Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  They joked with each other that ‘a friend in need is a pain in the arse’ but, from what I saw, these women would help each other out whatever the circumstances without even blinking. They knew when to encourage or cajole and when to back off. We stopped for lunch – and whisky – hunkering up to a rock for a bit of protection from the breeze. We could hear the water rushing by, feel the wind and see the big brown head of Ben Vorlich in the distance. It could only be a Scottish landscape. As Anne said, it was ‘so Brigadoonish’.

  ‘The best thing about Mondays,’ she added, ‘is that unless it’s a bank holiday or we’re on a Munro, you’ll never see another soul.’

  The Monday Walkers had climbed plenty of Munros, but they were not ‘Munro Baggers’. That’s the term for the folk who are determined to climb every peak over three thousand feet. There are 282 peaks above this height, and they were first listed in 1891 by Sir Hugh Munro, a founding member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club. Give a person a list and of course they will want to tick it off, peak by peak. More than five thousand people have climbed all the Munros, some starting or finishing with Ben Nevis, because it’s the best known. The youngest ‘Munroist’ or ‘completionist’ was only ten when he finished the challenge. Ten years old!

  The Monday Walkers were hard core, but at least they took their time to enjoy it.

  That’s the way it should be, because walking is something we can all do. It’s not competitive – not unless you’re with a particularly assertive group which wants to get to the next spot on the map as fast as it can and tick it off in the little black book. We have made that mistake before – I had paused to describe the Snowdonian scenery, and by the time I’d finished the group had disappeared over the brow of the hill. Lucy and I ran after them, cursing.

  ‘It’s not meant to be a bloody race,’ she whispered. ‘What’s the point of walking through a landscape like this if you don’t actually look at it?’

  As we caught them up, I saw the gathering of brightly coloured socks and sensed a murmur of disapproval.

  ‘We thought we’d lost you,’ the leader said. ‘Are we going too fast for you?’ There was a hint of triumphalism in her face that made me want to prod her sharply with her two-tone walking pole.

  The trouble is that, for some people, it is a race. There is a breed of walker out there that is all about covering the miles, ticking off the mountains scaled or the rivers forded. If they could wrestle crocodiles and eat raw meat along the way, they would. I call them ‘the Alpha Ramblers’. They are very fit, have all the kit and use walking as a way of proving themselves to the world. They are – and I will be honest here – quite dull.

  I’m sure there is room for all of us in the great big outdoors, but Lucy and I are not Alpha Ramblers. What we are, we’re still trying to work out, but we do our best to take in our surroundings and enjoy ourselves, bearing in mind that Lucy’s always carrying a pole with a furry microphone on the end:

  ‘Ooh, look, it’s a feather duster!’

  ‘Is that a rabbit?’

  ‘Ah, can I stroke it?’

  And, ‘Go on, Bonzo, kill!’

  Yes, we’ve heard them all. Telling your Rottweiler to kill a BBC microphone is really not a very helpful thing to do, sir. In fact, it’s irresponsible. Just plain irresponsible.

  Archie occasionally comes along with me when I’m recording Ramblings. He’s not averse to a bit of mild barking – particularly at people in hats or hoods – but he’s never tried to attack the microphone. Nor has he peed on it, which can cause even more damage.

  I always have to make sure the listener knows Archie is there. That helps to explain the ‘noises off’ as I urge him to keep up, scream at him to come back, or berate him – as I did on Hampstead Heath when I took him to meet a walking book-club – for sinking into the smelliest, muddiest puddle he could find. He lay there grinning at me, the white hair on his neck and around his nose turning black as he wallowed like a Gloucester Old Spot on a hot day. He then went loopy loo, running round and round the bemused book-club members, shaking himself and barking as he rushed by.

  I think Lucy prefers it when Archie stays at home.

  In my more energetic moments I can see the attraction of Munro bagging, and I have plenty of admiration for those who have done all 282 peaks, particularly those who have walked or cycled in between and slept out on the hillside. But I’m not sure it’s really for me. I’m a bit too partial to a proper mattress and a hot shower, and I like a cup of hot tea in the morning, preferably brought to me in bed. A soft southerner? Yes, if you say so. Yes, I am.

  Anne and Annette were forcing me to drink more whisky, while Ulla told me about them all stripping off to skinny-dip in a burn (honestly, the woman is obsessed) when a group of Scouts suddenly appeared.

  ‘Vey must ’ave got the shock ov vare lives!’

  The music of friendship echoed around the rocks as we started our descent. I was a little tiddly, but the dram worked well enough to allow me to finish the programme and the walk.

  I will never forget the experience – I just wish I could remember the route. A combination of being hung-over, feeling like I was dying of laryngitis and being so tired I could barely see meant that I had no idea where we had been. Trust me, though, if you head up to Lochearnhead and stride out in pretty much any direction, you can’t go wrong.

  I went back recently to meet up with the Monday Walkers, ten years after our epic journey. Their adventures are a little more conservative now – they restrict themselves to six or seven miles on more kindly terrain. Three of them have been widowed, including Ulla, whose husband, Bill, had looked after us so well. Some of them have had hips or knees replaced, and one is contending with the early stages of Parkinson’s disease.

  But still they walk on. Every Monday.

  DUMMER–KINGSCLERE

  At the pub in Dummer, the kids are discussing their plans for long-distance walks along the South Downs Way or the Appalachian Trail, which I have told them is the longest walk in the world. Andrew looks at his watch and tells me it is time to go. I may have planned the route, but he is the referee with the stopwatch in his hand.

  So, at 3 p.m. on the dot, with my brother in his football disguise and me looking like a Boy Scout, we set off in search of the Wayfarer’s Walk. I tell him it will be the longest time we’ve spent on our own together since we were teenagers.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he says. ‘I sat next to you on the plane to America a couple of years ago.’

  As I recall, he was either asleep or watching a film for most of that flight. I hadn’t really stored it as a strong bonding experience. Over the years, we’d played a few rounds of golf together and occasionally shared a car journey, but one of us was always distracted by phone calls, or the radio, or hitting a golf ball. This will be different.

  I sort of know the direction we’re heading in, but my research had told me that this section of the walk isn’t as well marked as our first six miles. We get a few funny looks from the customers at the garden centre as we walk up its drive and cut right to the edge of the field. I am fairly sure we can walk on the grassy edge and pick up the footpath at the top, which will eventually link across to our WW path. Andrew is on a mission, and I am soon fighting stitch from my roast-chicken lunch as I struggle to keep up.

  The miles are ticking over at about four an hour. To be fair to my brother, he takes only one phone call, from a racehorse owner, and doesn’t get cross with me when we take a right fork instead of going through Bull’s Bushes Copse. We head along a damp tunnel under the railway line just south of Oakley, and hang left towards Deane, where we encounter our first major hurdle.

  The road out of Deane is flooded. And I don’t just mean the deep puddles of the Candovers. It is properly sunk in water maybe two or three feet high. Andrew thinks we can get through.

  ‘You’re all right, in those daft shorts,’ he says. ‘And I can roll up my tracksuit bottoms. Let’s just wade through it and put our shoes and socks back
on when we get to the other side.’

  I am game to give it a go until I notice the fence posts have disappeared under the water. We would end up swimming rather than wading.

  ‘There’s got to be another way,’ I say, ‘even if we end up on the road for a bit. We’ve just got to get to the next railway crossing and, after that, we’ll be much higher and we should be fine.’

  With the benefit of hindsight, taking the road is definitely what we should have done. But hindsight is a glorious thing. Instead, Andrew decides he can see a path where other people have ducked through the trees and climbed the metal fence into a huge field that banks steeply up towards a wood. I can see from my ‘route planner’ that it is vaguely in the right direction but, without the benefit of an OS map, I don’t have any contours or proper landmarks. We hop into the field and I start praying that the landowner won’t come charging out of the large house below and start shooting at us.

  As it is, around fifty sheep decide we are the most interesting thing that has happened in their lives for a long time. They come steadily towards us, baa-ing loudly, in a mood that is hard to define.

  ‘I can’t decide whether they want to eat me or make love to me,’ says Andrew, who seems to be the main object of their attention.

  ‘Go away!’ he says firmly. ‘I have nothing for you. Now go away.’

  I imagine the headline – ‘QUEEN’S RACEHORSE TRAINER FOUND TRESPASSING TRAMPLED BY SHEEP’ – but they get the message and politely retreat, leaving us to climb over another fence into a wood. We can see where the Wayfarer’s Walk is meant to be, but instead of a path there is a swan gliding elegantly over our route. We are stuck.

  There is a point in any walk of a decent length where you stop trying to make conversation and concentrate on the important details: where are we going and how are we going to get there? We have reached that point.

  We ponder our options, which aren’t plentiful, and decide to cut back to the road, which is the way we should have taken half an hour ago, before we decided to trespass and make friends with the sheep.

  So we are tramping along the road in single file, dealing with the things you deal with – like a bug flying into Andrew’s eye and blinding him, or my feet feeling dangerously close to blistering – when we pass a farm which I knew I’d seen marked on the map. The trouble is, on the map, it wasn’t on the road I thought we were on. We are about to cross the railway for a second time, about four miles south of where we wanted to be.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Andrew. ‘I know where we are. I’ve run out this way, and if we stay on the road we’ll hit North Oakley, and then we’re nearly home.’

  Our original plan had been to follow faithfully the Wayfarer’s Walk from Emsworth to Kingsclere. But the rules had gone out the window when we ditched the first forty miles, so who was I to argue that we weren’t being true to our purpose now?

  As we pass Ashe Warren House, which is marked on an OS map for those clever enough to have one, a woman is shooing her dog back behind the gates.

  ‘Hello, you two!’ she says, a look of complete surprise on her face. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’re walking home,’ I reply. ‘From Dummer,’ I add, smiling, to try to show that it was a choice and that we hadn’t been thrown out of the car by our parents for fighting on the back seat.

  The woman says, ‘Are you looking for the Wayfarer’s Walk?’

  We nod.

  ‘Just take the next right, and you’ll hit it up by those trees. It’s not far. I take the dogs that way every morning.’

  We walk on, and I show Andrew the photos of the map on my phone.

  ‘But that takes us on a loop we don’t need to do,’ he says. ‘If we carry straight on up this road, we’ll hit North Oakley and we can join it there.’

  He points at the map, and I can’t fault his argument, although I’m hardly feeling the romance of our trek home if we do it all on a road. Barely twenty minutes of shin-splitting road trudging later, and we do indeed hit North Oakley, a pretty village I have never visited in my life because it’s not on any route I would normally take to Kingsclere. Andrew confesses he hadn’t known it existed either until he started his marathon training.

  He is still setting quite a pace, striding along in his tracksuit bottoms, knapsack on his back. I can’t pretend we have a series of deep and meaningful conversations – you can’t when you’re walking in single file along a road. Alice asked me later what we’d talked about, and I couldn’t really remember.

  ‘Oh, everything and nothing,’ I said.

  I find it weird that Andrew and I have the same genes, had the same upbringing, and yet are so different. He is very patient, and I’m not. He is a diplomat, and I’m a freedom fighter. He is a non-confrontational traditionalist, and I want to change the world. He can follow the same pattern every day, and I need constant variety. He is a homing pigeon, and I’m a traveller.

  I wasn’t really thinking about this at the time, I was just wondering how he had such a long stride and wishing he would slow down. Then he says, ‘I’m not sure I’d really be interested in this walking lark if it wasn’t local. I mean, why would you want to go to Scotland when you can have this?’

  I try to explain that walking in Scotland is sensational, but Andrew is like Dad: they are suspicious of praise for other places, in case you might somehow be denigrating the beauty of Kingsclere by mentioning that the area around Aberdeen is quite pretty.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Dad would baulk. ‘You can’t get anywhere finer than right here.’

  I used to argue and show him photos of Northumberland, Yorkshire, Devon, Cornwall, Jersey, the Isle of Wight or Ireland – but he wouldn’t have it. I wasn’t suggesting that Kingsclere wasn’t beautiful or that he ought to move, merely that there were other landscapes to be admired.

  ‘Pah!’ he would say. ‘Not as good as this.’

  I suppose it’s a good thing for him and for Andrew that they don’t hanker after other views, because this is the one they get on a daily basis and it’s not bad. Not bad at all.

  We finally fork off the road back on to a footpath and glimpse the edge of Cannon Heath Down in the distance. We turn right to see a long, gently sloping tunnel path, tree roots below and branches overhead. The sort of place you’d take an American if you wanted to show them what footpaths look like.

  We have lost sight of the television mast that had worked as our North Pole throughout the walk. We had seen it from Dummer, Deane and North Oakley, and I knew it had to be hidden just behind the trees. Andrew’s children call it ‘Two Lights’ and think of it, as I used to, as their own private beacon.

  The sun has lost its warmth and is beginning to dip, but if we can get to Hannington it will be downhill from there. We might just make it before dark. We pass a group of caravans mounted on concrete blocks and come out at a road crossing I recognize.

  ‘Look! The mast’s just there!’ I say, pointing to the right.

  We are less than two miles from home, haven’t got lost, haven’t needed to be picked up, haven’t injured ourselves. We are still talking – infrequently, but only because we’ve been walking for nearly four hours and we’ve run out of things to say. We walk up the border of a huge wheatfield on our final climb as the sun starts to set on our left behind the Downs. The gallops and the Team Chase course look different from this angle. I am overwhelmed by the desire to jump on a horse and thunder off in that direction.

  Andrew decides that it will be quicker to carry straight on than take the Wayfarer’s Walk, which turns left towards White Hill car park then cuts right down the Phoenix Reach gallop (named after a globetrotting Group 1-winning horse he trained). It isn’t. Quicker, I mean.

  As we climb over the fence on to ‘our side’ of the hill, I suggest that we give thanks to the land for not killing our father when he had a fall up there eight years ago and broke his neck.

  Dad was jumping the tyres he’d built for the drag hunt. He can’t r
esist ‘popping’ a few little jumps, even on an ex-flat horse that can’t really lift its feet off the ground or a spooky hunter that shies at its own shadow. There were rabbit holes all around the tyres. Sam, the horse he was riding, put his front foot in a hole on take-off and catapulted Dad over the fence into the ground on the landing side, head first. He broke his C2, known as the Hangman’s Bone. In A&E at Basingstoke Hospital he said, ‘I suppose I’m lucky not to be paralysed.’

  The doctor replied, ‘No, you’re lucky not to be dead.’

  He was in a brace for four months, during which time he swore a lot and behaved like a child, demanding attention, sympathy and food. Poor Mum.

  Dad still has a bit of trouble turning to look both ways when he pulls out of a road junction, and he wouldn’t be best placed side on to a tennis match, but he’s pretty well recovered and still rides out every day, plays tennis and golf. He’d even ski – if anyone would let him near a mountain.

  I pause and think about my father lying there in agony, incapable of moving, as his horse farted and trotted off home. Andrew has turned his back on me and is facing the hedge.

  ‘Are you giving thanks?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I’m having a pee.’

  A thanks of sorts, I suppose.

  The trouble with the route my brother had chosen for our final section is that not only is it not shorter than taking the actual footpath, it is also unbearably steep – unbearable if your toes have been pressed up against the end of your shoes for longer than is comfortable and you fear you may have shin splints. I potter as best I can down the slope and think about doing it backwards because it will hurt less, but then decide against it because I will inevitably fall over and break my neck. Then my brother will come back in a few years and pee on the spot where it happened.