Shaking away the illusion I walked on and came out of the trees high above Llanbrynmair, seeing many hills below me, lapping away to Machynlleth and the sea. The sun glinted on a tiny triangle of open water, away in the far distance. I’d walked to the edge of my home district. Down there, further along towards Cemmaes Road, began the places where my friends lived, where I’d go for visits, cups of tea and afternoons in the sun: the roads I knew, the farms and houses I’d visited to care for the elderly.
Home started in this view, where the River Rhiwsaeson curled down from the hills I stood in, met two others in Llanbrynmair and became the River Twymyn, running around to the west to join the River Dyfi at Cemmaes Road. The Dyfi Valley spread out all the way to Dinas Mawddwy, forming a scattered community of houses, farms and villages, centred on Machynlleth. Up in the forest wilds of Aberangell, or the sheltered peace of Aberhosan, people turned towards Machynlleth as the place they went to shop and gather together, and I’d follow Glyndŵr’s Way from here to there the next day, walking back to the clock tower again after I’d left it six weeks before. It was the first time I’d return, but not the last; I was still several thousand miles away from that final finishing point.
From the top of the hills, wind blowing life at me and the sunshine dappling on the green expanse, I descended in and out of small pine plantations, following small green lanes, tree-blocked, no longer the places of passage they once were. Modern farmers’ quad bikes could whizz up whichever incline they pleased. I came at last to the lane that held the road to the gateway to Annie’s Land, Tir Heddwch, somewhere I’d been driving up to for the last two years and I could go to receive a warm hug and feel loved. Annie fed and petted me, showing me clippings about my journey she’d cut out of the local newspaper. My rucksack had arrived before me, like magic. I’d walked away from it up in Nant yr Eira and here it was again, safely carried round on the road by Caroline and Mick; they’d done the long tarmac trip while I took the high hills shortcut.
A day later, in Machynlleth I bought knee-supports and called in at the wholefood shop; they were really kind about my panicked over-ordering – 5kg of dried vegetables, 5kg of peanuts, 5 kg of sultanas, 5kg of Bombay mix, 5kg of dried apricots, 5kg of cacao nibs, 5kg of trail mix. They took back the peanuts and sultanas, split and packaged them to sell themselves; it was just the dried vegetables they couldn’t sell. No-one would buy it and it wasn’t surprising; I’d bought enough to start a pot-noodle company.
I’d already taken a lot of things back to Ruth’s house; kept the apricots, the trail mix, the cacao nibs, added it to my supply dump: a huge storage-box full of scattered chocolate bars, books I’d saved from my previous flat, all the guidebooks I’d bought in advance, plus stores of odd things like extra socks or tins of lighter fluid for my handwarmer, packets of strange food that might be useful, Kendal mint cake, falafel powder, protein supplement to add to muesli, sold in strange, huge plastic jars as a weightlifter’s muscle-building aid. I was constantly fighting against the weight of my rucksack, taking things out and sending them home, spending hundreds of pounds on postage over the duration of the journey: a foam roller for tense muscles, spare smartphone battery-pack, waterproof trousers… Too heavy, too bulky, not warm enough, not cooling enough, not used enough, not efficient. Scarf, hat and gloves had been necessary at the beginning of March but weren’t in late April.
The boxes were silting up; they became a layered thing to root through, putting aside the discarded gloves, the extraneous insoles, the spare fleece waistcoat, maps and guidebooks that I no longer needed. There were things that I tried but didn’t work for me; an orange, plastic emergency survival shelter that would coat the outside of my sleeping bag with all the moisture that escapes from my body overnight and a rucksack cover that didn’t fit over the extra things I strapped to the outside of my bag. There were many different attempts at easing foot pain: discarded gel inserts, foot lotion, half-squeezed tubes of Deep Heat, ibuprofen gel and arnica cream. There were scattered boxes of matches, painkillers, bent sachets of Dioralyte, small lengths of rope, as well as things people gave me in the hope of easing my journey: gaiters to stop rain running into my boots, bicarbonate of soda to stop them smelling so awful, single-use handwarmers. There were stray postcards and scrawled children’s drawings, carefully hoarded memories of a thousand special days. I’d sift through the detritus every time I passed, pick out a new book, pull out a couple of chocolate bars, a fresh stack of symptoms-cards, refill my puny bag of trail mix from the gigantic plastic sack that never seemed to lessen in volume.
The route from Machynlleth led to Llanidloes, where I could stay with Heloise again. But first I had to climb up and over a broad moorland gap, cross the heights of the uplands, where rippling grasses and scattered gorges and lakes led south to Plynlimon. After a day walking in the beautiful Dyfi valley and a sharp, sweaty climb up the 500m of Foel Fadian, I came out into a different world. This was the landscape I loved best, raw and difficult to control.
A complex mass of plants grew here, clumps growing and holding and supporting each other in twenty shades of green to delight my eyes. Only in the sheep-nibbled tracks could the ordinary green grass creep in. The textures palpated my vision – shaggy, bulbous, feathered mosses, samphire-like stalks of young bilberry bushes shooting upwards through rounded moss-clumps and purple heather. Occasional gorse grew in a sheltered space and, where the land truly dipped, in the curves that held still air, a gnarled and weathered tree, arthritic hawthorn or rowan, grown small and stunted.
I stayed for the night near Dylife, a wild place where the wind blows strong and bitter. Snow comes every winter, the houses are scattered, and scars have been cut into the ground by the diggings for lead. The Star Inn stands as a traveller’s beacon, a respite on the journey over the pass for the drovers, the trudgers, the itinerant.
I’d walked as far as I could that day, but my host was still another village over so I thumbed a lift from a pleasant-faced farmer in a golf buggy, dogs rattling and barking in the caged back. He told me I’d accidentally picked a dead-end road to try and get to Pennant. I walked 100m back to the main road and he kindly came back ten minutes later in his pickup and took me the six miles to Pennant, telling me he was a fifth-generation moss-farmer, a fascinating detail.
I came gratefully to Felicity, my writers’-group friend from Machynlleth, finding a new appreciation for her hardworking days of mothering two children in a very isolated village, the intellectual escape of her editorial self-employment. Lambs rattled into the kitchen in the morning, searching for their bottle feeds, and I was joyous, spreading out my fingers for them each to take a suck, the ridges of their greedy mouths pulsing away at a finger, small teeth mouthing but not biting.
After the first couple of days of camping in the northern section of Glyndŵr’s Way, I was hosted almost everywhere – so much so that I almost felt bad. Did I deserve this? This was supposed to be a tough adventure, inciting donations to charity, not a stroll from meal to meal. I’d sit down to eat food that friends had cooked for me and they wouldn’t even let me wash up. I could just get up from the table and go straight to bath and bed, feeling selfish. I understood their compassion as they watched me though, just rising from my seat took a slow-motion effort of creaks and groans. Walking felt fine during the day, once I’d stretched and started, but as soon I sat down for the evening I’d solidify into an achy shuffling lump.
“I’m fine, I’m fine”, I’d manage to blurt, as I hobbled up the stairs towards glorious immersion in hot water.
I was tired. Really, the groans were just a symptom of the effort I’d made to date: 395 miles covered in six weeks. The beginning stages of the walk brought the pain of blood swelling into my feet to cushion against the unexpected pounding, leading to a sharpened ache at the new internal pressure, feet feeling like clumsy stones at the end of every day, cells brutalised by the repeated thump and press.
After the final section of the ODP between Knighton and Mon
tgomery, with steep hill after steep hill I’d toughened up. The ordinary hills felt easy, the flat sections felt like flying, my legs driving on by themselves. My body was developing muscle and I started to feel power inside me, a steely core that could walk and sleep and walk and sleep. I felt solid; my body didn’t hurt in the same way as at the beginning of the walk. And yet I was heavy and tired, my thigh muscles starting to flicker into cramps on the day I reached Machynlleth. My body was growing to strength, yet under a duress that brought it close to breaking. The peace of sleep saved me, each morning bringing me fresh ability after the collapse of the previous night. The rhythmic rubbing and soothing of my muscles helped relax me into sleep, ritually removing the tension from the walk-formed cramps and knots.
Being hosted along this section, seeing friends, was lovely – but nevertheless I felt stressed. I was slow compared to the pace I’d planned, what I felt I should be doing. I fell prey to imposing the killer should upon my reality. I should be doing fifteen miles a day by now to reach to Bristol again by September. I’m not good enough, I’m pathetic, an idiot, a total failure.
But if I walked fifteen miles a day, I exhausted myself for the following day. I was carrying too much in my rucksack but didn’t seem able to let go of it. I was carrying too much weight on my body, I hadn’t prepared properly for this, I couldn’t do it, I was useless and stupid. Twelve miles a day felt sluggish and slow, why was this all I could manage? I’d be laughed at by most long-distance walkers, the ones I read about on the internet, flying up USA trails with their 5kg pack-weights and their thirty-mile days. I felt like a fat amateur in comparison. I wanted to walk more but I was so, so tired, I could barely handle what I was doing now, struggling to get going in the mornings, squeezing in an extra rest-day with James and Vicky near Machynlleth.
I found it very easy to think negatively about myself, especially regarding comparison with others. It was something I’d been trying to conquer my whole life and now, as I pushed myself to achieve something extraordinary, the nasty thoughts of my inadequacy and weakness became a strong voice that was sometimes difficult to ignore.
Heloise took me in again, once the Glyndŵr’s Way passed around Clywedog reservoir and into Llanidloes. I spent the day gradually descending from the high places and entering regular farmland, uniform enclosed fields green and seeded, winding around the spiked fingers of the reservoir, negotiating boardwalks over flooded valley corners, finally arriving at her place to be treated to more cocktails, flambéed banana pancakes and generally glorious food.
East of Llanidloes, almost at the end of Glyndŵr’s Way, I spent two days walking from Llanbadarn Fynydd to Knighton with an old friend, Will, who visited from London on his way home from Pembrokeshire. He was a 6ft swimmer, cyclist and all-round athlete; he even carried my bag as well as his own so that we’d be equally paced. We stopped for lunch in a chapel, unlocked for once, enjoying the usually hidden space, feeling slightly criminal as we ate the sandwiches he’d brought from Pembrokeshire and looked at Sunday school outings photographs from the 50s, monuments to time long past. The importance of this chapel had faded, leaving behind an empty building, musty air and dusty windowsills, a lone loyal lady coming to hoover once a week. We spent the night in Will’s tent, no sleep for me as an owl chose to make his perch in a tree directly above us, shrieking out a regular small-hours hoot.
The land turned to moorland on the way towards Llangunllo the next day, the last small piece of wilderness on our way back to Knighton and the smoothed-down borderlands. We climbed above the close-crowding, muddy-shanked cows and came to an open, misty land, tracking our way between two gentle hills. Resting there and eating Will’s sweets, I bit into a lump of hard toffee and felt a tooth separate, splitting into two. A piece of filling had flaked away from there months earlier and I’d ignored it, even though I could occasionally feel the tooth creaking and aching. I was too caught up in the rush of journey preparation to acknowledge such impediments. I hate dentists, avoid them, but I couldn’t ignore this; the tooth had cracked open, half of it wobbling loose in my mouth.
I kept my fears to myself and walked on with Will to a small village near the train line where we said goodbye: him hitching back to London and an impending art exhibition, me to walk to Knighton and the end of Glyndŵr’s Way. I knew I had to sort out the tooth problem immediately and as soon as I reached Knighton, I hitched to Machynlleth for an emergency appointment, taking a night’s rest with Claire in Welshpool on the way.
I sat in Claire’s kitchen. This time she’d gone to work and left me with a day to take time out before the dentist’s visit later. I had a kitchen table, a sunny window, endless cups of tea and Radio 4 murmuring reassuringly – my favourite way to spend breakfast time. I had space to do some staring, think about plucking my eyebrows, look at the internet. All while the minutes slowly passed and the world burbled in the background, at a peaceful volume. Even though I hated the fact that I’d have to pay to experience pain (I had enough of it for free) it was nice to have an enforced rest. A day to look in shops, to hitchhike, to chat, relax my body and enjoy the day, no pressure to be anywhere else.
I’d been feeling nervous over the previous week. It felt as if I was going so slowly this would never be done. When I thought of the hundreds of miles I’d trudged over the last few weeks and how it was a very, very small fraction of the thousands still to come, the size, the enormity of what I was taking on, felt insurmountable. I felt rage at the total mileage, puny in the face of it. I’d found myself pushing for a few extra daily miles, always thinking ahead, panting to get to the next town, to the end of this path, to begin the next section. I wasn’t walking any faster, just mentally throwing myself at the mileage, the equivalent of pushing your feet against the car floor as it bowls along the motorway. Do it, get it done, push onwards, so many miles to walk, so far to go. But my body simply wasn’t capable. Too many miles one day meant more pain the next.
I had to recognise the time as well as the distance – this wasn’t going to end quickly but would last, unequivocally, for months and months and months and no amount of push would get it over with. I was trying to sprint through a long-distance race and if I didn’t go slowly, mentally as well as physically, it would break me.
The dentist put in a temporary filling. I imagined the line of amalgam snaking through my tooth in a Japanese Kintsugi style, mended but more beautiful for it. Then it was back to the walk. I felt grumpy at the thought of walking that tough section of the Offa’s Dyke Path again, from Knighton to Welshpool and, at the last moment, as I hitched east out of Machynlleth, I decided to skip it. Sod it, I excused myself, I’ve already walked it once, it’s an extra, an add-on, not part of any named routes. I felt bad about not walking a flowing route, the idea of what I’d designed was a route that never stopped and started, but I felt like I kept getting delayed – especially irritating when it was imposed on me by unwanted dentistry.
Back on the Offa’s Dyke Path, heading north away from Welshpool, I spent a few nights camping in pub gardens. I was getting used to my new tooth, managing decent distances every day, things didn’t feel too bad.
Val in Selattyn was the stepmother of a friend of my mum’s: another typically tenuous and roundabout way for me to be invited to spend the night in the home of a complete stranger. She was careful and nervous, an almost-retired music teacher, leading a quiet widow’s life, full of choir recitals and village meetings. She offered me a gin and tonic as I sat in her kitchen, taking in this new home, watching the cats waft in and out of their favourite sleeping-spots. I’m not sure welcoming strangers into her home was something she did very often, but Val had made a space for me in her life, and set out a small selection of snacks in my bedroom, next to the pile of towels. It was a wonderful welcome.
The night after walking away from kind, caring Val, I slept in a field again. I’d been able to walk without my rucksack for the morning and after I got it back at lunchtime it felt incredibly heavy. I trudged up a
nd down the hills very, very slowly.
I walked into the grounds of Chirk Castle, through bluebell woods in full blossom, and on to the entrance where they had a second-hand bookshop. I couldn’t resist picking up two books, one a hardback. Far too heavy! I’d finished Nelson Mandela’s autobiography earlier that day and I was able to buy the biographies of Hannah Hauxwell and Malcolm X. Hannah’s book must have weighed a kilo and a half, a ridiculous purchase but I vowed I’d read it that night and pass it on the next day.
I left the castle grounds and walked on, trudging by now, the rucksack feeling its full 16kg weight. It was early evening, the time of day where I should start looking for sleeping places.
I spent a long time looking at a dip down by a stone wall – very sheltered but stony at the bottom. Nope, right by the path, not quite the one for me. I walked on, past a house that had placed spikes along the top of all the gates (including the footpath gate); there were high walls, signs warning of dogs and telling me to close the gate and not trespass on private property. I wasn’t going to knock on that door and ask to sleep in their garden, sure I’d get a very different reception to the one I’d had in Newbridge. On I went, along a road, passing a small copse where the brambles and nettles rose high beneath the close-crowding, human-planted larch. No comfy bed there.
Eventually I came off the road into a field of longish grass. The field went sloping gently downwards towards a fence, and at the bottom of the depression there was a hawthorn tree. It was secluded and beautiful, hidden from the road, no animals in the field. I decided I’d sleep underneath that tree the moment I saw it: protected by great thick roots rising from the ground, which pressed against the wire fence and made a solid wall for me to shelter behind. I could run the poncho off the fence to hide from the rain. The grass was long and soft, the field slightly sloping. Wonderful.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 8