by Mike Parker
Though I say so myself, my invented Welsh Coast to Coast (though I’ll settle for the Montgomeryshire Way or, if that’s already taken, the Parker Trail) was stunning, and gave me everything that the English one hadn’t. I had numerous easy chats, and some great laughs, with people en route: farmers in the fields, old ladies hanging out their washing, workmen on the roads, a shopkeeper or two, landladies and regulars in a few pubs, mothers pushing prams, the mobile librarian, an old boy nailing up the parish notices on a chapel board. Staying with complete strangers in B&Bs quite near home is a novel experience too, giving you unexpected new angles on places you thought were so familiar, and both were great fun as well.
The variety of paths was similarly intoxicating. The most exciting were the sinuous green lanes, winding almost subversively under their leafy canopies around the edges of fields and woods. There were little worn ways grooved into fields, not much more than sheep tracks, a canal towpath and walks along river meadows, glorious strides through the whole landscaped length of the Gregynog estate, sweet little paths that tiptoed through bluebell woods, farm drives, rickety bridges, and zig-zags up and down the many hills. Quite a few country lanes filled in the gaps, and they were some of the best bits of all: high hedgerows bursting with colourful life and sudden views over gates. Not once did I wish I was on a rocky fell.
In one tiny village, there was a nasty blast from the past when I saw a sign hanging on the side of a stile, its lettering faded, but the words still able to burn into my heart:
FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE
Public Rights of Way are CLOSED in Powys.
Maximum Fine for use £5000.
How quickly, and how sickly, it all came back. The 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth had been my baptism of fire to rural life. I’d moved to Wales the previous summer, and had then experienced the wettest, greyest autumn on record (in our local weather station, rain was recorded on every single consecutive day for over three months), followed by a cloudy, damp winter. Just as March – and hope – approached, animals started blistering and footpaths were snapped shut all over the country, even in places miles from any outbreak. Real worry, paranoia and isolation hung over the countryside like a poisonous miasma.
The speed with which these signs had gone up had staggered me at the time – horrified me, if I’m honest. Within just a couple of days, they had turned up on every obscure, forgotten path and bridleway. It was impossible not to compare such brutal efficiency in getting the things closed with the eternally lackadaisical approach to getting blocked ones open. And no path was left unshut. The only place for miles around that I was able to walk the dog was the nearby four-mile beach from Borth to the Dyfi estuary, though there were angry demands in the local paper to close even that, but it was considered logisitically impossible. The boardwalk paths through the dunes were soon taped off, however, as were numerous urban tarmac paths in towns, floodlit cuts behind shops and through housing estates, tracks that hadn’t felt a cloven hoof along their length for centuries, if ever. It was a ridiculous over-reaction, and its lingering unease lasted years.
With hindsight, we can see now that the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001, and the hysterical blanket closure of footpaths that it sparked, ended up doing the cause of public access to the land no end of good. To lose every path in an instant was a wake-up call like no other, and to everyone. It wasn’t just the beardies and the hearties moaning, it was the folk who liked a nice run out into the country on a Sunday afternoon, the people wanting to walk their dogs or take the kids somewhere that they could charge around and let off steam. Rural tourism collapsed, the effects rippling through the whole community and alarming even the most loutish of local politicians. It was an apocalyptic vision of what could so easily be, and people didn’t like it at all.
It wasn’t even an effective way of dealing with the problem. There have been outbreaks of foot-and-mouth since, which have been successfully dealt with in a far more localised way. The 2001 outbreak, and the mass, aggressive closure of all rights of way and most common land, felt like the last stand of an old order, especially as it coincided with the enactment of the Countryside and Rights of Way (CROW) Act 2000, the so-called ‘right to roam’. Things would never be the same again.
Researching this book, when I’ve told English rambling campaigners where I live in Wales, there’s been a common response, along the lines of, ‘Oh, I don’t go walking in Wales. Too many closed paths.’ End of. Walking across the width of Wales, I came across only two that were completely inaccessible, each necessitating a bit of a detour, some scrambling over gates and, in one case, an encounter with a farmer that turned into a very enjoyable chat about local history and characters. Only once in 25 years of walking in Wales have I been threatened and forcibly turfed off the land, but I’ve lost count of the many illuminating and entertaining conversations ignited by having to ask for a little guidance.
It might sound strange to those of an absolutist way of thinking, but the Welsh way has at its core something even more precious, democratic even, than the holy grail of well-waymarked routes for all to march down. There is a danger that, when we walk the prescribed routes, we become stuck in their groove, sometimes at the expense of the wider context of the landscape and its evolution. The boundaries in Wales – physically in this instance, and ethereally in so many others – are more blurred and often more interesting. You have to ask, to engage with the people for whom every lump and seam of the land has a story to tell: they are as intrinsic to the path as the stones underfoot or the flowers in the hedgerow.
This less official, and considerably less officious, Welsh way has a long tradition. As a schoolboy on the run, Thomas de Quincey, later the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, wandered as a vagabond through Wales for a couple of months in the summer of 1802. He noted that there was ‘no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too generally upon the great roads of England, to the pedestrian style of travelling’. From the same era, the less charitable English response to walkers was captured by Pastor Karl Philipp Moritz, a German who set about walking from London to the Peak District. His diary records his amazement at the jeering and abuse he received everywhere, particularly from those on stagecoaches, and the way inn landlords took one look at his pedestrian attire and shunted him immediately into the worst rooms. ‘Why do the English disparage walkers so much?’ he asked a fellow traveller. ‘Because we are too rich, too lazy and too proud,’ came the reply.
More than 200 years later, it’s a distinction that endures, and, from the Welsh point of view, thank God that it does. In the same way that walking is woven into the natural fabric of life, rather than ring-fenced apart from it, so it is with the Welsh landscape. You can, of course, choose to see it purely as an aesthetic display, a succession of two-dimensional picture postcards; plenty do. But dig just a little deeper into the cultural, social and economic contexts that run through the landscape in recurring leitmotifs, and it comes alive in entirely new, and infinitely richer, ways.
Thank God, too, that the broken stiles, the rights of way that don’t translate from the map to the ground and the occasional theatrically surly farmer all combine to put off a certain type of English walker. Sorry, but it has to be said. Were it not for the distinctive Welsh way, in all its bony bloody-mindedness, the beautiful mid-western peninsula of the island of Britain would long ago have been overwhelmed from the east, even more than it already has been. And even nice people, people like us who read the liberal press and recycle every last bit of it, who love the wind on our face and a pint of real ale in our hands, even we can cause untold damage to the fragile fabric of marginalised communities by insisting on our way over theirs. We might not even realise that we are insisting, but we will be.
I’ve just had a fortnight with the boot on the other foot, and it’s been very instructive. There’s a tiny cottage that I rent occasionally at the very end of the Llŷn peninsula, that bony arm of north-west Wales pointing at Ireland. In common with the many o
ther little whitewashed stone dwellings dotted around the heathery slopes, the cottage is a tŷ-unnos, a ‘one-night house’. This refers to an old Welsh tradition that if you started to build a house on common land at sundown and managed to have it roofed and with smoke coming out of its chimney by the following dawn, that house, and the land as far as an axe-throw in four directions, was yours. The little tŷ-unnos that I rent sits above the sea on the side of a mountain criss-crossed by paths both official and not. There’s no garden as such, just a couple of out-houses (one of which contains the toilet bucket; there’s no bathroom, nor indeed running water – you have to collect that from the spring up the hill) so that the house sits squarely as part of the hillside, with no evident boundary.
Since my last visit two years ago, the Llŷn coast path has been cut through on top of the cliffs either side of the cottage, and I saw more people walking up there this time than ever before, I’d guess by a factor of about ten. If I was sitting outside with my nosy sheepdog, who has a tendency to stand and stare at anything that moves, however far away, then the pattern of behaviour that unfolded when people came past was almost invariably the same every time. I saw them crest the hill that first gave them a view of the cottage and us. They would stop, look a little befuddled, pull into a tight huddle and confer with each other. The walk leader would then very ostentatiously pull out the map, and do a bit of pointing, reassured that they were in the right place, on the official right of way. Visibly bolstered by the knowledge, they would then sail past, heads high and bristly chins resolute, not quite near enough to say hello, but never, ever, with so much as a wave or a small detour for a chat.
It reminded me of a passage in a wonderful old book I picked up years ago in the back of some dusty second-hand shop. The Countryside and How to Enjoy It was published at the end of the 1940s: it is a splendidly paternalistic instruction manual intended to smooth the way of the great unwashed into their brand new National Parks and designated trails. Amongst chapters entitled ‘Going on a Journey’ and ‘What of the Weather?’, there is one called ‘The Footpath Way’, written by S. P. B. (Petre) Mais, perhaps the author most responsible for educating Britons in the 1930s and 1940s about their landscape and history. ‘Never turn aside from an approaching farmer,’ he boomed. ‘You would consider it a grave discourtesy if you found a caller at your own house turning away when you came out to meet him. The farmer is your host wherever you go in the country and it is necessary to exercise the manners of a guest when you encounter him.’ Mind you, he also offers this gem: ‘It is quite likely that you may want to call on the farmer either to ask the way or to beg a glass of milk or perhaps a meal. The farmer may be glad to see you in spite of being a very busy man.’ Just a hello would have done; I wasn’t after rustling up dinner for them.
So inspiring was the experience of being dropped off three days away from home, and then just walking back, taking in familiar sights from wholly new angles, I rang my dad to see if he fancied doing exactly the same across our home county of Worcestershire. We did it the next week, my step-mum dropping us off in the Wyche Gap, that ancient pass through the Malvern Hills that marks the border with Herefordshire: a sublime experience that I’ll cover at a later point.
If there is one path that I would encourage anyone to try, it’s this, and every one is bespoke and unique. Beg a lift, take the train or bus, and land two or three days’ walk away from home. Turn back, and start walking. Stay in a B&B only ten miles from your front door. See your own back yard in a completely new context. It’s the ultimate staycation – and a great way of realising too that for a good walk, you really don’t need too much Stuff.
Chapter 7
AND DID THOSE FEET
Stairway to heaven: ascending Croagh Patrick, County Mayo, Ireland
With the exception of the Coast to Coast, which had been a glimpse into one hall of my own particular hell, every path I’d walked so far had put me in a far more spiritually robust frame of mind. I was keen now to try some paths with an explicitly divine identity, in particular to undertake an organised pilgrimage. With that as the aim, you want to go for the jugular. Although I am normally quite a loner when it comes to walking, when I thought about undertaking a proper pilgrimage route, one of the most important factors to my mind was the presence of others, and preferably in cacophonous multitude. A few years ago, in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, a Basque bulwark of a town on the French side of the Pyrenees, I’d been genuinely moved and amazed at the sight of the legion of pilgrims starting their journey there on the Camino of St James to Santiago de Compostela, nearly 500 miles away on the Atlantic coast of Galicia. They looked so purposeful, excited and united in their mission, and that’s what I wanted next. Despite – or perhaps because of – our technological advancement, we seem to need pilgrimage more than ever. 2,491 people completed the Camino in 1985. By 1995, this had jumped to 19,821, and it now easily tops 100,000 a year.
I considered the options nearer home. What about the original great pilgrimage route, as portrayed by Geoffrey Chaucer over seven centuries ago in The Canterbury Tales? His motley band of pilgrims, covering all bases from the devout to the debased, caroused their way across Kent from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to St Thomas à Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. Although the express intention of the trip was meek obeisance to the Christian principles of confession and redemption, it was all conducted with feet firmly scuffed into the earth, the sacred and the profane inseparably commingled. That seems to be an essential ingredient in a good pilgrimage: devotion and wonder, for sure, but with the option of a little light drunkenness and debauchery too.
Aside from the fact that it might bring back unpleasant flash-backs from my A levels, I quickly dismissed the idea of following Chaucer. His pilgrims’ most likely route from Southwark to Canterbury was along the Roman Watling Street. This is now the A2 and assorted other trunk roads of varying ferocity, and I wasn’t much struck on the idea of plodding through Dartford, Gravesend and the sprawl of Medway towns while ingesting the fumes of countless Polish and Latvian lorries. I pondered a pilgrimage route to England’s most famous Catholic shrine, Walsingham in Norfolk. A few folk walk there from Ely Cathedral, a 73-mile tramp under the vast skies of the Fens. The route appealed hugely, not least for its lack of contours, but then I remembered going to Walsingham a few years ago and being quite repulsed by its sickly piety. I looked too at the groups doing the Ely–Walsingham pilgrimage, and that didn’t help. Salty Chaucerian exuberance was what I was after, rather than a polite trundle across the flatlands in the company of people who’d not taken their sandals off since 1986.
The Celtic corners of our islands seemed to offer a better chance of faith and fun. One of the great realisations about Wales, after ten years of living there, was how Christianity had cannily absorbed and adopted the older ways. Rugged little stone churches, seemingly sprung from the rock on which they sat, had often been built on sites that had already accrued a spiritual significance over centuries, perhaps millennia, before the missionaries arrived. As it is in the buildings, so it seemed in the doctrine: a far greater sense of organic absorption. My local parish priest, a man of belligerent vision and effervescent charisma, wrote a book on the many manifestations of the Goddess in our culture, and has built a little chapel adjoining his house that bursts with gilted icons and incense, a fusion of Eastern Orthodoxy, Hinduism and Christ in a damp Welsh meadow. I’d found comparable fusions in the Pictish kingdom of north-east Scotland, in the bypassed bits of Cornwall and, once you peeled back and peered under the festering fundamentalism, throughout Ireland.
Ireland! That was it. If there was one place in these islands where I might find the Christ and the craic, it was the Emerald Isle, where the church and the pub remain as one. Once that realisation had come, the answer to my quest became obvious. Much as I share the scepticism towards what Jim Perrin calls the ‘capitalist construct’ of our obsession with ‘conquering’ the highest, the largest or the longest, when it came to a
proper pilgrimage, size really was everything. I needed the biggest, most tumultuous there was, and that could only mean Reek Sunday up Croagh Patrick.
There are lots of ingredients that make up the perfect holy mountain, but the single biggest is its shape. A sacred mount must draw the eye and hold it there, in awe, in aesthetic delight and in slight terror too. It must embody both beauty and a certain haughtiness, which is why so many great holy mountains sit at some distance from any other sizeable peaks, for they are scene-stealers and do not like to share the stage. Symmetry is good, even if seen only from one or two vantage points. These too will acquire subsidiary holy status and become outlying pin-pricks of the light that generation after generation of worshipper has accorded the peak itself. Looking from the mountain from other angles, it is often best if it appears in many different shapes and guises, a reminder of the shape-shifting truths at the heart of any faith system. Travel the full circle around a holy mountain and it should, in turn, appear forbidding and welcoming, impenetrable and comely, and all the time iridescently beautiful.
