It was fresh the following morning as I clambered out of the barn, sore and stiff, blinking at the glinting of the boggy plain ahead, tinged with dew and frosty edges. The sun shone a thin clear blue through a faint mist, and I looked over the shining grasses towards the mountain. It was draped in folds of mist that clung to the top like licks of whipped cream. I paused in wonder for a few breaths of crisp, cold air, and set off to climb it. Plynlimon is less a rocky peak of a mountain and more a lumpy heap of grass-covered water. Because the Rheidol, the Wye and the Severn rise from it, the ground where they gather is running, oozing, with water which collects until it is more than the earth and overflows, pulled by gravity towards the sea.
I crossed a small metal bridge lying next to the track that wound across the open plain and around the reservoir, eventually linking with the road on the other side of this open sheep-walk. Straight ahead of me lay the peak of the mountain, high behind a small lake. But I was going to turn left and climb at a different point further north, towards the source of the Severn.
I trod my way carefully towards the first slope, following a stream that wound around the hill’s base. Bog blanketed the valley, clumps of reeds or long grasses that had to be picked through carefully. Sometimes instead of earth there would be unexpected squelchy water and I would rebalance, using my single walking-pole to probe and find a better footstep.
My boots had been damp when I put them on, and they were soon soaked through, filling with icy water that took a while to heat to body temperature and become comfortable.
The stream took me past a rectangle of tumbled stone, remnants of a small cottage abandoned 120 years ago. Across on the other side of the valley there was another, with a wavering chimney-stack resolute against the destruction of the brutal wind and creeping, dripping rainwater. Hilary, my landlady and friend at Talbontdrain, had met the last woman to live in that house. She’d told me about the child walking eight miles to school on Monday and returning on a Friday, the visiting pedlars. I imagined the lumpy laden carts trundling, dipping and rising over that wild, lovely landscape and thought of the mother in that house, sending her children to school to spend days alone, her husband outside, fighting the weather, struggling to claim land from nature and turn it to other ends, with only grass, moss and changing skies to see from her windows.
I followed the stream onwards, splashing in and out of wet grass and plant clumps, until I came to an incoming stream running down from a fold in the land. It was too big for my clumsy, cumbersome body to jump over, so I hunted up and down like a frustrated dog nosing at the stream, trying to find a way to cross the obstacle. Every time I thought I could see a place to cross, where the stream narrowed invitingly with large rocks placed either side of a small rush of water, I’d walk to it and find a torrent lined with slippery moss. The huge rucksack unbalanced me, made me too scared to take a risk.
After moving fruitlessly up and down for ages, I finally found a crossing-point, heaved my pack over the stream and followed, splashing a gout of ice cold water over my already sodden feet.
From there it was just a long, slow, heave up the hill. I stopped often, utterly lacking in energy. Sometimes it was to stare back the way I’d come, marvelling at the hard-won footsteps, and sometimes it was to admire the lush mixed mosses that bulged out of the wiry green grass. There were starburst fronds, colours from deep green to icy pale lime, sometimes shocking like crusted lichen and sometimes green and fronded in miniature forests. There were craggy pillars of pale green, warped and knobbled, ending in bulbous bright red growths. These soft pillows of moss were beautiful, sometimes so big you could sink up to your knees if you stepped on them.
I wanted to lie down there, forget the cold mist and damp clothes, just to put my face to this tiny forest and sink into the luscious surface, to rest and look up through the moss trees. But I knew that it was only movement keeping me warm. Every time I stopped, my clothes would chill against my body, and it wasn’t too long before I had to lumber up again and continue taking tiny steps against the slope, my calves burning in pain as I crept up the hill, bent against the weight of my pack.
Once the slope levelled out, I searched for landmarks in the mist. It’s a pretty featureless place up there, just shaggy grass and occasional soggy-edged pools. There were crags of peat curl-topped like waves, shaped into smooth curves at the base: sheep-chosen resting places where they can lie contented, sheltered from the wind.
A fence ran the length of the mountain, and the source of the Severn was on the other side of it. The official start of this huge river is marked by a wooden post, sticking up high in a sea of water and peat, brown water pooling in sticky mud, bottomless pools that are best avoided, lest you sink all the way down to the heart of the mountain. A trail of flagstones leads to it from the other side of my own approach, a safe path laid by humans. The mighty Severn, longest river in Britain, starts where crags and lumps of peat and mud crack and divide into islands, water trickling between them. It ends 220 miles away in the unstoppable four-mile-wide burst of the estuary. Not in a roar but a quiet hum, a near-silent force.
I took a few pics in celebration, grinning, rotund and sweating in black waterproofs, wreathed in a woollen headband, and set off downhill, trotting easily on the stone path down into the Hafren Forest. I came down through the pine trees to where the path joined a broader track running alongside the Severn. No longer a tumbling rushing stream, it had grown into a young river, too broad to jump across now. In the trees next to the path was a well-trodden area of flat ground, claimed from the forest before it made the earth impassable with soggy ruts and fallen branches. There was a small shelter there in the edge of the trees: just a branch leant up against a tree, others placed crosswise to form a skeleton shelter. When I’d walked the Severn two and a half years before, I’d slept in there on my first night, wriggling down into the length of the enclosed space, finding a way to shape my body around the lumps and rises of the root-riven ground. It had taken me almost a day longer to reach it this time and, discounting the rain and delayed start the previous day, I doubted my fitness.
Passing the waterfalls, I came down into an area of deep forest where the water lay thickly in the moss-choked grooves between pine trees. There was a wide boardwalk running by the river, slippery with creeping greenery, tinged with damp growth. It felt vaguely Germanic, a very wholesome way to come and enjoy the river, an organised viewing, wilderness tamed and made easy to access.
As I turned into the car park I saw people, dog-walkers. They were the first I’d seen in over twenty-four hours and I was shocked by the idea of interaction, almost recoiling from it. It had been an intense and solitary fight to get my lumpen and laden self over that mountain, and I’d forgotten there were other people on the planet. I smiled and spoke to them, the strangeness of human contact disappearing within seconds as I asked how to get to Llanidloes, the first town on the river.
My friend Heloise lived nearby and had offered to come and pick me up from the town, but I didn’t want to stay with her that first time. I wasn’t used to accepting help; I organised myself, looked after myself and shied away from any offer that suggested that what I could provide for myself was lacking. It wasn’t a conscious rejection, I hadn’t realised that was what I was doing. I instinctively brushed Heloise off, breezily telling her I’d probably be fine, would be past Llanidloes by the second day, no need for her help. As an afterthought, sensing that my rejection required softening, I added that I’d call her if I needed anything.
But, as I came down out of the Hafren Forest and onto the road I realised it would be stupid not to call Heloise. It was 4pm and there were seven more miles of hard painful tarmac before Llanidloes, another three hours of walking at my tired trudging speed. What was I doing? Why camp out so close to Llani when there was a friend’s bed waiting nearby? I was wet, my spare clothes were wet and I’d spent a day and a half walking over a mountain. What was I trying to prove? Once I became so debilitated it seemed li
ke a simple decision. I had no phone signal, so stopped at the first house I came to, knocking and asking to use the phone.
Heloise swooped, buzzing along the lane in her little red Punto and whisking me away from a damp night in the woods to her cluttered and comfortable rented house where I would be safe and looked after. She quickly organised cocktails, filling food, a bath and clean clothes. I just had to sit while she fluttered and cared for me, my clothes drying nicely on the airer and belongings scattered over every surface. I didn’t know then that this would become a familiar routine. I hadn’t imagined that this was how the journey was going to be.
The soaking wet boots had rubbed against my heel leaving a small, thumbnail sized blister, as well as others on my toes. I decided to tape my toes and put a blister-plaster on my heel, pulling it proudly from my first-aid kit. I’d never used one before, or even travelled with a first-aid kit. I felt very proud and well prepared.
I could walk another day of the route and come back to Heloise again; she’d ferry me back to yesterday’s pick-up point and come back to collect me in the evening. I walked down the tarmac road into Llanidloes and out again the other side, stopping in a pub to have a strangely intimate conversation with the barmaid about female power and self-actualisation.
Coming out of a series of muddy, tiring fields that climbed up and out of a valley a few miles out of Llanidloes, I came to a crossroads where I could call Heloise and await a pick-up. No phone signal, though, so I walked to a nearby house and called from their landline, sat on a low grit-bin at the side of the road until I was cold, and watched the winding corner of the road for a while, waiting for her car to come into view, a tired and grateful walker.
Back at the house, the routine of cocktails and kit-washing well established, she gave me a bowl of water to soak my feet. We chatted as I drank a huge mojito, Heloise carefully squeezing the fresh lime, mixing it with rum and sugar. The plaster started to peel away from my heel and I unthinkingly bent down and pulled it further. Disaster. It seemed to have pulled the skin away entirely. I didn’t just have a small blister anymore; the whole of my heel was raw. I had fundamentally misunderstood the way blister-plasters worked; where the plaster had bonded to my skin I’d just pulled it away, tripling the size of the skinless area. My thumbnail-sized blister had become an oval about two inches long.
Heloise phoned ahead to Newtown, running through her list of contacts to find someone I could stay with the following night. I accepted her help, not really knowing what else to do, not really able to process the idea that after only twenty miles of this huge journey I was hobbling and in need of aid. She would drop me back at the crossroads, then meet me later that night with my bag and introduce me to her friend Karen. All I had to do was walk fourteen miles in the meantime.
I looked ahead from the lonely crossroads. The path dipped down into a valley, going past a couple of small farmhouses and curving up to the right and around the hillside. I had to walk that. I had to get miles done that day, had to get to the next bed waiting for me, to the end of the section I’d set for myself, to Bristol in three weeks’ time. It was too soon to stop. I’d set out to walk 3300 miles; how could I stop after twenty? It simply wasn’t an option.
There was nothing to do but set off, agonising pain shooting through the raw skin at the back of my heel. The urge to limp was so strong, I had to force my steps into a stride, push my legs to walk in an ordinary, casual gait. After a couple of steps the agony would lessen and I could continue to walk normally, the pain reduced to a manageable background buzz.
“Come on, Ursula, it’s just skin. It’s not serious pain, of course I can walk like this, of course I can get to Newtown.”
It was OK, just about. I walked through green fields, alongside pine copses, around small farmhouses, eventually coming high up alongside the Severn valley and dropping down to meet the river again as it looped wide and lazy through the flat flood-plain, the trace of the glacier carved wide and clear. I rested a while at the foot of a huge oak tree, curved and gnarly, roots flowing outwards to allow me a seat, eventually, hours later, stumping numbly into Newtown, feet like swollen stones in my boots.
That night at Karen’s the pain was sharp and strong. I tried to make conversation with this friendly and interesting new person, but I couldn’t focus away from the pain in my foot. Worry about the next few days kept stealing my attention, making me drift into silent thought. I rested on the sofa for a while, trying to chat or watch TV, but when I got up again I couldn’t put any weight on it. My knee buckled and I had to catch myself on the chair and table edge. The skin was drying, trying to heal and I just broke the wound open again with every new movement.
The blister was huge and egg-shaped, taking up most of my heel. Excruciating pain shot through it the next morning as I tried to walk. It was an effort to straighten up, to avoid limping. I had to force myself to think of my posture, think of the weight on my back.
I marched forward, muttering orders to myself, forcing myself to stiffen my back and continue walking smoothly through the first few agonising steps as the raw skin pressed against the back of my boot, and pain screamed an urgent message to stop. If I could get into a regular pace then the pain lessened. If I curled my body against the pain, guarded the impact on that boot by limping, it would strain the rest of my body, which was already aching too much to take extra impact.
Not far out of Newtown the path turned to follow the Montgomery Canal, an arm of the UK canal network, reaching out into Wales as far as it could before the hills became too numerous. It was a relief for me; eleven miles of a wide flat path gave me a wonderful chance to build up a steady pace, no changes of terrain or angle to force the raw skin against my boot in a shriek of pain and jerky hobbling. The canal was beautiful: underwater plants waving in glassy serenity, cows treading the opposite edge, dipping in to curl their tongues through the water. Small bridges, individually numbered, squatted low over the water, their bricks beautifully aged and flaking. I ducked under their curves, thinking of the horses, tethered to ever tug and plod their way to and from the big towns. The canal was impassable now, full of years of silt and plant-leavings.
Out of Newtown I could call on Laura. She’d picked me up the previous summer as I hitchhiked to Bristol.
“I’m on my way to hospital: ovarian cancer,” I’d said proudly.
“I’m having treatment for breast cancer,” she’d replied calmly.
I looked at the hat holding close to her bare head and breathed in. We piqued an interest in each other. She’d invited me home for tea and to share cancer stories: not in a flood of warmth or an outpouring of traumatic detail but in comfortable common knowledge, the bond already made, sharing only serving to cement it. It felt important to spend time with this woman who’d picked me up from the side of the road.
Her house turned out to be a sprawling ramshackle hall, pillars at the door and a high-ceilinged kitchen. She had six children, two adopted, plus years of fostering under her belt. Calm, surety and a sense of purpose were the cornerstones of this very strong woman, allowing her to provide a place where others could develop the same qualities. Laura approached her cancer with the same calmness and organisation, arranging childcare for the week of her chemo cycle when exhaustion took over.
“I just lie on the sofa and knit” she said, as if it wasn’t too much trouble at all, light filtering dimly into the large room filled with sagging, comfortable sofas, an almost adult boy banging through in the background, saying hello.
I fitted quietly into the mix of teenagers filling her table, fostered, adopted and birthed, talking over each other, comparing selfies. An extra body to feed and house for one night was no bother here.
We walked a short way along the canal together to say goodbye, ending with talking about the false heroics of being a cancer survivor. I’m alive because of luck and doctors: the random way the tumour grew and because other people removed it and took care of me. I didn’t fight cancer, I endured it and i
t knocked me sideways during the process. I wasn’t brave, I was terrified and that made me a miserable, whining patient, prone to self-pity, petty anger and tears. Maybe that’s not how it was for Laura; it’s certainly not what I saw in her experience. We shared a rejection of the labelling, the tropes of being a brave warrior, battling cancer. My illness was a traumatic ordeal, but being labelled as a heroine and survivor was something it was hard to avoid, especially as my story became a public one through my own attempts to raise funds and symptoms awareness.
Shrewsbury came, and the welcome relief of my Auntie Susie with her warm hugs and loud laughs. She came out to get me when I came within a day’s walk of the town, whisking me forward for a day to be fussed over. I could finally soak away the blister-plaster and show off my heel to appropriate shock and shrieks, revealing an egg-sized patch of fresh pink skin, frilled by thin scabs and tender to the slightest breath of air. I could sit on the sofa and read magazines, be brought cake and tea, cream for my heel, eventually sliding down into an afternoon nap, covered over by a soft, white, furry blanket.
I went to the boot shop and returned the pair I’d bought in haste. They were too small and leaking. I was fitted for a replacement pair, full leather to the ankles. Walking up and down a small, rubber-covered lump that was supposed to represent hill gradients, I tried to guess whether my toes were pressing against the front of the boots. These would do, I thought, grasping at straws again.
A day later, Susie and I went back out again and walked into Shrewsbury together, retracing the route I’d been spirited over by car, entering the town and walking underneath the huge bridges. I saw my first boats in Shrewsbury; the river would begin to be navigable below its huge weir.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 3