The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [51]
If Didcot power station is the elephant in the room on the eastern section of the trail, then Swindon is its westerly equivalent. Wiltshire’s largest town, more than three times the size of Salisbury, struggles to shake off its image as a corpulent, corporate nowheresville, fed by the intravenous drips of the Great Western Railway and M4. Famous for producing trains, pneumatic blondes – Diana Dors, Melinda Messenger and Billie Piper – and having the most terrifying roundabout in the land, the massive sarsen stone chip on its shoulder is periodically polished every time there’s one of those competitions for city status between the usual municipally desperate suspects. In 1999, the town council made one of its regular requests for an upgrade, only to be told by the Home Office that its bid was ‘too materialistic’. As both rebuff and proof of the charge, Swindon did, however, win the competition to become the UK’s first official twin town to Walt Disney World in Florida.
More fittingly perhaps, Swindon’s real twin town was revealed to be Slough, in Ricky Gervais’s excruciating series The Office, when the decision was taken to consolidate both branches of the Wernham Hogg paper company in the same place. Both towns evoke exactly the right image of open-plan tedium, of designated parking space one-upmanship on grey industrial estates and instantly regretted fumbles at the Christmas party. It was some surprise, therefore, when the National Trust relocated their headquarters to Swindon in 2005. Not everyone was happy: one manager confided to the Financial Times that ‘I can’t think of anywhere worse.’
The arrival of the NT in town caused some significant ripples in the local property market, if not on the new estates that make up the bulk of Swindon itself. Period properties in nearby villages were snapped up as soon as they landed on the market, and it only served to widen the suspicious divide between town and country. From the Iron Age hill fort at Liddington, just off the Ridgeway, I gazed down on the motorway and the massive town still spreading like a stain beyond it. Though if you look on the toposcope there, erected as a millennium project by Liddington parish council, you’d be hard pressed to work out quite what you were looking at. The arrow pointing towards the town is marked as to Cirencester, nearly 15 miles beyond. London, Oxford and Marlborough – none of which you can see – are marked. Swindon, which you cannot miss, is not. If Liddingtonians had their way, you feel, the mile (and several grand) gap between their village and the outer reaches of the eternal city-in-waiting would be landmined.
The trail was drawing to a close. As I marched like a centurion across the Marlborough Downs towards Avebury, the feeling of regret about finishing became stronger with every step. During my week on the Ridegway, the niggles and frets of daily life had been replaced with a calm certainty that my only goal was the next mile and the next view. Everything suddenly seemed so absurdly simple, that love and landscape were all that I needed. As I walked: I inhaled the words of Richard Jefferies, that great Victorian worshipper of these Wiltshire paths and downs: ‘It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now.’
With only about half a mile to go, I saw a slight figure coming along the track towards me, under a rucksack much the same size. It was obviously a fellow Ridgeway walker, but one who was only just setting out. Most unexpectedly, I felt such a surge of jealousy towards her, of all the wonderful things she was going to see, smell, hear, think and feel over the next week. We chatted like long-lost cousins, and I lapped up her excitement. A nurse near Sheffield, she’d decided a couple of years ago to do an annual solo walk on a long-distance path; this