The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [48]
After four days, I reached the Thames at the Goring Gap. It’s one of those names that I’d seen on the map, but had rather dismissed as a classic piece of British landscape over-exaggeration. Rural Oxfordshire is hardly the Alps, I thought, and having driven this way a few times, I’d not had cause to change that opinion. Dipping down to it on foot from the ridge of the Chilterns, however, gave me a completely different angle on the landscape, and suddenly, the name made perfect sense, for the Thames slicing through the hills really does create a notable gap. Only by walking slowly into it, with the Wessex Downs (and the cooling towers of Didcot power station) rising up ahead, could I see it, for it is subtle and needs a similarly subtle approach to be appreciated.
Until 1837, Goring, on the eastern bank of the river in Oxfordshire, had nothing much to do with the larger, more important Streatley, over on the western side in Berkshire. Then a toll bridge was built connecting them, and three years later, the railway came, but only to Goring. That then became the major settlement, and so it is today. The twin villages are exactly half-way along the Ridgeway path, and provide a much-needed splash of semi-urban glitz – a cashpoint, a shop that’s open past five o’clock, a choice of places to eat, that sort of thing.
Earlier on the Trail, near Watlington, I’d bumped into a party of four Americans walking the other way. They’d decided to do the Ridgeway after reading about it in The New York Times a few months earlier. I later found the article online, its opening words stealth-bombed to excite any historically minded New Worlder: ‘The Ridgeway is the oldest continuously used road in Europe, dating back to the Stone Age.’ A grand supposition, but it had done its job. My American friends had had two nights and a day’s rest in Goring, which seemed to be stretching a good thing to possible breaking point, but they’d loved the place. Cute, quaint, cheerful, old, so very old; all the things that do it for a party of enthusiastic Ohioans. They were loving it all in fact, including – and this may come as a shock – the ‘amazing B&Bs and brilliant food in the pubs’. I crossed my fingers, and hoped they weren’t booked in at Colonel Shouty’s.
My B&B at Streatley was in the home of a delightful lady, a retired school geography teacher. We sat for hours in her conservatory, drinking tea, watching the sun go down and chatting about life and, more importantly, maps. She told me that she once taught Clare Balding, the jolly-hockey-sticks TV presenter. When she got the class to draw maps of their home area, Clare’s was nearly all pubs. I was proper excited by now, for the following morning I was being joined by an old college mate and his wife, to do the long stretch up on to the Ridgeway proper, that great chalk highway and bulwark, that liminal border between worlds, that self-declared ‘oldest road in Europe’.
It was great to see Jon and Helen, even more so because they had come equipped with the right OS for our day’s 16-plus mile walk to Letcombe Regis. God, I’d missed a decent map. My Harvey’s trail plan had been doing its job with perfunctory precision, but I fell on their Explorer map like a starving man on a plate of chips. And just in time too: the section we walked was the first stretch along the Wessex Downs, where you needed to see the Ridgeway in its far wider topographic context. From here to the path’s end at Avebury, the landscape is strewn with ancient relics, all painstakingly mapped: other tracks, hill forts, tumuli, ditches, temples, sarsens, standing stones and circles, field systems, deserted villages, barrows, enclosures and earth-works. It’s OS at its best, the image