The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [96]
Time and place sorted, and it was immediately obvious too as to the company I wanted. I first met my friend Woody at the annual Queer Pagan Camp (QPC), back in 1999. He’s a shaman, a witch, a priest, an artist and a star, and had moved from London to Devon at much the same time that I’d left Birmingham for mid-Wales. As two single urban gay boys launching themselves into the rural outback, it had been good to have each other to lean on over the years, compare notes and shriek with shared laughter at some of our less edifying moments, especially in the early days. After we’d been in our respective idylls for a few years, we almost simultaneously fell in love and settled down with local blokes, people that neither of us would ever have met had we stayed in the urban jungle. I remembered the many nay-sayers when I was preparing to move: a single gay Englishman thinking of upping sticks to Llannowhere! How mad was I? At worst, I’d be lynched, and at best, I was condemning myself to a life of aching loneliness. Even at the time, and without really knowing why, I knew that was rubbish. And one supportive conversation with Woody was worth a thousand hours of clucking from the chorus of doubters.
I outlined my Lich Way plan to him, and he agreed to join me. He was a little freaked out by it, all the same, and warned me to think very carefully about what I wanted and expected from it. One of the most important parts of his spirituality is regular communion with the folk of the land, for to him, they are as real and as present as the milkman or the curtain-twitcher at number 76. At QPC, it would usually be him monitoring – policing even – things like where people pitched their tent, so as not to block the spirit and fairy paths across the land. If you were on gate duty at camp, it was your job to explain this to new arrivals, along with more mundane issues like toilets and meal times. One day, I was on gate duty and a lesbian couple arrived for their first time at the camp. They’d driven from London to our field in west Dorset, and were in a pretty fractious state. One of them could hardly wait to join in, but the other looked like the proverbial bulldog licking piss off a nettle. I brewed up a cup of tea for them on the gate fire and then went through the few rules and regs of the set-up. When I reached the bit about not camping on the fairy paths, the edgy-looking one shot to her feet. ‘See, I told you!’ she shouted at her girlfriend. ‘I told you they’d be fucking nutters! Fucking fairy paths! Hippy wankers!’ Within five minutes, she’d roared off back down the lane to London, while her partner stayed the week and had a lovely time. Mind you, a week away from that girlfriend would have been fun if she’d spent it in a cardboard box in an underpass.
The day of the full-moon walk grew hot and sticky. Storms were threatening according to the forecast, and Woody was certain that if they were going to break anywhere, it would be over Dartmoor, and probably at dusk. After all, the moor was famous for its gloomy micro-climate, where fogs can descend suddenly out of a clear sky. His spirituality deals often in the dark of life; mine tends towards a blithe ‘Oh, it’ll be all right’ certainty that, despite the many occasions on which it had been proved wrong, still somehow endured. I gave him Paul Devereux’s book, so as to read the quite lengthy description of the route we were to take that night. It didn’t help. Ignoring the blood-stirring passages about the Wild Hunt, phantom funerals and the splendours of Coffin Wood, he instead seized on phrases like ‘a gruelling journey’, ‘difficult to navigate owing to marshy conditions’, ‘continues in an increasingly ill-defined way’ and ‘poorly defined or, at best, a stranded