by Mike Parker
The B&Bs I stayed in were run by ferociously efficient ladies of a certain age, who managed to welcome me in, get me out of my boots, rustle up a pot of tea, bake a light sponge, order the kids to piano practice, saddle a couple of horses and hoover the Labradors, all without pausing for breath. They reminded me of a great routine I saw once in Glasgow by American comedian Scott Capurro. He’d been touring England for weeks, and had garnered a wealth of material about how mad the English were, a sure-fire winner of a topic in Glasgow. He wondered aloud why Britain needed an army, as all we had to do, he said, was position on the white cliffs of Dover a few battalions of upper-middle-class English ladies, their arms folded and one eyebrow raised menacingly. No-one would dare invade.
I’d rather them any time, though, than their husbands, who were either golfers in loafers or tweedy types in regimental ties. In one guest house, I was grilled by an ex-army chap, who, his wife whispered to me, had already had three heart bypass operations. It quickly became obvious why: he was permanently on the verge of scarlet-faced apoplexy. His wife invited me in to watch the early evening news with them, which was accompanied by a constant barrage of heckling from him. During one story, they took vox pops in the street, one coming from a young male student with shoulder-length hair. ‘Get a bloody haircut!’ he kept shouting at the screen; we never got to hear what the student had to say. His wife, doing her best to keep the mood sweet, asked me if I had a wife or children. ‘No, I live with my partner,’ I replied, provoking a snort of derision from the corner as he plunged back into the pages of the Telegraph. At breakfast he told me, at some length, about the organised holidays that he leads to the Second World War battlefields of northern France, ‘though never to the American beaches in Normandy – what bloody good were the Yanks? Too little, too late.’ Despite my still-painful foot, I fair danced out of there and back on to the trail.
The Chilterns must be up there as having perhaps the best signposted footpaths in the country. It wasn’t just the Ridgeway that was waymarked with such colour co-ordinated vigour, but so was every single footpath, bridleway and byway that either led off it or connected to it. And I never came across a single broken stile or gate. The Chiltern Society, run with the same brisk efficiency as the area’s B&Bs (and probably by the same formidable ladies), is largely responsible for this laudable state of affairs. Not only do they have a Rights of Way group to browbeat any recalcitrant local government worker into submission (‘Come on now, chop chop!’), they also publish and sell their own footpath maps, some 28 of them, which will set you back £70 for the whole pack. They’re at the same scale as an OS Explorer, though each covers only a small area as it is designed to be more portable than a sometimes bulky OS. They’re very beautiful as well, emphasising not just the paths, statutory and permissive, but pubs, car parks and Anglican churches too, a set of features that makes as good a definition of the Chilterns as any. This is, you surmise, a supremely map-literate part of the world. I was tickled to see on the Chiltern Society website a button haughtily labelled ‘Report Something’, which sounded like one of the buttons in longstanding Chilternite Roald Dahl’s great glass elevator. Report Something – anything: stray sheep, hoodies, drug dens, inconsiderate parking, a porch with no planning permission, late-night noise, smoking on an open-air station platform, bad highlights, suspected Labour tendencies, wearing something that’s so last year. On the report form, you are politely asked to nail the location of your grievance with an OS grid reference, the inference being that anyone wanting a proper moan would, of course, know both what that meant and how to do it.
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 on the map demanding closer inspection and intimating huge rewards.
There was much else to learn about the area from the map. In stark contrast to the popular image of southern England, the names of Starveall and Skeleton Farm hinted darkly that these downs are a barren prairie, where little would ever grow. And so it is: the fields we passed looked like ethereal installations at the Tate, so full were they of flinty rubble. As a result, much of the area has been given over to horse gallops and, over the next few days, it was a pleasure to watch them flying by, the horses sleek and sinewy, their riders red-cheeked and intent. On the map, it looks as if the day’s walk would be entirely dominated by the great hulk of Didcot power station, sat belching in the Thames valley below. On the ground though, it doesn’t much intrude, at least not in the foreground. I’d caught my first glimpse of the cooling towers two days earlier as I was crossing a field just south of Watlington, and they remained part of my horizon for four days, eventually vani
shing in a blue-sky haze near Uffington. They never offended me, though; quite the opposite. It was good to see real life chugging onwards as I glided indulgently across the landscape, and better still, the power station, and its changing position from my viewpoint, gave me a powerful sense of my own locomotion.
The Streatley to Letcombe Regis stretch, where there really is nothing to break the flow, was my longest day’s walk, and it was great to have such good company. I love walking alone, going at exactly the pace that suits only me, but it is quite possible to have too much of your own company. It was a blazing spring Saturday, and the chalk track dazzled phosphorescently. You could often see it miles ahead or behind, a pale corduroy ribbon across the green swells of downland. Far below to our right, the vale shimmered in a gentle heat haze. In the fields at our side, skylarks trilled and hares squared up to each other as we strode by, laughing and gulping lungfuls of freedom.
Up here, it was far easier to raise the spirits of long-gone farmers and drovers, merchants and messengers. Walking ancient paths is hugely powerful, for it places us directly in touch with our ancestors (‘Foot of Briton, formal Roman/Saxon, Dane and Sussex yeoman’, as Andrew Young had it on the South Downs Way). This is very much part of their magic, for we share these ways with the pounding feet of countless unknown others. It is a sensation that we will only ever get on foot, for not only are we on exactly the same routes as our forefathers, we are also travelling in precisely the same way and at the same speed as them. And it is the perfect speed for contemplation and revelation.
Along this prehistoric motorway that winds its way through the voluptuous curves and swells of the downs, great hill forts punctuate the way like ancient service stations. Segsbury, Uffington, Liddington and Barbury are all on the lip itself of the ridge, while the track generally held back in its lee, unseen from below. There’s little evidence that they were ever used defensively, and it was far more pleasant to imagine them as gathering places for travellers and pilgrims, somewhere to refuel, stock up, pay respects and swap news or gossip. Uffington is the overlord of the clan, the mighty ridges of its fort visible for miles either side, and its indeterminately ancient chalk ‘horse’ (or dragon, or cat, or serpent) a fine example of early advertising to the lowland tribes.
A mile or so beyond Uffington is Wayland’s Smithy, the most powerfully atmospheric neolithic relic on the entire Ridgeway. Usually described only as a burial chamber, it is so much more than that. People may indeed have been buried there, but it is no municipal graveyard, for this has long been a place of celebration and ceremonial focus, a point of power for all time. Look at it on Google Earth, and two fields further along the Ridgeway you’ll see another of Wiltshire’s famous features, a crop circle. This one is in the shape of a gorgeously geometric jellyfish, pertly swimming its way upfield. I just love Wiltshire, and it was such a pleasure to be back there and, even more so, to have walked there from suburban Hertfordshire. Crop circles and UFOs, tumps and relics, crazy pagans and beer that can fell a frisky bullock all make it one of our most exhilarating counties to visit. Even in the trim little towns, where posters advertise tennis tournaments and whist drives at the Conservative Club, there’s the sense that, just beneath the sensible frocks and comfy jumpers, there are tattooed warriors waiting to burst out.
One of my favourite photos of my dear departed dog Patsy was taken as we walked this bit of the Ridgeway on a similarly bright spring day in 1999. As I passed the spot where I had taken the photo, a little vortex of wind suddenly whipped up on the path just in front of me. Chalk dust and a couple of leaves spun round and round in a perfect circle about 18 inches high, and I just knew it was her. She spent hours of her life spinning in circles, chasing her tail; virtually anything would set her off. ‘Hello Pats,’ I whispered, my eyes prickling. The vortex vanished, a solitary leaf floating out of it and off up the path. I followed it up into Wayland’s Smithy, settled against the trunk of a massive beech tree, and fell into a deep, contented sleep.
Prior to doing the Ridgeway, people had warned me that the most knackering part of it was dropping down to your overnight stop in the villages below, and climbing back up again the next morning. The same is said of the South Downs Way, a similar chalk ridge route. I found it a wonderful aspect of the walk, a kind of daily decompression and chance to contextualise the high way within its wider geography, to head off the bone dry tops down to the welcome springs, brooks and streams below. Watering was very much the theme, for there are some marvellous pubs in those villages too; a world away, thankfully, from the overbaked fakes of the Chilterns.
These were journeys between seasons too. The vale is only 300–400 feet beneath the ridge, yet it was weeks ahead in its spring plumage. Up on the Ridgeway, hawthorn blossom was tight and tentative, budding leaves looked delicate enough to be blown away with one gust, excitable daffodils waved in the breeze. Down below, cherry and apple blossom frothed lustily, magnolias swung in pendulous bloom, the leaves on the trees danced full and crunchy, tulips and bluebells lit up gardens and verges. I never tired of walking slowly up and down through this progression, one of English nature’s finest shows, and I couldn’t quite believe how many B&B owners told me they usually had to drive their Ridgeway walkers back up on to the trail in the morning. Being a puritan at heart, I was keen not to get into a car for the duration of the walk, not to break the spell and bring myself crashing back to normality. That could wait.
Loveliest of all the ascents from the vale back up to the Ridgeway came one sunny Sunday morning. I left the village in which I’d stayed just as the four-bell peal of the medieval church was repeating its call, over and over, to morning service. The only other sound was the excitable twittering of birds in the blossom-heavy trees. Sunday mornings have always been my favourite time of the week, their atmosphere like no other. Time hangs more languidly, and there is an indefinable sense of freedom and possibility stretching far into the distance. It was there in my childhood when my dad would drive us through empty streets to be the first at the doors of the swimming baths. It thrilled me in my Brum dancing years, catching the first bus of the morning back from some city-centre club or squat party, the bizarre mix of passengers – us hollow-eyed ravers and a gaggle of Jamaican ladies in fabulous hats on their way to church – only making it more special. Nor is the sensation confined to still-slumbering urban streets. Even in my tiny Welsh village, where, to the untrained eye, a Sunday morning looks much the same as any other, there is something sweeter and less hurried in the air, and it was there in bucketfuls as I marched and sang my way back up to the path, the church bells ringing and my mind as playful as a box of kittens.
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.’
