Diagonal Walking

by Nick Corble

Maybe I got lulled into a false sense of security, maybe I just became complacent, but at the next farm things went badly wrong. I thought I’d followed the right signs and where these were absent that I’d made intelligent choices, but suddenly I was completely and absolutely lost. Wherever I went I was unable to pick up the footpath. At one point there was an option to either walk straight through a field of wheat, in a reckless, Theresa May kind of a way, or be responsible and walk round the edge to find the footpath to the next field. I’d taken the latter option, and this was my big mistake. Everywhere I went was either ploughed up or tall grass. Barbed wire, hedges and electric fences protected every boundary. I was trapped in Staffordshire Hell. Having walked up and down one field three times looking for an exit, I stopped and hailed someone in a tractor mowing one of the pastures.

  He returned my friendly wave and then, his smile turning into a look of concern, suddenly realised I wasn’t waving but drowning. He stopped and climbed out of his cab.

  ‘I need some help here mate,’ I pleaded, showing him my remnant of map. ‘Do you have any idea where I am?’ His answer wasn’t reassuring.

  ‘Haven’t a clue,’ he said, ‘I live twenty miles away.’ He looked at my map. ‘Is that a footpath?’ he asked, nodding towards a gate.

  ‘I’ve no idea, there’s no sign, but that doesn’t mean much round here.’

  Equally lost, I asked him how he’d got here, on the face of it a reasonable question. He couldn’t remember. This was becoming one of those conversations that could go on all day. I got him to think back, and eventually he recalled a road by a farmhouse in the distance which he thought linked to the main road. It wasn’t much, but I took it.

  On reaching the farm there was someone brushing the yard. I thought it politic to ask if I could climb over the gate separating us. The nonchalant brusher wasn’t sure. The farmer was at the other end of the field. My feeling at that point was that if the farmer wasn’t prepared to maintain decent signs, as was his legal duty, then I was going to take the initiative and climb over his ruddy gate. The time for cousin Simon-level diplomacy had passed.

  Now talking face to face with the brush-armed farmhand, I asked, nay demanded, where the road was. This also appeared to be a tricky question. Getting to the road meant walking through the yard, and while I was prepared to do this, my informant was less keen. Not wanting to get him into trouble, I followed his instructions to walk across a field, duck under an electric fence and climb over another gate. On finding the road I came across another house and was presented with another 50:50 choice.

  I stopped to consult my map and the compass on my phone. Someone came from the garden of the house, which I now saw had a swimming pool. He heard my story and assumed a look of concern. I clearly looked distraught, and he was keen to offer me some water. What I really wanted was a lift into town, ideally preceded by a dip in his pool, but when it became clear neither of those was on offer I got my phone back out and called Annette, giving her instructions on where I could be found. For the first time, I needed to be bailed out. I’d come to the conclusion that in Staffordshire it wasn’t so much a case of personae non gratae, but ambulatories non gratae – walkers not appreciated.

  Reunited with Annette, I learned that she’d been waiting for quite a while, taking sanctuary in the cool stone interior of the local church. Her time hadn’t been wasted. She’d picked up the local parish magazine, in which an article by a correspondent who called himself, somewhat self-deprecatingly, The Country Bumpkin explained that Staffordshire has over 3,000 miles of footpaths and that the County Council was responsible for working with landowners and others to keep these public rights of way open.

  With the county under increasing financial pressures, they’d undertaken a consultation and were proposing to categorise the footpaths as A, B or C in order to prioritise maintenance. It came as cold comfort that at least there was an acknowledged problem. Further research revealed that the council receives 2,000 footpath complaints a year – that’s forty a week, or more than five a day. I wasn’t surprised. But wait a minute, wasn’t there something a bit at odds there? The council worked with landowners? But as cousin Simon had pointed out two days before, in many cases the landowner was … the council. Some dots in my head joined up. Now it all made sense.

  Fed and rested, the next day I completed a relatively short seven-mile stretch into Alrewas. This was to be the end of this leg of the walk and I was keen to get as close as possible to the edge of Staffordshire, if for nothing else to find out if the footpath problem was contagious. The day started in Yoxhall, a clear competitor with Abbots Bromley for the Best Kept Village competition, with my route following a new long-distance path called The Way for the Millennium, and as such it was refreshingly easy to follow.

  Just as I was coming into the village at the end of a long meadow I stopped by a gate, where it looked for a moment as if I was back into the cow manure scenario: an ocean of the brown stuff. As I was soon going to be getting into our car I didn’t really want to get my boots caked up again, so I worked my way through some trees. Just as I made the track on the other side a Land Rover pulled up, towing a trailer. The back of the trailer was lifted up and the driver released half a dozen fresh young cows. Just to apply the finishing touches.

  Stage 3

  Alrewas

  to

  Newport Pagnell

  94.3 miles

  210,934 steps

  6

  Out of the Woods?

  Mention Alrewas to most people and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll get a blank look as they wonder why you’ve taken to swearing in Romanian. That is unless they’ve visited the National Memorial Arboretum, which sits just outside the town, situated a few miles north-east of the cathedral city of Lichfield in Staffordshire.

  Planting began at the Arboretum in 1997 and it was officially opened in 2001. Recent major investment has seen the building of an impressive Visitor’s Centre. The Arboretum has since become a favourite with coach parties and individual visitors. They don’t come just because it’s free, or at least I hope they don’t, but to pay their respects to those who’ve fallen in combat, not just in the armed forces, but civilians too.

  Annette and I had visited at the end of the previous leg of the walk, on a swelteringly hot day which demanded use of a glacial ‘noddy train’, with its running commentary, both from the loudspeaker and from others in the carriage. Although the set pieces to each of the three main branches of the armed services were grand and impressive, a feature of the vast site that hit us both was the variety of memorials to other groups. These are as diverse as the Bevan Boys, War Widows and, appropriately enough, the National Association of Memorial Masons, who possibly have a vested interest in the whole enterprise. Established as a living tribute designed to last for generations, there remained a slight sense of having been here before. Perhaps it was the newness of it, the impressive display and large car park, all built on reclaimed land. We both hoped we were looking at something more lasting than a modern-day National Garden Festival.

  It was interesting, this relatively recent refound respect for the armed forces, which has undergone a revival since the millennium, with further evidence coming in the shape of the foundation of the charity Help for Heroes in 2007. As a nation, there’s a sense that we’ve become more comfortable with public grief and remembrance. When I was a schoolboy, there was Poppy Day and a minute’s silence by the school war memorial, but these days recent wars have become exam subjects, with trips to the First World War battlefields almost obligatory at some point in a child’s education.

  The Second Gulf War in 2003 and a wider recognition in general of the devastating impact of Post-Traumatic Stress have undoubtedly played a part in this revival, but I wondered if it was something more fundamental. The national mourning for the untimely death of Princess Diana, for example, suddenly made it okay to grieve in public, as did the collapse of the Tw
in Towers. Was this a permanent shift away from the traditional reserve of the English or, on the contrary, should a symbol like the National Memorial Arboretum instead be seen as an archetypal English expression of considered respect, expressed through that most English of things, a love of gardens?

  Another possibility was that it was linked to a broader harkening back to a glorious past, to a time when things were better and we enjoyed a prominent place in the world, sentiments that no doubt fuelled some of the voting in the Brexit referendum. This could also be seen in a growing vogue for all things ‘retro’ (or, to you and me, old tat), and an ostensibly endless stream of films and plays about Britain standing alone during the Second World War. These sentiments had escalated to the extent that people actually believed that a nationalised railway was better than the alternative. To be nostalgic for British Rail you either had to be too young to remember it, which is forgivable, or wearing spectacles with the deepest shade of rose tint available.

  This suspicion was supported by a survey published by the BBC12 while I was walking, which suggested that half the country thought that England was better in the past (rising to two-thirds amongst Leave voters), with only one in six thinking its best days were ahead. An immediate reflection on this finding was how it highlighted the general state of confusion in the country – that we were better off on our own, but having secured that status feeling pessimistic about it (with Leave voters more pessimistic about the future than everyone else). Perhaps all this was saying was what a load of old moaners the English were. After all, the same research indicated that a majority of people in each of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland thought their country’s best years lay ahead of them.

  My acquaintance with the Arboretum on this leg of the journey was supposed to involve following a footpath around its edge. This being Staffordshire, things didn’t quite turn out that way. Having taken a train and bus to where I’d left off, the start of the walk was straightforward, a track down the back of some houses which led me out onto a busy dual carriageway. My map indicated a path on the other side so, taking my life in my hands, I crossed, not leaping the crash barrier so much as clambering awkwardly over it like a spineless hedgehog, before waiting for the next break in the traffic. A fingerpost told me my eyes weren’t seeing things on the map, and I proceeded down a narrow road which led me to a sewage farm, pausing momentarily to wonder why they were called farms.

  The location was apposite, as the path was supposed to take me round the edge of the fence surrounding this facility, but was obstructed by six-foot-high nettles and other vegetation as effective as any Trumpian wall. There was no choice but to turn back, treading a treacherous path down the side of what I now knew was the A38, before picking up a side road, passing the disused Alrewas signal box by a level crossing, resplendent in cream and emerald green paint, and finally emerging at the entrance to the Arboretum.

  It hadn’t been the greatest of starts to this third portion of the walk, but at least I was making progress. Preparations for this leg back home had been time-consuming, leaving me with little choice other than to plan for long daily treks of around fourteen miles. I’d done similar distances earlier in the walk so I wasn’t particularly fazed by the prospect, but these totals had usually resulted from diversions and getting lost.

  As such, planning for these distances left no room for error. The thought of potentially undertaking treks of sixteen or seventeen miles a day – and on consecutive days – was going to stretch the limits of my comfort zones, especially as I was now reacquainted with my old friend the rucksack. On the positive side, this planning did remove the need for a car. All my overnight stops were more or less on the route, and overruns on time and distance in the past had usually resulted from underestimating links and transit times.

  As my fresh leaving date got closer the more a chemistry set of emotions brewed – excitement and trepidation combining to leave a fog of anticipation. Yes, comfort zones were being tested, but wasn’t this part of the point of the whole exercise? Things weren’t helped by the weather forecast a week before I set out, which wasn’t good, including thunderstorms and a lot of rain. The thought of having to complete those miles, togged up in wet weather gear while lightning forked into open adjacent fields, wasn’t an enticing one. Up until then, I’d been very lucky with the weather, experiencing record temperatures. Too hot if anything, I’d reasoned, displaying my own streak of particularly English moaning.

  I was comforted by two thoughts. The first was my established belief that weather forecasts are about as reliable as an appointment with British Telecom. Bitter experience over the years suggested that any weather forecasted a whole week out was almost certainly the one type of weather you were guaranteed not to get. Maybe modern weather forecasters are simply overwhelmed with data, to the extent that they can’t see the clouds for the rain. Even the BBC had sacked the Met Office as its weather supplier, allegedly on the grounds of price, but I think we knew better. As each day passed, the forecast swung back and forth like the pendulum in an old grandfather clock. Adopting the principle that there was no such thing as the wrong weather, just the wrong clothes, I made sure I was suitably equipped and hoped for the best. It was only worth worrying about things I could influence.

  The second comforting thought was the fact that I would be leaving Staffordshire within a day’s walking. Were the county’s footpaths the exception or the norm? Was I out of the woods, or was there more to come? For the remainder of that first day back, I decided not to take the risk. Building work at the Arboretum had already provided another diversion, so I took to the sides of country lanes. These were relatively traffic-free, but also, understandably, bench-free. As a result, I was forced to unshackle my rucksack and slump to the ground on frequent water-stops, before finally entering the refuge of the small village of Harlaston, where my bed for the night awaited above the local post office. Yes, it still had a post office.

  A 2008 article in the Birmingham Post13 described Harlaston as ‘the quintessential English village’, and it has won the Staffordshire Best Kept Small Village award five times (how many of these awards were there?). Walking around it, it certainly had all the ingredients. Manor house? Check. Half-timbered houses? Check. Neat gardens? Check. An old phone box converted into a library? Hold on, a what? Yes, an old red phone box on the main bend in the village, its gold crown freshly repainted, had been converted into an informal lending library by the Parish Council. A sign instructed users to return books when they’d finished with them and gave details on where to leave donations. I learned later that the box itself was actually listed. It was a neat idea which warmed me to the locals.

  I soon met one of them, Tony, who was also my host for the night, as well as being proprietor of the local shop and postmaster. What he wasn’t, was a cook; but I supposed that might have been asking for the moon. When he asked if I might be wanting a cooked breakfast in the morning and I replied in the affirmative, reckoning it came as part of the whole ‘bed and breakfast’ deal, his face took on the aspect of a man who’d been given another job at the end of a long hard day in the stamp-dispensing business. He said he’d make a few calls, and I went up to my room for a much-needed shower.

  First impressions suggested Harlaston as one of the parts of England probably the least touched by progress over the previous twenty years. Certainly, I experienced trouble getting the WiFi to work, despite trying every possible permutation of the proffered password. I took my life in my hands and sought out Tony.

  ‘Hi, I’m having trouble logging onto the WiFi.’

  ‘Well yes, you will,’ he offered, a little unhelpfully, I thought, sighing a little as he did so. My slightly raised eyebrows encouraged him to continue. ‘BT promised me they’d be here last week, and when I called after they failed to show up they said it would be a few days. However, one of my customers works for them and he says they’re actually coming tomorrow.’

  This t
wisted logic sounded about par for BT. If even a post office gets this sort of service, what hope was there for the rest of us? For a company whose entire raison d’être is communications, it really is surprising how bad at it they are. They are the modern equivalent of Flanders and Swann’s gasman, or, if you’re of a different generation, Monty Python’s cheesemonger. Their terrible attitude to customer service is one of the few things that has remained unswervingly the same over the previous two decades.

  Harlaston’s pub, The White Lion, was my next stop – having had the foresight to phone ahead to make sure they served food on a Monday, which, to my relief, they did. A ramshackle brick building painted white, set off with a pair of fetching red parasols outside, my first impression was that this was a real locals’ pub, and my instincts turned out to be right.

  Four burly tattooed men, still in their working clothes, were sitting inside on two pairs of chairs, facing each other, like the back of a London bus. The language was ripe, but the beer good. I placed a food order and allowed the first pint to slip down easily, as it always did. When offered the chance to go through to the deserted restaurant, I said I was fine where I was, watching the entertainment. By entertainment, I didn’t mean the large flat screen TV showing Emmerdale with the sound turned down, something that’s crept into pubs in recent years. That said, I guessed the screen in this pub would soon be useful in showing the forthcoming World Cup.

  In between glances at my phone (unlike the post office, the pub had WiFi – it seemed BT did have priorities after all), I watched as a rotating cast of characters came in and out, with two of the original four acting as mainstays. Some left forever, some returned, bringing a whiff of nicotine with them, the habit of smoking outside a definite plus to twenty-first-century pub-going. Topics of conversation swung from activities at a village event the previous day, to arcane details of different types of car engine, and although these were both outside my orbit of understanding, they were nevertheless strangely absorbing. Perhaps I was just delirious, or demob happy at the thought of leaving Staffordshire? Impressive amounts of alcohol were being drunk, matched by equally impressive beer bellies. There was no mystery as to how this pub serving a village of a mere 400 souls managed to stay open.