The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [43]
Then there is the fascism of the trail itself. You become flanged to it like a rusty old steam train on ancient rails, unable to branch off in any direction, or for any reason. I first became aware of this when phoning to book B&Bs in advance of the walk. When I said that I wanted to stay because I was walking the Ridgeway to the landlord of a place about two or three miles off the path, he sighed and said, ‘Well, I’ll come and pick you up in Nuffield, then.’ ‘But I’m walking,’ I said. ‘I can just walk to yours instead.’ He seemed surprised. I asked him if a lot of Ridgeway walkers insisted on being picked up from the side of the trail. ‘Yes, and taken back there the next morning,’ he said.
To many, walking a long-distance path, especially one that has been officially stamped as a National Trail, is even more like a heritage steam-train trip than I realised. Instead of seeing the path as an integral part of a much greater network, it is just a pretty, but pointless, thing in itself, a truncated chuff from nowhere to nowhere, and connected at either end to the wider world, the real world, by the inevitable car. In between, there are the official stops or stations, and there’s no deviation allowed from the one route. Nor can you skip any part of the official path: every last inch has to be religiously trudged, as if in penance. While I can just about understand this completist rationale on the wide, ancient track of the Wessex Ridgeway itself, I fail to get it at all on the eastern half of the National Trail, much of which dates back only as far as a Thursday in the 1970s when some county council twonk drew it on the map. It is quite some achievement to transform something so inherently joyous and liberating into something so tediously anal.
Conscious of having to carry everything on my back, I’d ditched all my beloved Ordnance Surveys and had invested a tenner in a kind of map I’d never used before, one of the specialist walker’s maps, made of ‘strong durable waterproof polyethylene’ and produced by Harvey’s of Perthshire. It’s very good and does everything it claims to do, but it wasn’t helping to assuage the nagging feeling that walking a National Trail was a fixed, unmovable exercise. The path is portrayed in varying shaped chunks and perfectly adequate detail, but oftentimes it’s cut off only a mile or so either side. It was a map of the trail, for sure, but with absolutely no context of the land through which it progressed. It was like having a plan of a 90-mile corridor, but with no idea of what was in the rooms that led off it.
Edging past Chiltern pony paddocks and golf courses, it was hard to conjure up images of any ancestors stomping this way. Only the gigantic beech trees, and the chalk and flint mix of the soil in which they sit, hinted at anything much beyond last month. I’d purposely decided to walk the Ridgeway in mid-April, hoping to catch that magical week when the beech leaves first open into a canopy of feathery, lime-green iridescence, before they quickly darken and harden into their summer wear. After the coldest winter in 30 years, however, nature was behind schedule, and, with a few unexpected exceptions, the entire walk was done against a stentorian backdrop of skeletal trees and bare branches. Not that it made the Chilterns’ legendary trees any less impressive: perhaps more so, in that all there was to look at were their trunks, bark, labyrinthine roots and branches, rather than the sweeter, but far more ephemeral, pleasures of buds and blossom.
Even more pleasurable was the ground underfoot, for chalk is always a treat and a novelty to me. Not knowing its lands too well, I constantly marvel at its desiccation, its dazzling Wensleydale whiteness and texture, its quiet sense