roads are either replaced by modern roads or completely lost. Broad grass verges either side of a country road are often a sign, as drove roads could be forty feet wide or more, so too are names such as “Long Acre”, typically a place where the herd would have been rested. Barnet Fair, sited outside London to avoid filling narrow city streets with hundreds of animals – up to 40,000 on display in the mid-1800s apparently – is not yet lost to history, as it still merits a mention, for the first Monday in September, on Barnet Council’s website. Perhaps not quite at the scale of Tudor times, when it was the principal market for butchers from all over London.

My day off had been fascinating, and had totalled just over thirteen miles: they do not, of course, get counted as part of the main journey. I cooled off in the hotel bar with a good pint, and later, after recalling how good the pie had been the night before, I dined on another one, this time a different variety. I fell into conversation with an elderly gentleman sitting on the next table. He had recently lost his wife after a prolonged illness, and now, at the age of 80, was touring the country from Wiltshire to Scotland catching up with all their old friends. He had driven to Ponterwyd to relive some happy memories he and his wife had shared of the place. I admired his spirit. I went back to my little room, where once again the rain was rattling on the window. It might mean that I would have to modify my plans for the last day of my journey, but that was a thought for the morning.

Down to the sea for journey’s end: day fourteen

The last day of my travels dawned in dampness, with a fine drizzle soaking the window and waves of mist intermittently concealing the hills beyond. This was going to prompt some more changes of plan. My original idea was to take the little road southward from just beyond the hotel, then to use steeply wriggling woodland footpaths to drop to the floor of the Rheidol Valley. A series of paths, tracks and lanes would then lead me parallel to the narrow-gauge railway down to the outskirts of Aberystwyth. I watched the drizzle for a while longer, thinking through the idea of “steeply wriggling woodland footpaths”, and seriously reconsidering. Instead I decided to go north, passing the Dinas reservoir on the opposite side from yesterday, then using a little mountain road to head westward through the villages of Penrhyn-Coch and Capel Dewi, finally rejoining the original route to Aberystwyth and the sea. The distances were about the same, just over fourteen miles, although my new route involved a little more uphill and downhill. I reckoned it would take me about the same time as my wife would need to drive from London, so we would arrive at our destination quite close together, even though her drive was seventeen times longer than my stroll for the day.

I ate a large cooked breakfast -  my fourteenth “full English”, in this case “full Welsh” of the journey – and pulled on my waterproof top layer again before bidding farewell to George Borrow’s one-time haunt. This time my route took me into a lane just before the Rheidol bridge in the village, and immediately began a mile-long slow climb. Water was trickling down the road past my feet as I climbed, and I was quite lucky to miss the spray from a fast-moving pickup truck which hit a large puddle without slowing down. There should have been a view of the Dinas reservoir but it had this time covered itself in murk. Almost another mile on I came to something which had troubled me when I saw it on the map. It said “Ford”. On this road. I prepared myself, thinking that if it came to it I would take off shoes and socks and just go through barefoot. Sure enough, the road was washed by a good few inches of fast-moving stream, but luckily the local branch of the Ramblers’ Association – I think they now just call themselves “The Ramblers” – had clubbed together to provide a neat little wooden footbridge. Feet spared, quiet cheer.

For the next mile and a half the road went a little wild. It was barely six feet wide, rather poorly surfaced, and it wriggled up and down around the slopes through the mist. I will admit this little section was quite daunting, even compared with the mountain road up from Rhayader two days before. There was nobody, it seemed as if there had been nobody for a while, there was no habitation, nothing for a mile or so behind me or for two miles ahead, and of course zero phone signal. I was very grateful to see the shelter of the trees coming up ahead of me at the top of a sharp little hill. Just before the road slipped between the trees I reached the pair of low standing stones known as the Cow and Calf, or Buwch a’r Llo.  They were quite a sobering reminder that this isolated place was known to man thousands of years before – or to put it another way, what was I worrying about? According to the Coflein website there is, or was, another stone a short distance to the west but this was hit by a forestry machine at some time in the 20^th century and broken in two. There is speculation that all the stones in this area are markers for a Bronze Age trackway from the coast up into the slopes of Plynlimon, quite possibly connected with mining or prospecting for metals, but nobody knows. Certainly a touch of mist makes an ancient site truly evocative. I walked on through the woods and in half a mile arrived at Llyn Blaenmelindwr, a small but attractive lake, if on this day looking very grey. It was created as a reservoir to provide water for the lead mines to the south, back down towards the A44, but now keeps the anglers happy with a good stock of brown trout.  There was nobody there on this day, but at least the dampness had eased a little.

The silence was broken by the arrival of a large blue van behind me, coming up along the same little road that I had been following. Its registration suggested the south east of England, so too did the accents of the elderly man behind the wheel and his wife in the passenger seat. Their surprise at finding anyone at all in that place was all the more for realising that I had walked there. We exchanged optimism based on the day’s weather forecast, wished each other good day, and off they went.

Half a mile further on comes a second lake, Llyn Pendam, created for the same reason as the first. The lake is largely hidden from view by a tall bank and some trees, but it allowed just a few brief glimpses of its grey surface. A small car park was taken over by a large campervan, whose occupants had clearly ignored the signs forbidding overnight parking, safe in the knowledge that no-one would find them there. The blinds were all still drawn. While I am sure they are a practical means of cheap touring, years of motoring in Britain and Europe have left me with a serious dislike of these lumbering vehicles, invariably slow, typically filling the road, and often driven by those who never look in their rear-view mirror. I passed it by, and followed the road up a sharp little hill. Another half mile beyond the lake, still shrouded by trees, the road reaches its highest point, at 1,250 feet, marking the last high place on my entire route before the start of the long descent towards the sea. Another mile in the trees – and then very suddenly a transformation. As the road emerged from the woods at Tanybryn, a sharp line ahead in the sky divided the clouds from brilliant blue sky, and there in the distance, beyond rolling green slopes, was the darker blue of Cardigan Bay. Ahead also was the cleft in the hills in which sits Aberystwyth, and journey’s end. The gloom faded and the day became a lot more exciting.

I paused to take some photographs, and celebrated by taking off some of my waterproof layers. The road runs straight here, views on one side, woods on the other, for a whole mile, then descends across fields in a determined but unremarkable directness to the long village of Penrhyn-coch.  In the couple of miles from that first view of the sea to the edge of the village the road drops just over nine hundred feet, very much downhill all the way: best to make sure nothing was left behind at the top of the slope! Penrhyn-coch is not a place which will linger in my memory: a mixture of modern houses, a few convenience stores, a school and some grubby bus shelters, watched over by a neat little church with a spire. There was no village here until the 18^th century, and today’s inhabitants work mostly in or near Aberystwyth. To avoid a slog along a main road I needed to head south, and uphill, to find a little road to take me to Capel Dewi, and on from there to Aberystwyth. I took to a lane which meandered down across a stream, then hit me full-on with a steep climb to the top of the ridge of Cefn Llwyd. Such things might have troubled me at the start of the journey, now I literally took them in my stride. What goes up – at least revealing something of a view – naturally heads back down again, and in a little more than a mile further I reached Capel Dewi. On the way I passed what the map calls an “atmospheric radar station”, marked by a cluster of short metal masts. Apparently it is supported by a number of environmental agencies and universities, and discovers lots of deep and meaningful things about how the weather works. The weather needed little research at that point, it was fine, warm and dry.

At Capel Dewi I crossed the main road which helps traffic to and from the A44 and the coast road to avoid going through Aberystwyth, then left the whizzing vehicles behind to climb another gentle hill, with a good retrospect of the moors I had crossed earlier, still capped with gloomy grey clouds. My road crossed the railway, a single-track line which is Aberystwyth’s main train link with the rest of the world, and gradually eased itself into a more suburban feel. Quite suddenly it seemed there were more buildings, more buses on local routes, and generally more people than I had been accustomed to seeing for quite a while. About a mile and a half from Capel Dewi I reached the large complex of buildings for Aberystwyth University, on a campus to the south of the road, and then, pitching down a last very steep hill, arrived in Pwllhobi, where I met once more with the A44, as busy as ever as it headed into town. The “pwll” in the name of the village refers to a freshwater pool once used for watering horses on their way to market in Aberystwyth. Everywhere has its little piece of history.

The final approach, the last mile or so of my journey, was all that was left to do. I followed the A44 for a short distance, looking for a path which could keep me away from it. There it was, not only obvious, but signposted as a pedestrian route to the town centre. It led me past the front of a leisure centre and down to the side of the railway track before pointing me into what looked very much like a quiet park. All credit to the local council here for creating an elongated oasis by which to approach the town, along a broad tree-lined path, finally emerging through iron gates next to the bus station. Eagerly I negotiated a roundabout here and headed down Terrace Road, dodging a throng of shoppers as I covered the last few hundred yards to the sea. As I said before, I do not usually do those terrible selfies, but I indulged myself in the second exception of the trip  to mark my arrival at Cardigan Bay, then walked north along the broad curving Promenade to reach the hotel which marked the end of my stroll from London. I had to repeat that to myself: the end of my stroll from London. It refused to sink in.

While I had been walking, my wife had been on the road from home, a day-long drive almost the same mileage as my entire pedestrian journey. I had been able to track her progress and I knew as I checked in that I was only a few minutes ahead of her. I took my pack up to our room and returned to find her parking outside. Journey’s end. Fourteen days, twelve spent on the journey itself, two-hundred-and-forty-five miles, over twenty-two thousand feet of ups and downs… And not one blister.

Aberystwyth gets quite a raw deal in reviews. In some ways it is an old-fashioned British seaside resort, with all the connotations. It is certainly isolated from major population centres: several hours from Manchester, London or Birmingham by train, and a long way on slow roads from any motorway. Whenever there is a whisper of a storm blowing in from the west it is to Aberystwyth’s Promenade that the news cameras come, hoping to catch some enormous waves bursting over the road. It surprised us: it was not like the mealy-mouthed reviews at all. On the evening of our arrivals we strolled back along that Promenade, on which clearly a lot of money has been spent, climbed up to the ruins of the castle for a sunset view over the sea, walked past the impressive old university buildings and dined in a superb Mediterranean restaurant which we found purely by chance. The next day, which was colder and greyer, we took the funicular railway up Constitution Hill for an even more impressive sweeping view of the town. It was windy and chilly, and the summertime café was all locked up, but it was a good little jaunt for a cheap return fare. Then came shopping. The town has an unexpected range of independent shops, especially clothes shops. Sue’s wallet did not escape unscathed. Despite the wind we walked south to the harbour, where the rivers Rheidol and Ystwyth come together to make a rather languid, disinterested exit to the sea. The Ystwyth which I had followed down from the moors three days ago, and the Rheidol, whose infant waters I had seen high on the slopes of Plynlimon the day after, here were broad, slow and grey, offset by the cheery brighter colours of the harbour’s surroundings. We took a drive out to the ruins of Strata Florida Abbey in the afternoon, the destination of several of those wild tracks I had seen in the hills: the old stones were majestic even in the drizzle. That same drizzle encouraged us to dine in the hotel that evening, and we were not disappointed. The next day we left for the Italianate splendour of Portmeirion: my promise to Sue for abandoning her for a fortnight was the sheer wonderful extravagance of a couple of days in Clough-Ellis’s village. We were not disappointed there either.

Epilogue: whatever next?

Inevitably the first question all my friends and family wanted to ask me as soon as we returned from Wales was “What next?”. With the kaleidoscope of images from all those days still buzzing in my head, and with my feet still wondering why they were no longer being asked to stroll twenty miles a day, it was a tricky one to answer. Obviously this should not be just a one-off. I had got the long-distance thing on my mind now, and it was not going to go away.

Routes, new ones, are a big consideration: while some miles of tedium are inevitable it is important to have something in each day to lift the spirits. I thought back to the green slopes of the Chilterns, the tranquillity of the Salt Way, Bredon Hill, Hergest Ridge, the drove roads to Llandrindod and the isolation of the mountain roads. To every day there was a landmark. More prosaically it is also important to have places to stay along the way. For the moment I am still eager for every long trek to begin at my front door, so that I can say I really did travel from home, although in time this will limit some choices and no doubt I will take trains to some starting points. One of my sons suggested I should walk to Beccles, in Suffolk, where there is a family connection. We are very familiar with the dual carriageway tedium of the 125 miles by road, but going cross-country opens up some fine parts of rural Essex and Suffolk, and at around 130 miles it could be done in a week. We love Dorset as well, another possibility for a week of travelling from London. I considered tracing the Harroway, part of which is shared, on and off, by the Pilgrims’ Way to Winchester, but the ancient trade route across southern England is otherwise very much in debate, even whether it ended in Devon or in Dorset, so it would be hard to claim it as traceable at all. At the start of the year I was holding on to the week’s journey to Suffolk, and perhaps a second week to Dorset, with a renewed two-week foray to Wales in mind for next year, this time going further north, taking in Stratford and the Shropshire Hills and ending perhaps back in Portmeirion.

Weather windows are also important. I was very lucky with weather in 2019, but I had researched the best time for the trip very carefully. It does seem that late May or early June, and the turn of August into September are generally the best times to avoid the worst of any heat and the highest risk of rain.

Naturally after the big walk I kept up my weekly mileage as much as the weather would allow, happy not to be carrying a full pack every day. Through the entire year I averaged just over eight miles a day, and I was looking forward to carrying on with that into 2020. Then came the rain again, falling throughout January and early February on land already soaked from the downpours at the end of 2019. Several of my regular training routes were effectively closed by flooding and mud, and at the time of writing, early in April 2020, some still are. The same rain, falling almost incessantly on Plynlimon and the Cambrian mountains, filled the Severn, the Wye, the Teme, the Lugg and hundreds of smaller rivers to bursting point. It was so sad to see the devastation in and around Worcester, in the Teme valley by Knightwick and in dozens of other places from my route.

When the floods subsided they were followed, almost literally, by the plague. As I write these words the whole of the country is in “lockdown” as a result of a coronavirus pandemic , with pubs, hotels, shops and more all closed and the nation strongly encouraged not to leave home. Fortunately exercise from home is permitted, as long as we all treat each other like lepers and hold our distance, so I am still able to keep my legs on form for when this dark and dangerous cloud moves on. I feel for the little places in which I stayed – pubs and B&Bs in Longwick, Hampton Poyle, Broadway, Bromyard, Shobdon, Radnor, Rhayader and Ponterwyd. I hope that when this is over they can re-open with a smile to welcome travellers once again.

For the moment then all thoughts of further travels are on ice: a trip such as that described in these pages would just now be unthinkable. But I shall be back once again as soon as I am able, and who knows what that will bring?

London, April 2020