I expected him to ask me for change but instead he said, “What are you doing? I saw you in town all day.”
“Long-distance walk, charity, blah blah.”
“Oh, that’s brilliant that is, I really like what you’re doing. Well done.”
I smiled, he smiled. I asked him how to cross the train line and he gave me directions. “Cheers, love, nice one.”
Next, I walked down the side of the canal looking for the Cistercian abbey ruins. It was shabby and industrial, and I didn’t see anyone until I came towards a chunky metal railway bridge. Under it were about five or six shadowy figures. I felt vulnerable as I walked towards them, and braced myself for danger. I came closer and saw it was a bunch of kids, maybe early teens.
“Nice flag, can I have it?”
“No, I need it.”
“What for? What you doing?”
“Long-distance walk, charity, blah, blah…”
“Oh, wow, I really respect you for doing that.”
And they clustered around me, asking questions. Turned out they were hostile at first because they’d seen me talking to a policeman. They didn’t have any money until two more boys turned up and they could put a pound into the tin. I took their photo; one of the boys insisting on posing with his shirt off, and we left with smiles and waves and a promise to put the photo on Facebook.
One of the things that’s happening to me on this walk is being forced to question the judgements I make about people. It’s easy to view the unknown through a prism of fear, mistrust and misinformation.
“Just keep moving forward in peace and love,” a friend once said. Would I ever learn to let go and wholeheartedly do that?
I could no longer tell exactly how many miles I’d walked. I could measure the amount up until Holywell, when I’d come inland, but the Cistercian Way had no handy guidebook to give section distances, so if I wanted to work it out for myself I’d have to do that annoying thing where I measured the wiggly line on a map with a bit of string. I decided not to: it didn’t matter anymore, I was just walking. When I reached Holywell again in what could be a few months’ time, I’d add another definite 602 miles to the 754 I knew I’d covered to that point. Until then it was kind of a haze.
I felt like I was starting to confuse my online followers, with all the unexpected turns to follow new paths. I realised they were starting not to know where I was any more, weren’t able to anticipate my route or to comprehend my journey. To me I was following a sequential list of paths; the way I incorporated routes meant I never had to stop in one place and start again in another. My walk flowed, for me, from coast to mountains to rivers. It made perfect sense to me, but not to anyone else; to them it had morphed into walking Wales. I’d created a journey where people didn’t have a good understanding of exactly where I was or where I was going next. It was good for my security – it meant that no-one could come and surprise me en route – but people weren’t able to plan ahead and come and walk with me. Friends tried, saying they’d come and walk with me in Pembrokeshire or the Dyfi Valley, but because they were unable to see dates in advance, when it came to it they’d made other plans.
Neath to Carmarthen was, well, boring to be honest. The Cistercian Way route description seemed to melt away in this area, I couldn’t find useful connecting footpaths either and resorted to the unpleasant trudge of a couple of full days road-walking. The land levelled out; I had the pleasure of coming to a trig point one day, sun blaring in the sky, and realising that this was the highest point for miles in front of me. Everything rippled away from me in waves of gentle hills and I was overjoyed. Carmarthenshire was flat! As flat as Wales gets, anyway.
I met a woman in a pub one night. It was a small pub that wasn’t noted on the OS map; I walked through the quiet village planning to knock on the door of a house to ask for water, swerving into a U-turn as I spotted the pub sign. It was the kind of rural place where the conversation of about ten people stopped completely as I walked through the door, not in a hostile way but just to wonder what the hell was going on with the flags, the sweat, the big rucksack. I sat down, puffed a bit and explained what I was doing. They were all very nice, if slightly bemused at this alien presence, and I handed a few symptom-cards out and received about £20 in donations. One woman was really impressed.
“That’s a cause very close to my heart,” she said. “And other parts of my body.”
Her sentence trailed off into the inferred meaning, the things she wasn’t telling me.
She was coming back into the pub as I left, having been out for a cigarette, she gave me a piece of paper with the address of the café she worked in, inviting me for breakfast the next morning.
“What you’re doing is brilliant,” she said, touching my arm. Suddenly tears were in her eyes, and I realised that this was a woman hiding pain beneath a layer of bustle and joviality.
I walked away from the village, up a bridleway to a field full of sheep where I lay down to sleep and thought about this journey and all the tales of ovarian cancer I’ve heard, other cancers too. Somehow it seems that by my standing up to say I have had this cancer, it draws other people to tell me their stories in return.
There was a man, dealing with me in a professional capacity, who leant forward and said in a low voice, “My mother has it.”
We exchanged a glance and no more words; it wasn’t his time to speak about it.
One woman recognised me as ‘the walking lady’ while we were both in the waiting-room of the hospital, her head wrapped in a colourful scarf. Her cancer was advanced; she was seeing the doctor to decide on a second course of chemotherapy. She was bright and cheerful but incredibly brittle, her smile quick to droop.
A woman at the next table in a café suddenly started telling me about how she was waiting for the results of genetic testing, how her mother had died of ovarian cancer and she was being tested for the BRCA1 gene. She’d been waiting for her results for eight weeks, her future hanging on the receipt of a letter.
The festival electrician, a well-loved character who’d banter with anyone, bustling and funny with his Scouse accent, had taken his wife for tests that day, suspected ovarian tumour. No jokes in that face as he spoke to me, tears not far away.
The woman in Lidl who asked me, “What are you doing?”
I’d leaned my flags against the fruit display to put some bananas in a plastic bag.
“I was meant to meet you today. My sister-in-law has just been diagnosed and she’s waiting for surgery…” We talked for a while about encapsulated tumours.
There was the woman in the beer-tent at a festival who called me back to the table after I put some symptoms-cards into the centre, her eyes large in sudden emotion. She only said that she’d had recent abdominal surgery, not what was removed, and we talked and talked and talked in whispers about the ways we’d found to recover from pain and trauma, people shushing us as the fiddle played nearby.
In a café in the Rhondda valley, and in a pub in Connah’s Quay the regulars said, “Someone died of that quite recently.”
I was helped a great deal by a woman whose mother and best friend had died from ovarian cancer, who’d driven her friend to all her chemotherapy sessions, who was doing what she could to help me in their memory.
I was met by a woman in Welshpool whose mother died of ovarian cancer and now speaks for the charity Ovarian Cancer Action in Wales, trying to do the same thing I’m doing; raise awareness, raise awareness. Tell women about the symptoms so maybe they don’t die so soon.
There are so, so, many more than this; my memory was becoming too full to hold all the people that I met.
They’re all so hidden, these personal stories – just an ordinary person going about their business until the moment when they walk up to me and speak.
It gives me a sense of the multitudes of people carrying pain or fear or trauma, past and present. I don’t mean this to be negative or depressing, but just the way that this forms a part of what life is. That an
inescapable part of this glorious, incredible life is dealing with illness and death and that’s OK because life is wonderful, overall.
I do what I can in these moments, I say, That sounds hard or, Are you OK now? and hear as much of their story as they want to tell me. I try and hold just a little of bit of their troubles for them, by being a person who listens.
I walked from Carmarthen to Tenby and back again, poking myself out on the little tip of the Cistercian path that detoured out to Caldey Island, to visit the monks’ abbey on the little rock, a mile offshore from Giltar Point. Monks have been living on the island for 1500 years – the Cistercian inhabitants for eighty-five, keeping cattle, making chocolate and soap, accepting visitors, except on Sundays. It took four days and I was hosted all the way. After over a week of wild camping it felt wonderful to be so nicely treated. I stayed with Melissa near St Clears, then over to Matt and Charissa near Tenby for two nights before back to Mel, so closely did my steps retrace themselves on the way back up north. I came to walk by the sea, following the coastal path for a few miles around Tenby. Annoyingly, I reached Tenby on a Sunday, so I couldn’t actually go and visit the monks, the whole point of my path thus far.
It was a visceral shock to see the sea again; it had been at least two months since I’d walked a shoreline, and the weather and coast had changed completely. This was my first taste of the turquoise sea of Pembrokeshire. It was early August and felt like the Mediterranean, bracken bobbing like humid jungle-ferns, small power-boats turning circles in the big bay below Monkstone Point, their white wash rippling in widening geometries.
I walked up from Tenby and towards Brechfa, camping one night and then, after a day spent walking though the peaceful Brechfa Forest surrounded by many bright butterflies, arriving at Juliet’s farm, where she’d said I could take a day off, my first in over a month where I had nothing to do. I had a bed and a TV and a day to myself, a day to rub my feet, stretch luxuriously and move around as little as possible. The last thing I did before arriving at the farm was hitch back to the nearest village to buy food for the rest day. I was picked up on my way back by a big bald-headed Polish man, kindly looking, who worked at the local anti-venom factory, a big local employer. When I mentioned I was walking between Cistercian abbeys, following ancient trackways and pilgrimage routes he turned to look at me, surprised.
“There’s a Catholic pilgrimage happening in my country right now and I really wish I could be part of it.”
I invited him to walk with me, in the easy way that I made arrangements then, unsurprised at the latest magical coincidence, which had brought a seeker and a provider so easily together. We swapped numbers and he came out with me a couple of days later, as I walked from Tregaron to Cwmystwyth. I was glad to have company that day; it was a tough fifteen miles climbing up from pasture into high wet pathless moorland and back down again, skirting the edges of the untamed Cambrian mountain range. Greg wasn’t so experienced, getting nervous as we left the road and started squelching down towards the thin river, exclaiming that we couldn’t do this, this was too much, too wild. But we faced the endless blowing grasses together, and he was an easy companion. I navigated us through the mostly featureless land, matching the land shapes around us to the swoops of contour lines on my map, walking from lake to lake, sometimes tiny puddles of water, unseen until we were almost next to them. He gave me a bible and a fifty-pound donation and we parted with a big squeeze of a hug. My friend Anna came to pick me up and take me to her house, dropping him back at his car on the way.
There was a sense, during this period, of feeling a bit fed up with walking. It’d been a bit of a trudge over the previous couple of weeks through south Wales. The novelty of beautiful countryside had worn off a bit, and I no longer felt amazed each time I reached the top of a hill. Rolling farmland? Wind turbines? Seen it – many times over. I wasn’t miserable; it had just become mundane, the norm. I wondered, when I felt faintly underwhelmed by the relentless parade of greenery in front of me – is it going to be like this for the rest of the walk? There was a sense of simply trudging the miles away, battling the pain and plod, plod, plodding to the end.
My body, most of it, was bearing up pretty well. No pain in my neck, shoulders or back. My legs could go on for miles and miles; it was just my feet that were letting me down. They were painful every day, the tendons and ligaments strained. I hobbled every evening once I’d cooled down and in the morning too, before I got into my stride and the rest of my muscles began working properly. I was even starting to get pains in my legs, ankles and feet at night, shooting pains in the bones and joints. My legs twitched and I experimented with taking painkillers to sleep. I was reasonably sure I could carry on and finish, but it hurt and I didn’t know how I could make it hurt less.
I thought the main foot-problem was my recent change of shoes. Every small thing that I did to my feet – new shoes, different insoles, taping them up, even a different pair of socks – affected them in a new way and took time, and days of new pain, to adjust to. It’s as if I was experimenting to try and find a system that didn’t make my feet hurt, but everything might make the pain much worse.
I’d changed my shoes two weeks before, the same style I’d been wearing for the last 800 miles but half a size smaller; we’re talking a men’s size 7.5 instead of an 8 (normally I wear a women’s size 6). I had a blue-foam wedge under the left heel and a disintegrating pair of gel insoles, which were all discarded with the old pair. First I wore the new shoes with no insoles, then a pair of foam ones and then, after I realised that the pain in my feet was becoming severe, a pair of gel insoles with an extra gel wedge under my left heel. Fine; foot pain was diminished but now my shoes felt too small with all the layers of insoles in there. Should I have gone for the bigger shoes I was used to? Even though they had a good inch extra at the end of the shoe? And what did I do now? Did I change again? More money on shoes and more stress trying to find an address I could have the shoes posted to. It was very hard doing this by myself. The shops I encountered en route dictated what quality of insoles I bought. The crap foam ones were from a fishing-tackle shop in Caerphilly; the better gel ones were in an outdoor shop in Tenby.
I so wished there was a magic support-fairy I could just turn to at the end of the day and have them fix all my problems for me, I’ll buy maps for you, Ursula, now sit and eat this delicious food, and would you like a foot rub afterwards?
My mood changed as I moved further into mid-Wales. The last few weeks across South Wales and Carmarthenshire had involved a lot of road-walking, sometimes the entire day on tarmac, my feet slapping down on the unyielding surface over and over again in a way that made them throb and ache. As I moved off the road and my path took me into forest and field once again, my feet could twist and bend to take account of the ever-changing surface they found themselves upon. It really helped reduce my, by now, constant plantar tendon pain.
As I moved north I also found myself again in the place I call home, moving into the orbit of my scattered friends, able to be picked up by them and taken home for huge hugs and relaxation.
As I moved into the landscape of high moorland and quiet pine forestry, I found the land familiar to me. Where the farms are more spread out and up on the high lands there’s heather, bracken and bilberries, miles of waving yellow grasses and squelchy peat-bog. Where unprofitable small farms have been handed down, amalgamated into large stretches of mountain-sheep territory, the houses are empty, abandoned, heaps of stones and wavering, solitary chimneys, maybe a rusting bedstead.
The day I walked from Cwmystwyth I came into my real home territory: the wildness of Plynlimon and the Nant-y-moch reservoir, leading north down to Machynlleth. I’d left my home there more than five months ago, packed up, given notice and set off to walk to hospital. I’d walked away from Mach, up the single-track road towards my house at the head of the Uwchygarreg valley and past it, up to the highlands of Hyddgen and the slopes of Plynlimon where Glyndŵr’s army defeated Henry’s
soldiers so many years ago. I’d walked to the bridge across the small river trickling down towards the reservoir where it became the River Rheidol, and turned left to go up the mountain. It was the start of my journey to hospital. I had to walk up Plynlimon, find the source of the River Severn and follow it all the way to Bristol.
I gave a gasp of shock as I saw the clump of pine trees by the bridge, remembering that cold March morning when I struggled slowly through the boggy ground and up the mountain, my feet in too tight boots that would give me blisters by the end of the day, my plump body in no condition for physical work. All that propelled me onwards was an idea, the belief that I could do this, that I could simply put one foot in front of the other for months at a time until the small steps grew into a journey stretching for thousands of miles. Now, I was returning having walked for five months and covered almost 1300 miles. The belief had become reality.
I might not have been in the best state, but I was doing it all the same. I walked down through the Uwchygarreg valley as the light dimmed, seeing the familiar waterfall, the forestry plantations lining the steep sides. I came down through the field that farmer Gareth used for silage, past Talbontdrain, the place I’d retreated to in the aftermath of cancer, the small house where I curled, alone, and healed.
The barns were still falling down, the fields hadn’t changed, the cars in the driveways belonged to the same people. There were new windows on a house, a replaced gatepost. Here was the road I walked two or three times a week to go down into Machynlleth: the familiar dips, the views of Cader Idris, the same chapel, corners and trees. It was still the same – just me who was different, turning up at old friends’ houses, door slamming open with the wind to reveal a rain-dripping, rugged wanderer, seeking shelter. I felt as if I’d been gone for years, so much had I lived over the last five months, and it was a surprise to find James and Vicky still the same, the baby a few months older, walking now, bread being baked, vegetables grown and good meals cooked, raspberries infusing into a bottle of gin.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 16