Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  ‘It’s a lovely circular walk that’ll take us three hours,’ she said. ‘Or four … or five, or six, depending on how we’re going.’

  I thought she was joking.

  Éanna talked with rattling rapidity, spraying information with energy and enthusiasm, words tumbling out of her faster than water from the cascade ahead of us. As we set out from Glendalough (‘Glen of the Two Loughs’), towards the Poulanass Waterfall, Éanna directed me towards the railway sleepers forming a staircase up into the Wicklow Mountains.

  ‘These are the easy steps, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘There are only about two hundred here by the side of the lake, and then we’ve got a thousand at least to come. I’ve never counted them all because it would just be disheartening and I don’t like to be disheartened.’

  I was breathing heavily and my thighs started to ache, so I kidded myself into a state of masochistic meditation. I tried to enjoy the pain, knowing it would be worth it for the view.

  Pain is all about mindset. There’s a part of every top sportsman or sportswoman that actually enjoys pain – they learn to like it because they know that by punishing their body they are working towards the ultimate reward. They know they will have enjoyed it when it is over, if you know what I mean. I thought of Chris Hoy, AP McCoy and Katherine Grainger as I climbed the wooded sleeper steps, dreaming of my gold-medal or Grand National moment.

  Éanna (who is twenty-one years older than me) was springing up the steps, chattering about bell heather, ling heather, hazelnuts, pine cones, bogs, rock formations and mining.

  ‘The main thrust of the climb is yet to come,’ she promised, as she nibbled on a hazelnut. ‘We were just warming you up.’

  Finally, an element of reward – the view. We looked down into the U-shaped valley and the rippling black waters of the Lower Lough, with a sixth-century monastic site just visible. The light was mottled, with shafts of sunlight falling down on to the dark rocks below and illuminating a lone tree.

  There was something biblical about the scene. People had been looking at this same view for thousands of years.

  Sometimes when I’m walking, the emotion of it all gets too much. Generally, the tears do not flow because I’m tired or upset but because it’s so beautiful. I also had a moment like that in Northern Ireland in the Mountains of Mourne: the morning sun came flooding across Carlingford Lough, turning the water pink. It was stunning before we even started.

  A year later, when a horse called Carlingford Lough won the Galway Plate for AP McCoy, I could picture the place it had been named after. On one side of the lough stands the ruins of a castle and, call me one-track minded, but I was quite proud that I had also heard of Carlingford Castle – he’d finished second to Teenoso in the 1983 Derby, and gave Mick Kinane his first ride in the race.

  As the miles and hours passed and we walked up the ridge known as the spine, Éanna revealed more of her knowledge and more of herself. Having told me the climb was over and the rest of the walk was ‘pure enjoyment’, I kept wondering if she was a compulsive liar. As the rain battered us, she baffled me with the logic that ‘Irish miles are longer than English miles’.

  ‘I had forgotten it was quite so steep up here, but you’re meant to be distracted by the views and the light,’ Éanna said. ‘If we went up any further we’d be in heaven, so don’t you worry, it’ll be flat and downhill from now. We didn’t walk into a bog hole, we’ve got good boots, the rain will pass and we haven’t broken anything, so things could be worse!’

  She was a natural optimist, and her energy was contagious. She taught me about glacial valleys, acidic soil, edible hedgerow berries, wild flowers and plants, fungi, waterfalls … and also revealed how she had fallen in love with the man who became her husband.

  ‘I wasn’t a strong walker as a child,’ she said, ‘but when I went to university in Dublin I met this gorgeous hunk of a man and he loved to walk in the mountains, so it was a case of “love your man, love your mountains”. In an effort to persuade him that I was fierce interested in all that he was, I would follow him up into the mountains and pretend that I liked it.

  ‘We came up here one Sunday. There were four or five of us, and one of the girls decided that she wanted to cross the waterfall – mad thing to do – so of course she slipped and fell in. And there she was, clinging to a rock and screaming for help, and my beloved leaps in to save her. And I got this St Paul on the road to Damascus feeling: “Ooh, if he gets out alive I’ll never be nasty to him again.”

  ‘So we formed a chain and we hauled them both out, and subsequently we got married and had three children, and we are still together. I can tell you, we give waterfalls a wide berth.’

  Ten years later, in 2012, I met up with Éanna and her husband, John, to walk in Dublin Bay. By then, they had been married for thirty-five years. John was much quieter than Éanna (but if I’m being honest, that’s not difficult) and seemed silently to absorb the information that his wife delivered at breakneck pace, occasionally adding a detail or two of his own.

  Éanna can’t walk on a beach without diving off to collect shells or look for lugworms. It was like taking a puppy for a walk. I thought she was beside me, and then she wasn’t and I’d see her frantically digging into the sand with her bare hands.

  She burst into song about cockles and mussels and told me how Molly Malone (of the song) died of typhoid. Then she told me about lugworms and their predators, curlews, who have nerve endings at the end of their big, long bills to help them find their breakfast in the sand.

  She did all this without seeming to take a breath. It was a staggering display of non-stop, information-laden, one-way conversation. John stood there, listening to it all as if he’d never heard it before, smiling. He had retired earlier that year, so Éanna, in a flash of inspiration, had decided that they should climb all twenty-six of the highest peaks in Ireland and Northern Ireland. They did them all and got a certificate from the Mountaineering Association for their trouble, which was lovely – but not enough for Éanna, who decided they would go further afield and climb Mount Snowdon. So they did that. And then she thought they should do Ben Nevis. So they did that, too.

  Bear in mind that they have both long since celebrated their sixtieth birthdays. And the woman who had initially traipsed along to try to show interest was now suggesting mountain climbs for the two of them. As for John, ‘I’m charged with what’s called the “mountain foreplay”,’ he explained. ‘That consists of studying maps, books, the Internet and coming up with the plan. Éanna just turns up, and I tell her where to park the car and where we’re going. Then off we go, and it’s lovely. She tends to slow down a bit in terms of the chat when she’s with me because she’s so used to me, so I do get a little bit of peace and quiet when we’re out in the mountains.’

  ‘Believe me,’ chuckled Éanna, ‘you can’t chat much when you’re clambering up Ben Nevis.’

  Éanna had a Mary Poppins umbrella that she didn’t use for protecting herself from the rain or for flying but to open and turn upside down under a tree. She then shook the tree and watched the creepy crawlies fall into the umbrella. It’s a great way for a botanist to examine spiders, earwigs and the like – but not so good if you’ve borrowed your husband’s golf umbrella and not told him.

  ‘John has got used to opening his brolly on the course and finding a few spiders falling on to his head,’ she said.

  ‘By the way, have a look at this earwig. Now, of course, people think they’re called earwigs because they drill a hole through your ear and eat your brain, but they don’t. They eat flower petals. And, in fact, their original name was “arsewig”. God knows what people would think they did if they were still called that.’

  Laughter filled the air in Dublin Bay, and we walked on, looking at plants and animals, learning about history and geology and biology. It was like going back to school with all the fun of lessons and none of the trauma of taking exams. A butterfly fluttered beside us, then suddenly a dragonfly called a
red-veined darter landed on Éanna’s hand, just as she was talking about the wonders of the outdoor world.

  She has a touch of magic about her, and it’s not just the Mary Poppins umbrella. Éanna Ní Lamhna could give an hour’s lecture on mud and it would be fascinating. She has that rare gift of eternal enthusiasm, and it’s impossible not to be swept along by it. John is her foil, a solid, steady presence who went back to get the car for us to rescue us from the rain, because that’s the kind of man he is. She fell in love with him for rescuing a woman from a waterfall, and he’s still doing it today.

  ‘I want to live in Ireland,’ I said to Alice when I got home.

  She looked up briefly.

  ‘Of course you do, darling,’ she said, and carried on reading Twitter.

  4

  Aside from naked rambling, I am fairly happy to try anything once. So when I got a four-page handwritten letter suggesting I should walk barefoot, I thought, ‘Well, why not?’

  Michael Weltike first tried barefoot walking in the 1980s, almost by accident. ‘I used to go hiking with my brother and sister and sleep out on the hills,’ he explained. ‘On one occasion, my brother and I decided to walk up a mountain adjacent to Ben Nevis carrying our boots rather than wearing them. It was a revelation to feel the texture and temperature as we walked. When we got to the summit, we didn’t feel tired at all, but energized and refreshed. I didn’t think any more of it for a while …’

  We were meeting on the western edge of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, on an overcast day in February. Michael wore a red-and-yellow hand-knitted hat, green trousers and fur-lined boots. I looked at his feet, and he must have detected the disappointment in my eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He smiled. ‘They’ll be coming off as soon as we get off the road.’

  We walked away from the medieval church in Compton Bishop and gradually gained some height, but I starting fretting about the sky. Why couldn’t we have a clear day so I could enjoy the views from the Mendips? Why did it have to be cloudy and grey? It was the sort of sky that gives you nothing – no colour, no warmth, no detail.

  The sky dictates my mood more strongly than anything else. My brain clouds over when the sky does and, equally, it brightens with the light. I remembered how distressed I was when I had to work in an office with no windows and no natural light. Now, with the prospect of walking barefoot with Michael, I had an alternative mood measurer. I had a chance to change my focus and look to the ground instead.

  ‘Normally,’ Michael said, taking long strides beside me, ‘we’re insulated from the ground by our boots and by concrete flooring in houses. By making contact with natural materials, you can earth yourself through them. We’ve evolved over millions of years as barefoot beings and then we were wearing animal skins on our feet. It’s only recently that all these artificial materials have come in that have cut us off, in a way.’

  He stopped and smiled as he bent down to untie his laces. We had reached the close-cropped grass of the Mendips and it was time to ‘strip off’.

  The Mendips are a range of hills south of Bristol, running from Weston-super-Mare to Frome. You can see the start of them from the M5, their limestone largesse dominating the landscape. In the south of the area is Cheddar Gorge, the deepest ravine in the country and our own version of the Grand Canyon. The Mendips are pockmarked with caves, including the spectacular Wookey Hole, and in 1903 made headlines around the world when a complete skeleton, thought to be nine thousand years old, was discovered. The skeleton was known as Cheddar Man. Another good name for a horse. (‘Cheddar Man comes to Tattenham Corner and is still hard on the bridle … Cheddar Man goes a length up with a furlong to run … Cheddar Man has won the Derby!’ Oh yes, it works.)

  The Mendips look over land famous for cheese, strawberries and ice cream. They provide the gradients for fell runners, hill walkers, rock climbers, abseilers and, in our case, barefoot walkers.

  As soon as I had peeled off my first sock I could feel a strange sensation, and it wasn’t just the cold of the earth. As we walked, the mud squelched between my toes as I slipped through it and every time I hit a patch of moss it was warm and soft. It was thrilling, as if I’d suddenly been ‘plugged in’.

  Michael’s feet were long and thin, with toe bones that seemed super-humanly strong. I don’t really like feet and, to be totally honest, have a bit of a phobia about hairy ones. Luckily, his were smooth and hairless, and they were soon coated in thin, teak-brown mud, which meant I could pretend they weren’t really feet at all. We bounced along on short, sheep-grazed turf, the land that gave this area its medieval affluence from the wool trade. I felt even more springy and positive than usual.

  ‘There’s an energy exchange between you and the earth going on now,’ Michael explained. ‘We’re all electromagnetic beings and so is the earth, and if we can make that connection it can have profound benefits on our well-being.’

  When I’m walking with someone I try to let their experience become my experience. Where, normally, I might suspect something or someone of being eccentric or even a tiny bit unhinged, I go with the flow and buy into their world. So I tried to ignore the cold, the wet, the rabbit poo and the sheep droppings that decorated the hills and started to feel surges from my feet. I used to run around a lot with bare feet when I was young but, as an adult, I really only do it on holiday on a beach. This was the first time I could remember walking on grass on a winter’s day, not worrying about staying clean.

  I was aware of my toes and how they help to balance my body, of the changing temperature of the earth and the delight of soft, short grass. Some dog walkers passed us and exclaimed in surprise and perhaps a little in fear when they saw our bare feet. I felt even more excited that I was doing something so innocent but which seemed to create such a reaction. How strange that we have become suspicious of anything that is different, even something that harks back to our natural beginnings.

  After half an hour I decided that the benefit of barefoot walking was about to be outweighed by the gradual freezing of my toes. I grabbed Michael’s towel and wiped off the soles of my feet. As I pulled my socks back on I appreciated them more than I ever had before. It was like climbing under a warm duvet on a cold night. My feet were tingling and they felt more alive than they had in a long while. Maybe I’ve been hard on feet all these years. They’re still funny-looking, but I guess we need them.

  My feet were grateful to be wrapped up warmly, but I promised them that, come the spring, they would be let loose again. It’s such a simple pleasure, and I wonder whether it allows us to connect with our distant past in a way that, most of the time, modern life prevents.

  For Michael, barefoot walking was not just a passing pleasure, it had become a necessity. He had suffered from depression and, while in hospital, had started walking barefoot through the grounds.

  ‘I strongly feel that it helped me out of the situation,’ he said. ‘The doctor couldn’t believe how quickly I had slipped into depression and then how quickly I had come out of it. I thought I had to investigate it further and try to walk as often as I could barefoot, especially in wild places. I feel reconnected with life and I would recommend it to anyone as therapy.’

  Michael felt more sensitive and centred because of walking barefoot. After I’d put my boots back on (my feet were cold, dirty and getting shredded), he carried on barefoot for another two hours – splashing through puddles, skipping over rocks, padding on tarmac. He washed in a stream when we got back to Compton Bishop, dried his feet and put his boots back on. His face was glowing and he looked barely half his fifty-eight years. I told him that he would probably live to be two hundred at this rate. He looked genuinely thrilled.

  There are so many ways of walking to stay healthy. One that has a strong following is walking backwards.

  I was filming pandas in China recently and, as we left the hotel at the crack of dawn, we nearly knocked over a woman who was walking backwards up the road. All the way along the steep path, people were wa
lking backwards up the hill. It was four in the morning and there they were – men and women in their forties, fifties, sixties walking backwards up a hill. It was like a scene from a zombie movie.

  The theory is that walking backwards exercises muscles that do not ordinarily get used and increases the heart rate, making it a more energetic workout. They say a hundred steps backwards is the equivalent of a thousand forwards, which is a good job, as you’re going to get wherever you’re going about ten times more slowly.

  Since then, I have been trying the backward-walking thing around London. It’s useful because, if Archie gets behind on the walk, I can keep an eye on him and pretend to other normal, front-walking folks that I am just a responsible dog owner.

  ‘I’m just watching out for my dog!’ I try to explain, as they frown and take their child’s hand. Then I stumble backwards into a speed ramp and swear loudly. Alice is usually yards ahead by the time this happens, quickening her step and pretending she doesn’t know me.

  ‘For God’s sake, turn around,’ she whispers. ‘People will think you’re weird.’

  ‘Good,’ I reply. ‘I thought we didn’t care what other people think.’

  ‘Oh, do grow up. You know what I mean.’

  I carry on walking backwards, just to prove the point.

  Walking backwards increases the metabolic rate. Because it’s a new and unfamiliar exercise to most of us, it improves balance and coordination, helps the circulation, gives relief from lumbago and is good for the knees, but most important of all – and this is possibly the reason that the Chinese are so committed to their daily routine of early-morning suicidal backward locomotion – it sharpens the brain.