“Whenever we really seem to feel like we’ve got nothing left, the nuns come and bring us food,” his wife, whose name I have forgotten, told me proudly. “They always seem to pick exactly the right time.” Jars of dried food lined a bookshelf: pasta, chickpeas and lentils. They showed me the milk kept at the top of the cellar steps; the fridge had been turned off along with all the other electrical gadgets. In the winter, they tried making lamps from pig fat but were forced to buy fuel for oil lamps instead.
Steve was practised at breaking people down, keeping me answering questions over the dinner table, stopping the conversation when I avoided them – such as a question about whether I was traumatised by my cancer – and so forcing me to answer. I felt uncomfortable in the face of his forceful personality, their angelic, home-schooled children looking on interestedly, as they would have done with all the reprobates who’d come through the doors, chiming in with their own particular memories of certain characters. I felt as if I was being treated like the morally questionable people who came to have their minds rearranged, their beliefs turned upside down. Steve appeared to have forgotten I was a guest who was invited home because she needed a bed, not because she needed reprogramming.
I went to shower that evening, the bedroom door closing behind me on a darkly-polished wooden bed with lacework bedding, thick carpet softening my footsteps, and the shower water beating down on me as I stood in a huge Jacuzzi bath that wouldn’t work because the electricity had been disconnected. I lay in bed, listening to the sound of Steve praying with a woman on the phone in the chapel they’d created on the top floor. They’d taken her from being homeless and she was now in a psychiatric ward; he repeated the Lord’s Prayer with her over and over. It wasn’t relaxing.
It was an unsettling, strange and out-of-the-ordinary evening that I’m completely glad I experienced. Sometimes you have to leave yourself open to chance and deal with what you find out there. It’s the same with hitchhiking; I stand by the side of the road, stick my thumb out and wait for people to stop, then I deal with their idiosyncrasies, trusting I have the skills to deal with any danger. I open my arms wide and allow the possibilities of the world to flow through me. Threads of lives pass through my outstretched fingers until I catch one and am tugged along with it, experiencing their story until I let go and float free once more. It gives me a taste of the full variety of the human race. It’s never been too dangerous thus far: sometimes exceedingly strange but never too dangerous.
I set out to walk along the riverside from Bangor-on-Dee to Holt, following footpaths set out in the guidebook. It soon became apparent that the paths weren’t there anymore. Farmers had planted their fields full of crops, stiles were overgrown and blocked, field corners thick with nettles. If people were walking their dogs in this area, it wasn’t along the river, which was wide and fast here, high banks with trodden-down pits where cows stooped to drink. It wound in sinuous curves through the fields, almost doubling back on itself with an embankment alongside it covered, mostly, in nettles. The rest of the landscape was flat and wide, just trees dotted around, the mark of ancient boundaries now rendered gaping and meaningless.
The grass was high, waist-height, lush and thick growth, dotted with thistles, nettles as well as other, less aggressive plants. This was rich farmland. I had to step high with each stride forward, lifting my arms to drag my poles behind me. It was a very inefficient way to move but there was nothing else I could do, nowhere else to go. I’d committed to this path and finding another would waste even more time and energy. I just had to keep on trudging slowly through this strange and inhospitable landscape, looking at the shape of the section of winding river that was in view, and trying to relate it to the black line drawn across my map that sometimes touched the river and sometimes set off at an angle to cut across a horseshoe loop.
The sun shone hot on me and my dwindling water supply. Sometimes I came to patches of grass that would shoot out fluffs of white powder and seeds as I moved against them and I began to sneeze, the inside of my mouth itching.
I came to a fence where the book said there should be a double stile. Fuck it, I thought and laboriously climbed over. A field of Friesians came into view, languorously lying, relaxing, chewing cud – where I had to cross. They stood up as I approached and ran away, apart from one. Near to her feet was a newborn calf, lying apparently dead on the ground.
It was still warm, so I slapped it in a pathetic, ignorant attempt to make its sides move, trying to make it breathe, take air into its lungs, to live. The mother hovered, making warning, grumbling noises. There was nothing I could do: a dead baby calf in front of me on the floor, in a puddle of blood and mucus, blue tongue lolling from its mouth, body wet and sticky. I felt helpless in the face of my complete inability to fix death, my lack of knowledge revealed. I walked away, looking back to see the mother nosing her child, trying to bring it to consciousness. I held it together until I reached the next stile and found a fallen tree blocking it. It was the final frustration I needed to burst into loud tears. I sobbed and told the cow I was sorry her child was dead, then set about picking and clambering through the dead branches. I looked back moments later to see the cow eating the placenta, chewing vacantly on a string of bloody gore.
There was another fence, another stile, another field with no path, just long frustrating grasses and me with no option but to pick my way through the tangled mess. I was looking for a gate leading to a stone bridge crossing a stream. But what’s this? The river in front of me. I looked to see which way it was flowing, confused. OK, the water’s flowing left so I’ll follow it left. I didn’t understand where the bridge was but kind of gave up. If the river’s flowing towards the sea from the source, it made sense to follow it towards the sea. So I continued, picking my way towards the sea. Then came a cut through a hedge boundary, a driftwood log lying on the floor. I recognise that log, I thought. Am I going in a circle? The river looped round in a way I didn’t recognise. If I was going in a circle there’d be a fallen tree up there, so I couldn’t be going in a circle, there had just been so much grass and fields that it had sent me slightly loopy. I carried on, cutting across a field to miss out a curve of a river and came to a fence boundary. The same one I’d climbed over an hour ago. I’d gone in a fucking circle.
I shouted and screamed in frustration; would I ever be able to leave this stupid overgrown silage patch? I climbed over the fence again, this time managing to rip my top open on the barbed wire.
Another six miles of riverside struggle? No thanks. I was done. I gave up on the river, cutting away and walking through the next field until I found a gate and then the beginning of a track. I cut across west to a field with sheep in it and then, finally a house, a road. Civilisation! It was a four-mile straight tarmac stride to Holt, the last Deeside town in Wales: Farndon, its English twin, across the bridge. I walked into the Peal O’Bells and started swearing about what a crap day I’d had until the landlord bought me a drink!
I’d crossed the border into England, as proved by a mid-afternoon stop in a pub that charged £2.50 for a cup of tea! I drank it and felt aggrieved, making sure that I discreetly charged my phone up at the same time. Chester came next and it was ugly. A town that started gently with flat, riverside fields full of dog-walkers and shimmering, trailing willow trees, turned to grey concrete and blank faces, a typical bustling English town, all uniform shopfronts and bland unoriginality.
I spent a couple of days travelling in and out of Chester, going to see a few different friends and family, a leaving do that I couldn’t miss, a day out with my auntie and an afternoon with my granny in nearby Manchester. Every time I walked from the train station to the hostel or around the city at all I seemed to see the same group of scruffy street homeless. I recognised the types of person from my time working in a homeless hostel: grubby, disreputable, hard-drinking, probably junkies. The regular committers of petty crimes that would occasionally break out into violent ones.
I chatted to one of
them on the first afternoon, as I made my way out of the train station, and so word got around and they knew I was doing a long-distance walk, my rucksack marking me out whenever they saw me, and my walking speed meaning they could easily catch me up.
The final time, on my way out of Chester, as I came to the waste patch where I would cut away from grey streets through undergrowth, and out to the strange untended parts by the river where people didn’t go, they were coming single file, up out of the bushes. The leader came close to me.
“Still going,” he said. “What’s this?” He grasped my donation tin, pulling gently, face grimaced. “Only joking,” he said, as I shied away from him, but I’d caught a snarl of clenched teeth and it left my heart thumping.
I walked along the seemingly everlasting straight riverside path, along the New Cut to Connah’s Quay, checking behind me for unwanted followers. On the edge of town, where trees overhung and the path was secluded, three lads came towards me. Rolling shoulders, big dog, shaved heads, wild-looking, pushing each other, tripping along. I crossed to the other side of the path so my donation tin was away from them, kept on walking, keeping up a good stride.
“Nice flag, love, what’s the other one?”
“It’s my own.”
“Nice one, keep going, good flag.”
And I was left to examine my prejudices, yet again.
There was a lot of flag love that day, the tattered dragon proclaiming my status once I crossed the border back into Wales, people making a point of saying Nice Flag.
I rested for a while in a pub in Connah’s Quay, a scruffy place, where all the hefty, tattooed blokes at the bar put money in my tin; a woman up the road, friend of the barmaid, had just been diagnosed. This was my purpose, to walk and talk about ovarian cancer.
It felt good to be back in Wales.
I came to the end of my time with the River Dee, walking up the coast to Holywell over a couple of hot days, tentatively changing from long sleeves to vests. Brilliant for keeping cool, not so good for sunburn. My shoulders burned and peeled and burned again, causing me to be patchy, like a giraffe.
The river had widened to a great grey estuary when I said goodbye to it here, the Wirral still faintly visible on the other side of the long inlet that marked the beginning separation of Wales from England.
I’d been walking for over three months now, covering over 650 miles. I felt good, mostly; I’d grown a lot of muscle and felt strong and capable, it was just this painful foot that was slowing me down. I was already behind schedule, knowing for certain that I wouldn’t complete the mileage in the time I’d planned. What I didn’t know was what I’d do about it. Did I walk the distance or walk the time? I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to walk all the way, the full thousands of miles that I’d planned, but it depended on my body coping with the task. If I wasn’t physically capable there was no way to push myself beyond breaking. I decided to walk through the summer and then decide properly. It didn’t matter now – I could carry on regardless, get as far as I could before the real decision had to be made.
I’d felt a bit emotional over the previous week, as I travelled the length of the River Dee. I missed the feeling of staying in one place, the familiarity, the restfulness. It was hard to be on the move all the time, hard to keep washed and dry and in clean clothes, hard to meet new people every day and hard to carry your life on your back.
There was constant stimulation, beautiful sights like a field of white horses, wheeling and snorting, or turning to a tickling sensation and finding it’s a delicate green lacewing resting on your shoulder. All this was beautiful and wonderful, so it felt strange to find a yearning for home creeping in amongst the uplifting interest, support and generosity I was receiving.
I never used to feel like that; before I knew I had cancer I had been travelling free and unfettered for almost three years. Maybe age was changing me, or maybe it was the residue of having been through a life-threatening illness. Or maybe I shouldn’t underestimate the effect of being in mild pain all the time. I’d been jarred by this foot injury, the future of the journey thrown into doubt.
I had no plans to stop, obviously. I would complete this walk if I had to build a home and drag it behind me on wheels. It was just another new part of me to listen to and take into account.
CISTERCIAN WAY
Route description: Back in 1998, a Newport university professor decided to create a route that linked all the Welsh Cistercian abbeys, medieval and modern, to mark the 900th anniversary of the founding of the Cistercian order. It resulted in a walk around the heart of Wales, a loop connecting Holywell, Tintern, Tenby and Conwy.
Length: 602 miles
Total ascent: 26,861m
Maximum height: 550m
Dates: 12 June – 29 August 2014
Time taken: 75 days
Nights camping/nights hosted: 28/47
Days off: 20
Average miles per day: 10.94
The Cistercian Way is a little-known route that I’d picked based on its huge 602-mile length – the third-longest Welsh path on the list. There weren’t any formal guidebooks, just a written route description on a website, last updated in 2006 (at the time of walking). It was wordy and indistinct, containing such instructions as:
Take the minor road which bears right from the crossroads. In little over half a mile turn left then immediately right. Just after a block of trees to the right a track goes to the right along the edge of the woods. When the track divides, take the left fork and follow the bridleway up into Wentwood.
I found it really hard to follow but had to print out the description and try my best to take the landmarks it mentioned and link them to the footpaths I could find on the OS maps. There was plenty of road-walking, the most out of all the routes I’d included, and the paths it used were frequently underwalked and overgrown. As is the case with the majority of footpaths in this country, councils can only afford to spend money on maintaining the most popular routes. On the Cistercian Way, I regularly found myself fighting through brambles or nettles, climbing over fences and occasionally losing the path altogether and resorting to yet more road-walking. It was slow and sometimes frustrating, although there was a deep satisfaction in tracing an infrequently-walked 602-mile path through inland Wales. Although this historically-themed route didn’t include scenic high points like my other choices of mountains and coast, it complemented them somehow and felt worth the struggle.
At Holywell there’s a small concrete inlet, a boat launch for the tiny dinghies that were dotted about the harbour, and that was where I turned inland, stopping to chat for a while to a friendly man in a baseball cap, coming down to the sea with his stiff-legged white dog. I was saying goodbye to the coast for a while; now I’d walk from landmark to landmark, heading down the eastern side of Wales to Tintern, then across inland to Tenby, then up to Conwy and across to Holywell again, a four-pointed star, curving inwards between each outstretched arm to wriggle between the major Cistercian sites of Wales – the ruined abbeys of Strata Florida, Tintern, Valle Crucis, Abbeycwmhir, Cymer Abbey, the living community of Caldey Island – plus following as many pilgrim routes and ancient trackways as could be made part of the route.
I came over the Clwydian range from Holywell to Denbigh where I slept my most urban night out so far: in the doorway of the Denbigh ex-servicemen’s club, tucking myself down behind a pillar in the covered archway entrance, all tiles and concrete and cigarette-ash blown into the corners. I’d bought a takeaway and didn’t want to walk too far before eating it, then the skies promised rain and at 9pm it was too late to go searching for a more salubrious resting place outside the town. I felt pretty safe, slowly eating my disgusting Chinese takeaway: tasteless, water-injected chicken, sloppy sauce and hard chips – a meal that had been much better in the anticipation. There were plenty of passers-by cutting across the open grass inside the grounds to get into the town centre, but only one noticed me. It’s amazing how invisible you can
make yourself in a public space, just by hunkering down and staying still.
I felt bored for the few days it took me to walk down the Vale of Clwyd. It all seemed very samey somehow: just a long flat valley, faraway hills on both sides, hot sun, no shade and footpaths through field upon field upon field. Occasional animal interactions brightened the monotony: a couple of young birds, the size of hen chicks, with a mix of fluff and feathers, too young to fly away so they just hopped along the path in front of me, cheeping, before burrowing into the long grass. Then there was the first stuck sheep. I thought it was dead at first but then it twitched, lying on its back with all four legs in the air; it had rolled down a bank beside the wire fence and couldn’t right itself. I took a good grip on its wool and pulled it over to a more reasonable position, relieved to see it immediately get up and trot away.
With the long climb up to pass over the Llantysilio mountains, I was back in more dramatic scenery, and I revelled in my surroundings again. I turned round to see the way I’d come and to my right was the invisible line of the Offa’s Dyke, rising and falling with the Clwydian hills. Ahead lay the sea and my path from Prestatyn along the coast; somewhere in the mass of rising mountains of Snowdonia to my left lay the beautiful Conwy valley and behind me, over the Llantysilio range lay the Dee valley. My paths had covered these lands, tracing an invisible line of footsteps around me, the journey made visible in my mind’s eye.
I took a weekend out to attend a writing course, and I met a man for a short-term fling. We kissed a lot, walking to a quiet place, finding a grove of young trees high up in a field. He was ponderous and slow: a deep thinker and steady, silent mover. He was writing a book and talked about finishing it in a year or two. I asked him how long he’d been working on it: more than five years. Fresh from the exhilaration of constant movement, I was incredulous that he could spend so long on the same project and teased him in our rush of flirtation.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 12