The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [79]
Ah. The real truth.
I was lonely, and envious of those boring beardy bastards, smugly anticipating their chicken chasseur a week on Sunday. However hard I scoff at them, they had got it right and I had got it drastically wrong.
Somewhere past Preston, an idea seeped into my battered brain, and I perked right up. I’d failed to do Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, but it would be far truer to his legacy to devise one of my own and walk that instead. And not across northern England, either – this latest sorry saga had been yet one more in a lifetime’s litany of unfortunate experiences of the Lake District. I know how passionately many people adore it, and I can absolutely understand why, but it’s always seemed alien to me, succeeding in being both surly and twee at the same time. The relentless Outward Bound heartiness, the cagoules and calendars, the fell-bagging one-upmanship – it all left me as cold as a midsummer day in Witherslack. Years ago, I remember hearing a warning broadcast on the radio on some bank holiday Monday that ‘the Lake District is full,’ roadblocks were in place, the M6 was nose-to-tail and on no account should would-be daytrippers attempt to go there. This made it sound less like an area of stunning natural wonder, and more like an out-of-town retail park. Which, for very many people, it is.
As Cheshire rolled by and the far emptier hills of Wales loomed lovely on the horizon, I remembered Harri Webb’s immortal verse: ‘What Wales needs, and has always lacked the most / Is, instead of an eastern boundary, an East Coast.’ That was it! I would create and walk a Welsh Coast to Coast, starting with my feet in one of the rivers that form the England–Wales border and heading home to cool my toes in the tidal waters of the Dyfiestuary, just three miles from my front door. There was the added advantage that such a route would indeed take me across the entire width of Wales, but at its narrowest point, only 50-odd miles. After days of feeling nothing but vague, creeping dread, excitement pounded through my veins and I couldn’t wait to get home and get the maps out.
Better still, I could devise a route that took me across my adopted home county of Montgomeryshire, for it is the only one of the old Welsh thirteen that touches both sides, from the anglicised redbrick of borderland market towns to Cymraeg huddles hewn out of sweat and slate. Three days I decided it would take me, and not much wanting another night crying in a wet bivvy bag, I promptly found and booked a couple of B&Bs and set to working out a route that incorporated them. The options were glorious, and limitless.
A few days later, my partner dropped me off early one morning on the border, between Bishop’s Castle and Montgomery town. It was the obvious place to start: not only does the modern border run along the Caebitra river, but the spot is perfectly dissected by Offa’s Dyke, that mighty eighth-century bulwark between the tribes of Mercia and Wales. I paddled in the river, put my boots back on and set off on my three-day walk homeward. By car, the journey had taken an hour and a quarter.
For the first few miles, I walked along the Offa’s Dyke path, one of the loveliest of all our National Trails as it edges its way through the land that is neither England nor Wales, but hovers between them both, a delicious chimera. At this point, the path hugs the dyke itself and exactly straddles the official border. Puddles of bluebells could be seen shimmering in the hollows of the earthwork rampart, orchids in outrageous colours winked from the grass banks, the brand new leaves of oak, ash and beech trees trumpeted their recent return to life. I bumped into two groups of Offa’s Dyke walkers in swift succession, and had the same conversation both times. ‘Doing the whole thing?’ I was asked as I approached. ‘No, walking home to the other side of Wales, and making it up as I go along,’ I replied smugly.
In Montgomery, I had a pint of local scrumpy, which I fancifully thought might attune me to the rhythm of the place,