One Woman Walks Wales

by Ursula Martin

  Rose also showed me something about my diet. She ate a mostly vegetarian diet with very little processed food in her everyday life, and I realised our hunger was different. She needed to eat regularly and often, not quieting her system with handfuls of sugar. Her metabolism was different to mine, her hunger came strong and deep and wouldn’t be satisfied with a handful of peanuts, needing regular, large meals whereas I was satisfied with what she called snacks.

  While walking with her I started to move away from sugar as fuel, to foods that would provide energy differently, more slowly and for longer. It still had to be picnic food, however – raw food, able to be transported in a rucksack. Hummus became a staple: carrots, tomatoes, oatcakes and hummus. I felt my body react differently. I had fewer exhausted drops as the quick hit of high sugar energy ran out. I began to see that maybe this was why I was fatter than her, that I put my body in a constant churning and saving, that my body was fixed on energy storage because its supply came either as feast or famine. My metabolism was fixed in winter scarcity, holding onto what came in because it never knew when the next good food would come; she lived in a summer of plenty, always eating what she needed, not forcing her body to hoard energy. It was a glimmer of another life, not something that I could easily fix, but bringing the spark of an idea that if I wanted to change my body, to be healthier, it wouldn’t be by imposing a diet, but changing my entire attitude to food.

  We started along the Pembrokeshire coastal path. The first section of the path, from St Dogmaels to Newport, was reported as one of the toughest. No water sources or settlements for fifteen miles. After fourteen glorious cliff-top miles, we arrived at 6pm, stumbling and sun-shocked. The BBC told me it would start raining early the following morning so we bumbled around in Newport, trying to decide what to do. Try and squeeze two of us into my one-man tent or seek some form of shelter? An old lime-kiln? A barn? A bus stop? The porch of an empty holiday home? We were hungry, really, and in no state to make decisions, so we fumbled and demurred, played cards in a pub, went to eat expensive pizza and finally, as the last of the light ebbed from the sky, erected the tent on a field edge, a mile from Newport.

  Sunset lay on the surface of the rocking water out in the bay, metallic layers of light gold leafing the tide, highlighting the plume and spray of waves further out. We sat watching it, in peace, eventually noticing four fox-cubs playing and gambolling in the next field. They jumped and stalked one another, rolling and leaping. The nearest one saw us, sitting quietly in our lurid, unnatural colours, and their body language changed completely. Low to the ground and slinking, they stalked towards us, creeping and investigating, coming as close as they dared, beady eyes shining, before marking us as harmless and returning to their mown field home.

  All was dreamy and perfect until my sis came back from her final wee.

  “Sis. There are cows in the field.”

  There were and they were coming to investigate. Up sticks, roll beds together and hop over a gate into the next field, unfortunately a lot more sloping. Not much sleep, painful hips, aching back and bleary faces in the morning. Sometimes wild camping is like that.

  5am, the wind started blowing, 6am, right on time, the drizzle started and we got up. Pack away, waterproof up, a couple of slices of cold pizza, and we set off to an incredibly wild and windy Dinas Head and then a long trudge to Fishguard, windblown, tired out. These early starts would be the way to walk really long distances, twelve miles by lunchtime, if we could handle the exhaustion. My fit sister hurt all over, was hobbling, feet throbbing.

  “Welcome to my world,” I said with grim satisfaction, and probably a hint of sibling smugness. “You’ll enjoy it eventually…”

  The Pembrokeshire Coastal Path was where the coastal landscape really changed. Rosie left to make other family visits, and as I walked further south the sea became a glorious turquoise blue, shimmering seductively. I saw my first grey seal, thousands of bluebells, stuck my feet in streams, climbed endless steep cliffs, slept in fields, was sniffed at by wild ponies extending tentative, quivering nostrils. Around every corner was a brand new bay, jewel-bright sea lapping at the rocks. Wildflowers grew profusely, thick clumps of them everywhere, the air was thick with fragrance. Speedboats looped circles in the bays below me as I walked high on cliff edges, my feet following the foot-flattened dirt path.

  The sun beat down on me, unrelenting. I was wearing factor 30 and my skin was still burning; spending so many hours outside made it unavoidable. I saw cormorants, gannets, gulls, a myriad of small brown birds perched by my sleeping-spot, fluttering above me with beaks full of caterpillars. The caterpillars! Tiny black ones, tiger-striped ones, porcupine-quilled orange monsters. I put my boot down next to the path-stranded ones, they climbed up and I hobbled to the edge of the path and flicked them into the long grass. I assessed the path for sleeping places out of habit, finding snug dips with soft grass linings, hollows where the rock was giving way to gravity in the slow motion of centuries.

  These things were just small highlights in days of steady steps, hours outside, hauling myself up slopes or along cliff edges. My hair blowing in the wind, I just kept walking.

  I walked, I rested, I waved my flags, I ate, I met friendly people, I gave out symptoms-cards, collected donations; pound by pound they trickled into my tin. I kept going.

  There didn’t seem to be peaks of excitement anymore. I was surrounded by beautiful things and kind people every day, and instead of the jumpy, flushed peaks of joy there was simply a deep satisfaction that life was as it should be. I walked, I managed my pain and discomfort, I covered the miles. There was nothing more; it was simply a matter of mileage. I had come 2600 miles, I had struggled through pain, winter, mountains, turning my legs to steely trunks. There was nothing left for me to do but finish this; another 700 miles, more or less, give or take. I just needed to put one foot in front of the other until it was done.

  I sensed, faintly, that I had become obsessed, that in order to succeed at this walking challenge I had gone beyond a passion for symptoms awareness and talking to women about ovarian cancer. I was shoehorning my experience into every encounter, giving out cards, putting them on tables in cafés, up on noticeboards, leaving them in hosts’ houses to pass to friends.

  Tell as many women as possible. Walk 3300 miles. I was doing it. I would keep doing it.

  There is always a path when you’re following the coast, but especially in Pembrokeshire where the places closest to the sea are rocky and uncivilised. I’d look down at the next bay and see a path winding down to it, a cut in the gorse and thorny hedge which my eye could follow to the stony beach. The path trickled along the stones, heaped at the highest point of the wash in a gradual slope from the sea, and then down a sharper drop to where the bushes began.

  I enjoyed the feeling of rounded, sea-washed shingle shifting under each step, although it was difficult when it went on for too long, sapping my energy through the movement of the stone.

  The path clearly rose up with the shape of the next headland, a strip of brown worn into the earth by the repeated pass of feet tracing the edge of the land, an endless ribbon laid down to follow around every corner. I passed my eyes over the land, finding the trace of others’ feet, a marker for me to follow, unquestioning, trusting. It wasn’t grass that I walked on here, but dozens of tiny plants, tougher than grass, that could withstand the daily blow of offshore winds, nibbling sheep and the tread of feet. The ground was a mosaic of plant life, budding and growing together, wind-seeded. But mostly there was a thin stone path, as wide as two feet standing side by side, and my ankles brushed the tips of the grasses as I strode. In places the path gave way to rocks cleaned of earth by the repeated pass of feet. Bushes rose to either side, remnants of stone walls grown through with vegetation. Spigot bursts of gorse, studded with bright yellow buds.

  The path rose and dipped between harbour and headland. It was a ragged, rugged coastline, fragmenting away into the sea, a line of waves rippling and breaking
at the shore. The rocks sat in waves too, ridges lapping away from me, a line formed under immense pressure into wobbles and curves.

  I’d turn a corner and see, stretching away, another headland to manoeuvre, or the haven of a dip inland: a place to stop, maybe a toilet or a café to sit at. The harbours were mostly set to catch tourists now, the flat boat-stands emptied to hold car parks instead, cafés and pubs waiting ready with glossy menus to empty wallets and ring tills. I could stop anywhere, laze out on the grass wherever I wanted, but somehow these harbours made marker points, targets to achieve before I could rest.

  A week into Pembrokeshire, walking barefoot on the sands of Newgale, my feet felt like shelled prawns. Cramped and clawed they slowly relaxed into the sand and then struggled to revert to their usual positions. It was the final two miles of the day and I’d decided to walk them in a straight line along the long, flat sands. I never take my boots off and dabble my feet in water, it’s too much effort and would disturb the carefully stuck-on strapping that helps to save my feet from so much pain. But that day I put my bag on a rock and eased off my tightly laced leather ankle-boots, pulled off four sweaty socks – two thick woollen ones and two thin cotton liners – and wriggled my sensitive feet into the sand. Unused to the sensation of anything abrasive they squirmed; it was exquisitely ticklish.

  I took my poor feet to the sea and let them bathe in the ripples of the shallow tidal wash. I felt sorry for them, they’d suffered so much. I walked the entire two miles of Newgale Sands barefoot and it was painful, especially for my Achilles tendons, but I continued hobbling because I wanted my feet to stretch out in a safe place. The sensation of barefoot sand walking made my steps very small and tentative, and I trod carefully and slowly along the sand, thinking about stretching each part of my feet as they pressed against the buoyant, yielding grains. I took steps on tiptoe and steps on my heels. It felt lovely, raising and lowering my heels to stretch my calves into different positions. At the end of the two miles I went up into the rocky, gravelly edge where fields started to meet sand and made camp among the fading bluebells.

  From Newgale to Tenby I had help all the way. I was passed from house to house for 100 miles of walking, my rucksack a suitcase to rustle through at the end of a day, never strapped on for a day’s tread, never a stone upon my shoulders. Three families helped me, first John and Jo in Spittal, then Helen and Simon for a night in Pembroke Dock, and Lynn in Angle. They all had their own reasons for coming forward. Jo was a belly dance student of Mel’s, inspired by my bravery; further east towards Carmarthen, Simon had fought his own cancer battle; and Lynn was a keen walker who’d heard about me through Facebook sharing. I started to ramp up my distances, managing regular eighteen-mile days. My body felt good, I was a machine, flying along the rugged coastal path, full of physical power.

  During that week I met Sarah, another woman who was making her way through to the other side of ovarian cancer, relying on Target Ovarian Cancer and online support to navigate her way through a suddenly uncertain, fear-filled existence.

  I felt nervous as I approached our meeting point: the road bridge crossing into Pembroke Dock, high above the River Cleddau. We walked towards each other, small figures coming far from either end of the mile-long bridge, growing closer until we embraced, wind blowing hair into our faces.

  There was small talk until we reached the pub and could embark on the real thing: the exchange of cancer stories. Gary, her partner, bought drinks and smiled quietly, familiar with this relaying of history. We shared our diagnoses: holding up fists to describe the size of tumours, describing the unfolding, the progression of a cancer diagnosis, the details of the gradual discovery that all was not well – that in fact, something was truly terrible. She had an ovary that had burst as the surgeon went to touch it. I had a mystery fluid that filled my lungs, disappearing as the doctor stood poised with exploratory needle. We were traumatised still, years later, sharing memories of our naked, hurt bodies, exposed and quivering. Each nugget of detail assumes mighty importance in the traumatised teller; we knew how it was when your mortality was in question and all you could do was wait, hoarding small scraps of information to give definition, to give hope.

  We shared the before and after of cancer, of finding your way in a new and uncertain world; post-upheaval everything’s changed and you must navigate your way in this new landscape, try and return to yourself again. We shared our shock at diagnosis, our ignorance of the symptoms and common desire to take action: action as healing, action as strength, action to make other women more aware, to give them the power we didn’t have back then, before everything collapsed – knowledge of their own bodies and awareness of the symptoms, what to look out for and what might change.

  It was a short meeting; they had to get back home after their holiday and I walked on, towards the house where I could stay that night. Hugs outside the pub, a quick photo and they were gone. I felt a bit stunned when I left Sarah, reeling from the quick dip into another’s cancer story, and later in the evening I realised how far I’d come from that world, from the chaos and fear of major medical treatment.

  Three months after my abdominal surgery, back in early May 2012, I went for a walk one day. The sun was starting to warm the fields and I wanted to discover the beautiful surroundings of my new home, my new beginning post-illness. I went to find my way through the oak woods that covered the side of a huge rise of land as it forked away from the road my house lay on, and separated into a side valley. Coming out into a field of long grass I lay down under the blue sky. The sun was bright and I felt the warmth of fire on my skin, the moist grass underneath me, full of the wetness of growth, plump and lush buttercups and fat, wide blades of grass. There were vivid greens and blues, the white of the clouds. I felt this sensory world for a short time, trying to absorb the beauty of the land around me into my sad post-cancer mind-set.

  I felt positive and hopeful, pulling up my clothing in a gesture of healing, allowing the sunshine to hit my pale and violated skin, thin pink scar running the length of my centre. It was a few moments before I realised my thoughts had turned inwards, hands on belly, mind inside it. I’d disappeared into worry, thinking over my cancer – the chances of reappearance, the hurts of the previous months, the stress and worry and tension.

  Cancer had been hovering in front of my face for months, causing a blindness to all else, even obscuring the fact that it had enveloped me. It was only when the sun brought me out of it for a short time, showing me another, lighter way of being, that I noticed when I returned to the fear and darkness.

  When I met Sarah in Pembroke Dock that day, it was three years since my tumour removal, major surgery and cancer diagnosis, and I finally trusted my body again, to carry me for miles every day and not collapse. I’d walked back to normality over thousands of miles, nights of camping, days of sunlight, of soft grass, of beautiful views and contemplative solitude. I’d walked my way to health; my body was strong, solid with muscle, resilient, tough. Capable, trustworthy.

  The challenge I’d set myself was so big it had eclipsed cancer. It had taken such total focus to walk 3300 miles, such a concerted effort, that I’d burnt the fear of illness out of myself. I’d walked 2700 miles of the planned total; I was strong and healthy, cancer felt behind me. I might be talking about ovarian cancer, handing out symptoms cards, raising money for two charities, but it was all for others. My own cancer story was almost finished, I’d come through to the other side. Two more years of check-ups before I could get the official all-clear, but already I felt free.

  It was the 28th of May 2015 and I sat at the tip of West Angle Bay, looking out at St Ann’s Head across the mouth of Milford Haven. It was one and a half miles away across the water, refinery ships gliding serenely through the gap, the daily to-and-fro of oil deliveries. It had taken me two and a half days to cross between the two points, over forty miles of walking around the urban stretches and industrial edges of the bay, passing two oil refineries, a power station and four
small towns. This journey had taken me almost fifteen months so far, and I’d covered exactly 2700 miles. I calculated the totals that night as I sat at the kitchen table in Lynn’s fisherman’s cottage. She would have me to stay for the next three nights as I walked around the peninsula and back east, through the sheltered and luxurious green beaches of southern Pembrokeshire, very different to the rugged north coast. I checked through again, I’d walked 2700 miles, which should mean there were only 600 to go. But the numbers didn’t make sense. There were at least 270 miles of coastal path left, plus the second go-around of the Pembrokeshire coastal path once I reached the head of the Teifi River at Cardigan, plus four south Wales rivers, plus the Wye Valley Walk back to Machynlleth.

  I looked again at my planning book, where I’d listed the paths and totalled the distances, first in the planning and then noting the actual distances as I finished each path. They were different. The planning list was missing many miles. I’d failed to take into account all the linking distances I’d walk between the paths: the twenty-five miles into Bristol from the end of the Severn Way and out again to the start of the Offa’s Dyke Path; the extra fifty miles to walk the Mary Jones Walk in reverse back to the coast; the 100 miles from the end of the Cambrian Way to the start of the Coast-to-Coast Path.

  I sat back, a fool. In my panicked pre-walk jabbering I’d come up with a total that didn’t exist. I’d been focusing so hard on walking 3300 miles and now I was going to get to that amount while I was still awash in the journey, shore nowhere within sight. I didn’t know how many more miles there were to go, it would depend on the river routes I took. I calculated each path as I walked it, adding or subtracting small miles depending on the actual routes I took, not simply accepting the prescribed totals. Never mind, I’d just walk the path I’d set myself and work out how long it was at the end, laughing to myself for my stupidity. The number didn’t matter; the days, steps and endurance were the important bit, the people and the beauty felt never ending.