I walked all day, small steps, birdlike, feeling the pain in my feet throb, trying not to aggravate or worsen it. The busy road down below traced the river bends, but high up on a small winding road above the River Conwy there were no cars, just me and my rucksack all morning, taking our time about it, not pushing too hard, just staying aware of each movement. The pain had come when I walked from Rhyl, as I lengthened my stride on the tarmac, striking to the ground heel first. So to avoid it I walked in small steps, placing each foot gently to the ground, hobbling myself with a mentally-imposed restraint.
Bluebells thronged the banks around me, pushing over unfurling bracken. The sun shone on a haze of blue. There were thousands of bluebells pouring over the ground in a breath of blue mist. I turned in a slow circle, trying to count the bells, to distinguish the number contained in the blue blanket, but the number became meaningless, hundreds of thousands, a million. Uncountable. There were infinite bluebells, all coming up in response to the same temperature, the turning of the planet changing the amount of light in the sky and stirring them to growth. It was stunningly beautiful.
I’d told myself while I was resting in Annie’s yurt that I’d just set off and take it easy: five miles a day would be fine. I’d walk slowly up the Conwy Valley, letting go of timings and targets. The thing is, it’s different while I’m doing it. My body may be walking slowly, but my poor over-active brain moves at a quicker pace than my feet and there are minutes, hours filled with thinking. Entire scenarios flash before me, quick as blinking. Five miles a day is awful, I tell myself. I’m not quick enough, I’m stupid and ponderous and slow, my stomach flops over the belt of my rucksack, I’m chubby and ridiculous, I’m the worst walker ever. No, I’m not. I am a strong, powerful woman. I am wonderful and amazing and at the end of this walk, when I finish triumphant, I’ll be able to write a book and never work again, I’ll be able to sit in fields and read books forever. I’ve damaged my foot, I’ll have to stop, next month, at the end of the week, tomorrow, right now. What will I do? I’ll have to go back to work, it’s the end of the walk, no more adventure. No, it’s OK; I just need to take it easy, don’t worry, pace yourself, five miles is fine… All this within the space of a few steps. My mind lit up with extra energy, occupied by the walk, flashing neurons, over-activity, nothing to distract me from myself. You can do this, you can’t do this, you can, you can’t.
I would come out of my brain sometimes and realise that the birds were singing; they’d been singing the whole time and I wasn’t listening. My head was down and I was staring at the road, blindly replaying old arguments or forging fresh imaginary relationships. What was I doing? There were flowers to look at, a river to follow. The air was thick with heat and the plants around me were bursting, fecund, spewing seed heads into space to float hopeful in the air. There was a whole world here for me to savour, and I was shutting the blinds and disappearing into my imagination.
Each day was hard, is what I’m saying. The walk was about so much more than a physical challenge, it was about pushing my mind to constant acceptance and assimilation of change. I had to push forward, strive to achieve what was extraordinary (for me and my body), accept pain as normal, accept throbbing feet, clicking knees, a heavy rucksack, the discomfort of sleeping outside, of turning an ankle in an uneven field, of finding my way across the countryside, of walking every day for eight hours, of keeping going, being stubborn, not stopping, focused onward, always pushing onward.
Conversely however, I also had to, had to, if this walk was to succeed, practice self-care, give myself time, give myself rest, listen to myself, know when to pause. I was forever teetering on the tightrope between pushing myself beyond my normal capabilities and simultaneously knowing when to stop. It felt like an impossible balance.
In late afternoon, after taking six hours to cover just four miles, I came to a small lake, high up on the hillside: Llyn Syberi, lying still and calm, surrounded by trees, with floating ducks and small wooden jetties for fishers. I’d heard that ice and cold were good for plantar fasciitis – restrict the blood flowing to the area and restrict the pain – so I stripped off my boots and dunked my feet into the water, resolving to sit there for twenty minutes, to allow the inflammation to lessen. Light lay on the surface of the water like smoothed-out foil, wavering and rippled, holding the Easter egg-printing of tree branches and white clouds, blue sky and golden light. I felt desperate, spun into nervous over-thinking, in fear about the constant pain. The whole walk was falling to pieces in front of me; what could I do if I couldn’t complete this? I had a plan to walk back to hospital, an appointment in five months’ time, and I’d set daily mileages so I could make that. I should have been walking nineteen miles a day by now. Every day I didn’t do that I fell further behind schedule. There didn’t seem to be any piece of the walk I could cut short, it didn’t even occur to me to do that; the route I’d decided had formed as a whole. It existed, entire and integral: mountains, rivers, coast. I couldn’t miss any of that out. I was going to walk around Wales, I was going to walk 3300 miles. Every inch of me was focused on this idea. In order to force myself to achieve it I had to allow it to obsess me, take me over, to become all that I was. When it started to seem as if I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t change the image; it just shattered around me like a broken mirror, exposing a vortex. My mind distorted at the idea of my incapability.
Illness had ambushed me, smashed my life sideways, turning strong and fearless into weak and vulnerable within a matter of weeks. When everything had been made uncertain, the thought of the walk had been something to fix onto in the aftermath, a thread that I could follow into the future. I couldn’t imagine going back to Machynlleth and getting a job – in no way was that how I wanted to live. I wanted to go back out into the world and adventure again, but I was temporarily tied to this country, tied to hospital. Plus I couldn’t really return to my previous life in Bulgaria, I was too fragile, too weakened by shock of illness. Cancer stopped my life as it was but didn’t give me another one to continue with. I had to make one up and I chose to walk. If I couldn’t walk I had no idea what to do next.
I called my brother Owen, talking to him as I dabbled my feet in the lake, sending ripples out across the reflected blue and green, and he calmed me.
“Bro, my feet are hurting too much to walk more than five or six miles a day, what can I do? I’m scared; the whole thing’s collapsing around me and I’ve put so much effort into telling people about it and trying to raise money and I can’t just stop. What a let-down that would be, what a failure, what a disappointment; the whole walk just disappears because I can’t do it anymore. I’ve set myself the target of 3300 miles in eight months and now I can’t complete that, what can I do?”
Owen listened, like he always does, and then told me about his running, about when he started to take it seriously, to run harder, and decided to run a marathon, entered training, set his focus on personal bests and trying to beat himself every run. He found he was always pushing himself onwards to get better every time, all his focus became about the clock and he had stopped enjoying himself any more. So he decided to tell himself he was just going for a run, that’s all, nothing more, no training, no PBs, no competition, no failure, just a nice piece of exercise somewhere beautiful.
“That’s what you could do, sis,” he said. “Just go for a walk.”
There it was, this challenge reduced to its essence – just go for a walk. I could do it, I’d get to hospital, even if I walked a mile a day. It might take years but I’d still get there. I was still capable of movement, even though it was sometimes a painful hobble, at night reduced to an aching shuffle. I could still do this, I just had to get rid of time as a target, stop caring about my speed, about my miles per hour, my daily total. I had to stop comparing myself to other public journeys – Ffyona Campbell walking around the world, Carrot Quinn speeding up and down the trails of the USA, all the ramblers, all the pilgrims to Santiago, all the people who could walk faster than thr
ee mph, all the people who could walk twenty miles a day. Stop.
There was no-one else creating or judging this walk, it was only me who truly cared about what it contained. Everyone else just saw a huge charity walk, the details varied according to how accurate each local journalist was. No-one knew when my next hospital appointment was, no-one really knew where I was or where I was going, the route was too complex for that, my Facebook updates too infrequent. I’d veer off one path and onto another, make sudden detours inland to follow rivers: no-one cared that much, they just knew I was walking Wales. The definition of the walk only existed inside my head and I could change it. I’d return to Bristol and home again: it didn’t matter how fast I went. I would do this, I could do this, just at my own speed, that’s all. My mind calmed, panicked ripples fading to stillness. This was OK. This was possible.
There was nothing else to do but walk, so I did. I walked incredibly slowly along the Conwy Valley, not allowing it to matter how far I travelled in any given day. Shân helped me out from afar, arranging a free hotel room in Llanrwst, then finally a farmhouse host at the top of the Conwy Valley, near Ysbyty Ifan.
I was so lost in the difficulty of this walk sometimes, struggling along by myself in the hot sun or dribbling rain, just me and my mind and the pain of my body. Then a car would stop or someone would recognise me, tell me I was doing really well, that they were inspired or amazed or other superlative compliments that I was embarrassed to hear. It helped to break me out of the hard slog, give me a little boost, know that what I was doing was acknowledged. People saw me, they appreciated how difficult this was. That day it was a car full of children on their way home from school who stopped for me on a long thin road that ran high above the Conwy River as it curled around from east to north running. They’d been talking about me in school that day, the Wales bush telegraph had zipped ahead of me, and all the mums knew I was coming, thanks to Shân and Facebook. The children piled out, it felt as if there were at least six of them in the car, and I showed them my flags and rucksack, chatted to the woman driving, smiled for a photograph before they all scrambled back in, on their way home to various farms.
Down off the hilltop in the Vale of Conwy, coming close to the valley’s head where the river wriggled down from its source, Elin and Alun’s was the first working farmhouse I was welcomed into. It was also the first place where the household’s very young children chattered in Welsh around me, only able to speak the school-learned English phrases that were the beginning of their bilingual fluency.
I’d come to this place because Shân had put the call out on Facebook, in Welsh: Helpwch y ddynes yma! Help this woman! And Welsh people had responded; I’d made it to the inner circle. It takes a lot, in some ways, to break through to the other side of the Welsh/English divide. I don’t mean a divide that exists in that nervous, get-off-my-land type of way, and I don’t believe the tales of people changing language as soon as an English person walks in. No, the English/Welsh divide is two subtly separate circles that make up a community and overlap at school gates and in workplaces. It’s not a question of overt discrimination, more a slight turning of the shoulder. I see it as the historical way to deal with the total governance of your country by a foreign nationality. Every time you let in an outsider, your culture is diluted and there’s a danger your differences will fade away to the point of subtlety. So you turn the shoulder, keep your known circle to itself.
Through my work as a carer, going into the farmhouses of the Dyfi Valley, being for the first time in environments where Welsh was the first language, I realised the breadth and depth of the Welsh cultural world. I’d never appreciated before how it was possible to conduct your whole life in the Welsh language, listening to radio, TV, speaking it to your friends and family. Only strangers and acquaintances needing to be spoken to in English, so closely-knit are parts of the Welsh community.
Now I was there, in a farmhouse with a couple and four children, the children excited to speak to me but nervous about practising their English, breaking into giggles when they couldn’t think of words. The youngest, Gwydion, a boy just into school age, wanted to play with me but he spoke no English at all. We muddled by though. I could just about understand nursery Welsh; my few scattered words like ‘hot’, ‘cold’ ‘shirt’ and ‘outside’ helped a tiny bit.
I read him a bedtime story one night. The words were scattered, just a single sentence per thick cardboard page. Reading slowly and carefully, I sounded out the thick Welsh pronunciations, so lush and gloopy, using the whole roundness of my mouth. He seemed to enjoy it.
I stayed there for two nights, my slowness keeping me in the valley for longer than I thought. Alun had sheep up on the land near Llyn Conwy and he took me back one morning to where my walk had finished the night before. It was a hard and slow day, that one. The lake was an almost circle. No particular stream running into it seemed to be identified as the Conwy, so I decided to call the lake the source and walk around it in a ceremonial fashion. If the day hadn’t been so stark and wild and beautiful it would have been totally awful. There was no path, I just picked my way through the bilberry and heathered edge of the lake, cottongrass waving its white tendrils in the wind.
That part was fine, but the boggy parts were awful. I was wet to the knees, picking my way at the edges where water met soil and they blended into soggy, wet awfulness, no handy rocks to jump between, just a swamp with no discernible safe spots, extending too far inland for me to walk around it. It took a full day to cover maybe five miles. But I didn’t mind, I’d really enjoyed the raw and wild beauty, just me and the wind and the water all day, taking a break to sit in the shell of a boathouse on the opposite side of the lake, admiring the framing of the view through an empty hole where a window had been.
Alun drove me up to Llyn Conwy again the following day, after we waved his children off on the school bus. I was due to walk directly south towards Bala, heading from the source of one river to the start of another, the River Dee. Looking ahead to the Migneint I saw an expanse of bog and cloud, mist drifting across the reedy, grassy, slurping ground. There weren’t any footpaths crossing here, I’d have to walk to the end of a track and then take my chances, weaving from rise to rise, always trying to find the driest ground, following sheep-tracks between the twin rises of Migneint and Bryn Glas. Thin weaving lines, faintly trodden, that could easily disappear or take me in the wrong direction.
I thought of yesterday, my struggle against the terrain of Llyn Conwy, my sopping feet, the age that bogs take to cross, the careful picking and shuffling. Today I was lurching and overloaded and would take hours to cross a few miles of ground. I balked at this, using the excuse of mist and rain to take the tarmac way round, enduring a long day of road walking instead, getting wet through in the mist and soft, wetting rain, stopping for a few hours of sanctuary in a steamy café oasis. I knew I wouldn’t make it all the way to Bala and would have to camp somewhere out in this blank expanse of damp pine and grass.
I had dumped my tarpaulin in favour of a poncho which would double as a shelter when strung up with ropes, excited to lose another few hundred grams from my pack. I’d mostly used it as a rain-cover during the day but now was the time to test it out as a camping shelter. I came off the road into the forest and decided to duck underneath the wide-spreading skirt of a larch, hoping the thick spiked branches would provide some shelter from the misty, drop-laden air. I put the poncho up as best I could, tying each corner far out to branches, stringing up the centre-hood above me. But it wasn’t working. Keeping the central hood hole cinched tight meant that the material wouldn’t stretch flat. I watched as water droplets ran together into the folds of the material, and started to ooze through. A drop fell on my face. I was tired, my body hurt, I was wet through from the day’s walking and there was nowhere I could go that was drier or easier to shelter. I couldn’t get the poncho any straighter; it had a hole in it anyway. I’d come out here with the wrong kit.
It was only 8pm, still an
hour until sunset, but I’d stopped because I couldn’t walk any further. There was nothing I could do, not without an effort I was too exhausted to make. I decided to leave it, allowing the water to drip through the stupid, badly-put-up shelter onto my bivvy bag. I lay there and felt miserable, in a fuck-this and fuck-everything kind of way. Time stood still as I watched the rain drip down, eating all the chocolate that Elin had packed for me that morning. I was warm in my multi-layered cocoon, and knew I wasn’t in danger, just uncomfortable. I stayed warm all night, just got increasingly wet as dampness slowly soaked in from the outside.
The next day was hard as I came slowly down the road from the mountains into Bala, a defiantly Welsh town tucked down by a huge lake. Llyn Tegid is the largest natural lake in Wales, its flat shallow edges lapping into warm shallows, trees and jetties. It also contains the River Dee, which runs into and out of the long, thin lake. From here the Dee would curl around through north-east Wales, heading into England and ending in Chester and the wide estuary between the Wirral and North Wales. I’d arrived at my next river, but before I could follow it east out of Bala, first I had to go west, around the lake and up into the forestry to find the source.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 10