One Woman Walks Wales

by Ursula Martin

  Length: 189.5 miles

  Total ascent: unknown

  Maximum height: 500 m

  Dates: 29 July – 9 August 2015

  Time taken: 12 days

  Nights camping/nights hosted: 6/6

  Days off: 0

  Average miles per day: 15.8

  Leaving Cardiff was surprisingly difficult. I headed to the shops to buy more maps; I was going to walk up the River Taff and down the Usk to Newport, but there were no predesigned guidebooks or marked trails. I stopped in at a café on my way to the River Taff, and unfortunately chose a really good one. It served iced coffee in pint-sized glass jars and had a soft leather chair in a quiet corner of a room full of mismatched tiling, irregularly-placed mirrors, table-lamps and large windows. I did some writing, a couple of hours passed, and suddenly I found myself greatly desirous of a day off, the urge to walk completely absent, my body feeling heavy and tired. So I gave in: a night in a hostel, bag of crisps and a film, and set off again the following morning.

  Well, kind of set off. I walked towards the river, and stopped in at Wales Online to meet a journalist. I was having my photograph taken for newspapers, shoulders back, stand straight, look confident and smile. I found I was able to smile and bear it, not shrink away in an embarrassed grimace. The photographs showed a confident, happy person, tanned, with thick, sun-lightened hair – incredibly different to how drained I felt inside. Finally I found myself in the castle tearooms ordering a Welsh breakfast (laverbread scone, nice touch), spinning out a final hour of procrastination.

  Something had changed: my energy had gone. I just didn’t want to walk. All my energy, all my focus had gone into one thing, pushing my body forward to walk for thousands of miles. But it was all an illusion. I could stop at any time, I just didn’t give myself the option.

  I’d made the finish-date public that week, told everyone I was aiming for the clock tower in Machynlleth on the 22nd August. It wasn’t a random date: I’d arranged festival work the following week. If I made it I could meet my friend Sam’s baby boy. If I hadn’t made this arrangement I would probably have dawdled, slept late, finished early and arrived in Machynlleth a week or two later. Something happened when I named the date; I let my guard down and let the finish, the thought of no longer walking, come flooding into my mind.

  Now, as the end was so close I could almost touch it, I thought ahead to the time when I’d be able to stop walking. The temptation to stop putting my body through all this effort was bleeding into the present moment, and I was simply running out of steam. My body felt heavy; I had no impulse to move, no energy. The Taff trail was no help either: hard tarmac under my feet made them hurt much sooner in the day, and there was a constant oppressive vibration of traffic noise following me as the path wound beside the A470. Time seemed to pass incredibly slowly. There was no joy in my walking, I felt close to tears. I wondered where I was going to sleep; the Merthyr valley seemed to be a long conjunction of town after town, each one bleeding into another with unwelcoming industrial areas at the edges.

  It was a couple on bikes who saved me from urban camping that night. The guy slowed alongside me, asking me what I was doing.

  “I’m going to talk for a bit,” he shouted ahead to his partner.

  After a few cursory questions he offered me a camping spot in his garden. I took a quick sideways glance, assessing this open-faced, Lycra-clad Valleys man and said, “Yes”. So, out of nowhere, I found myself walking a few extra miles that day as I talked to the well-travelled Dai about his many experiences, on the way to his house just up and out of Pontypridd.

  “It’s just up this hill,” he’d say. “It’s just next to that pylon,” while I tried not to tell him that my feet had gone way past how far they could walk that day.

  I made it, feet burning, had a meal and a shower and camped in their garden, clean and with a belly full of pub carvery. Dai dropped me back into Pontypridd early the next morning, by car this time, thankfully.

  I had a pretty rubbish day on my way to Merthyr, nestled at the head of the valley. All tarmac and worry about where I would sleep that night, again. I skirted the town, too wary of all the negative things I’d heard about the place. “Merthyr,” people said, and gave a knowing smile as if we all knew without saying it what a terrible place it was.

  “They’re all a bunch of headers up there, love,” a man in Abercanaid warned me, beer swinging in his carrier bag, the smell of more coming off him.

  I stopped for half an hour of phone charging in the Merthyr Tydfil ex-servicemen’s club. People spoke to me, asked me what I was doing, gave small donations. All as normal really, my pre-judgements clouding a properly immersive experience of the town.

  I walked to the very edge of the town and beyond, not wanting to be caught camping out by the youths who came to the underpasses and bridges at night to smash glass and drop their empty cans. The sun was almost setting when I made it out to the first few farms beyond the town. On the edge of the forest I found a tall tree growing beside a stony track, and behind it a patch of smooth grass edged with mossy stones and foxgloves, where I could lie down and feel safe. The full moon rose behind me and I pulled my sleeping-bag around me against the cold night. I woke a few hours later to the sound of an animal near me, so close that I could see the shape of it moving and snuffling. Flicking on the light from my phone I saw a hedgehog, biting and sucking at my Welsh flag, undeterred by the flash of light. I moved the flags closer to me and it scuttled away, leaving me to the peace of the night.

  There are animals out there we don’t know about. We see them in black glimmers at the corner of vision, flicking in and out of sight. They are the rustles and calls in the night, the unexpected scat, the thin weaving paths that don’t seem to lead anywhere, the squeezed-aside wire at the base of fences. They have learned to survive in the spaces we don’t take up, and we’ll never know – because if we did, we selfish humans would kill them in our desire for total planetary dominance.

  The next morning found me rested, but no more motivated. I spread my kit out in the warm morning sun to dry off the overnight dew. I ate breakfast and read a book, no urge to move at all. It was hard, so hard to get going. There was very little impetus to lift my bag and take the steps that would lead to throbbing feet and exhaustion yet again. I knew that there was a hostel about twelve miles ahead and the temptation to give up early and hand over some money in exchange for a hot meal, shower and warm bed was overwhelming. My target was always there, hovering in the background, and in order to meet it I must always be fixed on forward. I walked to the hostel, slowly, pausing often, feeling weak and sad.

  Something changed on the way there, though, as I walked out from the confining narrow valley into the more open hills of the Brecon Beacons. My mood lifted as the horizon widened. I found myself walking on sheep-mown turf instead of tarmac, the path ahead winding up and over a hill instead of twisting through housing estates or under roads. The roar of traffic faded, the road signs fell away and it was just me, a map and the wild, living land again. I felt at home, realising that, of course, this was the kind of walking I loved.

  I slept at the hostel, filled my belly with as much food as I could and set off to find the source of the River Usk.

  It helped a lot, walking through the open land. I felt better. All the problems were still there: a looming finish-date, a few hundred miles still to walk, rain, wet tents, painful feet, practically empty bank account. I can do this, I told myself; it’s not an impossible target. I just need, as ever, to keepwalking. Most of these problems had been constant throughout the journey; there was no reason why they should have overwhelmed me in the final month of the odyssey.

  There were horses up on the shoulders of the Black Mountain, where dew formed on grass tips and rain hit the mountainside, trickling down from the heights of rock above, becoming the River Usk. I walked across the short tussocks of mountain grass, a band of roving ponies grazing close to me, the only human to be see
n. I sat for a while and watched them, shaggy manes fluttering in the wind, grey clouds hanging low over the hilltops. A herd, small colts staying close to the safety of their mothers, they talked in the touching of noses. They were pale colours: grey dappled to white, light browns, all with a white stripe down the centre of their faces.

  Underneath the sharp heights of the Black Mountain I searched for the Usk, walking over the wide open space, matching the shape of the land to my map contours, until I came over a shoulder of earth that popped down into the dip. Here it began, the nascent waterway, a liquid path for me to follow back to the sea.

  It was a pretty mechanical few days, following the River Usk back to the coast, starting alongside a babbling baby and then accompanying its transformation into a respectable river. I was happy to take easy, flat stretches along the Montgomeryshire canal path where the river wound, curved, and meandered alongside.

  I was up at 6am, walked as much as I could for the day and collapsed into sleep wherever I could camp. I still felt like crying lots, but I wasn’t sure exactly why. I wasn’t worried about what would come next, after the walk, I just knew that I’d rest and allow it to happen: how I would earn money, where I’d live, whether I’d try and write a book – the answers would come, in time. I had an idea that had been germinating for a while; I wanted to walk across Europe. Five years previously I’d kayaked the length of the Danube and just as I was settling down to a winter in an empty house in a small Bulgarian village, trying to process the fact that I’d paddled across most of a continent, I was diagnosed with cancer and had to start processing that instead, cancelling my plan to walk home to Britain.

  For the last five years I’d been dealing with what was directly in front of me, not thinking about the future: first the unavoidable cancer, then the walk which arose as a way to deal with it. Now the future was open again, I could do anything. It made sense to go back to where I’d left off. I felt a definite sense of, oh, right, where was I? What was I doing before all this kicked off?

  My mind had been chewing over this for months, always wanting to start worrying about the next thing, and I’d always pushed it to one side, telling myself to concentrate on this walk, to keep focused, not worry about a future that wasn’t here yet. Now the end was so close it was hard to keep focusing on today. The whole thing – the enormity of 3700 miles, raising money for charity, the audience I’d created, thousands of people following and interacting with my social media posts, the huge and epic seventeen months I’d just experienced – kept flooding to the fore; it was overwhelming. I had to push it away, stay present, stop thinking about the 3700 miles and focus on that day’s fifteen.

  In Brecon I made some calculations. It was fifty miles to Newport, then I’d walk back to Cardiff, seventeen miles. Next I’d head over to Bristol, fifty-four miles, before turning around and walking up to Machynlleth along the Wye Valley Walk, 144 miles. There was also that thirty-mile section of the Offa’s Dyke Path that I missed when I had a cracked tooth. So that was 295 miles to walk and eighteen days left to do it in. I couldn’t take a single other day off, even have a slow day, if I was going to make it in time. Scary. The pressure was definitely on. After 3400 miles I was ready to stop walking, but I couldn’t just yet. In fact, I had to up the pace.

  Once I reached and left Bristol I’d be able to relax somehow: there’d be only one route left, the Wye Valley Walk. A finite number of miles and a finite number of days. Simple.

  One precious night, near Llanfair Kilgeddin, I got to sleep in a barn. It was such a rarity and I loved it every time. I was comfortable, happily stretched out in the dry, massaging my legs and feeling snug. My tent was wet from the previous night’s camping and more rain was coming. I was so sick of waking up in a wet tent, rain on the outside and condensation dripping on me from the inside. Yuk.

  The next night was precious and valuable in a different way. I got invited to sleep in a pub on the outskirts of Newport. I’d walked in exhausted after a hard slog from Usk, the last five tarmac miles bringing pain. There was nowhere to camp on the edge of this big city that didn’t feel exposed or unsafe. I’d be creeping around on field edges where they bordered houses and roads, too many cars passing, too many eyes to see me trying to hide. Grass fringed grey with road dust, hedges speckled with tossed plastic. I thought I’d stay in the bar until it got properly dark and then creep into the churchyard next door. It was too visible for a twilight pitching.

  But camping didn’t happen. The barmaid offered me tea, soup and a place to charge my phone. I sat parallel to the big TV and watched people’s fascinated faces as Bake Off played; all sexes and ages turned to the screen and licked their lips or commented, their conversation stolen by the construction of a Black-Forest gateau. Eventually my host came over and we talked, she was living upstairs and suggested I sleep in the bar; she’d bring down a duvet and pillows to fit into the corner seating where I’d tucked myself. I didn’t know why she chose to do this but I was so, so grateful. This journey was full of random acts of kindness from strangers and friends alike.

  From Newport I set off along the coastal path to Cardiff. There was only a short seventeen-mile section of coastal path between Cardiff and Newport, but if I turned inland at Cardiff and popped out at Newport I’d miss it. What was an extra two days in a seventeen-month journey? Nothing. And yet without those two days I couldn’t say I’d walked the whole Welsh Coastal Path. So they had to happen, as did all the other ways I’d been stubborn about my route, getting dropped off exactly where I’d left off the previous day, making sure I walked in between the various paths. This was why I wanted to walk the missing thirty-mile section of the ODP that I’d skipped when I broke my tooth. I’d felt the omission burning at me for months.

  On my way back east I met Paul again. He’d set off from Aberystwyth and walked north, all the way around the coast and down the Offa’s Dyke Path. I met him in Newport, on my way back from Cardiff towards Bristol. We messaged and messaged, trying to gauge timings and a place to meet. He was faster than me – everyone was faster than me – but I didn’t care. We hugged, thrilled to be meeting again in the middle of our respective adventures, sharing the highs and the excitement, comparing tales of blisters and unexpected beds. I’d dared him and Gareth to walk over the top of the Newport Transporter bridge, as I’d been dared to do so by Paddy Dillon, the kindly guidebook-writer who’d been sending me advance copies of his books as they came out: first Glyndŵr’s Way and then the Coastal Path.

  Paul met me in Fanny’s Rest Stop Café on the west side of the bridge, saying it wasn’t too bad. We chatted for an hour and then parted, him heading west with another six weeks of walking in front of him, me going east, with just another three. Then it was my turn to walk over the top of the bridge and it was truly terrifying, suspended 60m above the river with only wire mesh to walk on. I couldn’t look down; seeing the gaps in the wire underneath my feet revealed a fear I didn’t know I had. I’d had to climb up hundreds of tiny, twisting steps in the supporting tower – no way was I going to reverse and go back down again, take the suspended car-platform underneath. I had to look straight ahead, take baby steps and hold on tight to the guard rail in order to be able to complete the walk. But I saw it though, silly selfie included.

  It was only two days from Newport to Bristol, walking around the flatlands of the estuary edge, seeing the two bridges so far away in the distance and then finally coming to walk underneath the concrete enormity of the new bridge, its swooping curves a mathematical beauty. I felt very slow and sleepy, taking breaks often. My body was heavy and ached but I couldn’t stop, I’d come too far.

  The flags at the end of my walking-poles were tattered by now; I’d long since given up trying to delicately unhook them from every grasping branch and bramble and would rip away in irritation at this check to my pace, leaving tiny threads in my wake, clinging to thorn talons.

  They served me well, these bamboo poles, base slowly grinding away against rock and road, shorten
ing the length grain by grain, my hands slipping upwards as the pole shrank away beneath me until my hands were pressing against the flags, material flapping against my face.

  Finally, there I was, seeing the sign for Bristol city on a long, boring roadside cut into the centre. It was August 2015 and I was a bit behind schedule. In fact I was eleven months late; I’d planned to arrive here last September, to fit in with my hospital timetable. But I was here; I’d done it, I’d walked 3500 miles, and raised thousands for charity on the way, and that was what mattered most.

  Tomorrow I’d start the last part of the journey, home to Machynlleth along the River Wye.

  WYE VALLEY WALK

  Route description: A walk that follows the meandering river Wye from its opening into the wide Bristol Channel at Chepstow, through the apple orchards of Herefordshire, rising to the moorland source on the side of Plynlimon.

  Length: 137.9 miles

  Total ascent: 5,579m

  Maximum height: 481 m

  Dates: 10 – 22August 2015

  Time taken: 13 days

  Nights camping/nights hosted: 5/8

  Days off: 0

  Average miles per day: 15

  I started the Wye Valley Walk with an ending: meeting the final marker stone for the Wales Coastal Path, the route I’d followed north to south in between inland detours, since May 2014.

  I slept late in Bristol; the thought of rain put me off leaving the house, and I delayed and prevaricated before eventually accepting that what I really wanted to do was go back to bed for three hours. It meant that I arrived in Chepstow, a fifteen-mile walk across the Severn Bridge, after 8pm. I walked through the town, thinking about finding a good chip shop and walking out again to camp, but first I wanted to find the coast path monument. Eventually there it was, tucked all the way down by the River Wye, with a quiet park beside it and a little wine bar discreetly sending music into the peaceful evening. I hung around, persuaded someone in to take a couple of photos of me at the marker stone, and looked around. Maybe I’ll treat myself to a celebratory meal in the wine bar, I thought. Sod walking more, it’s already close to 9pm, maybe I’ll sleep in this bandstand that’s just sitting right here in the centre of the park.