I had started to drive myself. I had started to push myself to cover more and more miles. I also noticed that this walk of mine was acquiring an elaborate set of rules.

For example:- No stopping for anything. No compliments on the weather. Rules I never once defined for myself, but which I knew were the way it was supposed to be. Such a rule was 6b - the morning after rule - which stated that when I was picked up by a car at the end of a day’s walking I must return myself next day to exactly the same spot, replacing myself like a golf ball exactly on the piece of England that I’d left off walking from the night before. It helped with the continuity of the walk. It helped my head.

It helped that I imagine myself to be a golf ball? I wondered what my scorecard would look like. Hole no.1- England’96 -A three and half million yard dog-leg - Par for this hole is 17,000. I selected a two-wood and drove myself north towards the Humber.

It seemed that where ever I went this morning I scared up hares. I found this surprising as I had always thought of the hare as being a rare beast. A shy, retiring English mammal, a bit like a rabbit who has taken too many steroids. However whenever I commented on hares in Lincolnshire people looked at me as though I was slightly soft, a look that said - oh we have lots of hares around here; suggesting that far from being rare, hare pie was probably a menu option. Capturing them was not difficult I discovered, just a matter of waiting.

As I walked through a tight break in a hedge I disturbed a couple of them courting in a nearby field. One sped off like a maniac, ears back, accelerating, while the other swung around in a reckless manoeuvre that reminded me of a motorcycle courier. Having just lumbered over a few hundred miles I was struck by how fast and free a hare can run. They do not, however, always use their brains when they are motoring along. The first one, which by now had put a good quarter of a mile of field between himself and me, executed a neat 3g turn and then came piling on back towards me like a guided missile. He passed between my legs going at about Mach 2. I could have easily caught him in my sandwich bag.

I had been walking for about an hour with a clear view of the towers of the Humber Bridge in front of me when the path took a sharp detour to the west taking me away from where I wanted to go. I checked the map and cursed the footpath committee that put this illogical loop into the Viking Way, but as I came out of South Ferriby on to the cliffs above the water I could see why they had included this cliff top walk in the route.

The Humber seemed huge that morning, more like the sea than an estuary. Yorkshire on the far bank a foreign country, cloaked in woods, in mystery. I turned east along the southern shore and headed my way towards Barton and the mighty Humber bridge.

I was fed up with my own whinging. I had decided to get tough and was pushing myself, ignoring the complaints of my feet. Every time I came to a halt I would take a deep breath and would mentally select the next club to send me spinning out over the countryside again.

As I walked the Humber constantly changed colour. It was a motile mixture of patches of browns, blues and bottle greens shifting like amoebae over the water, a restless effect which reminded me of mother of pearl. At other times I would have stopped to enjoy the view but after the lows of the Fens I did not trust myself to stop.

That was before I got my first view of the span of the Humber Bridge. I found myself just standing, staring at this structure.

The bridge seemed to me to be in a breathtaking state of achievement. The curving central deck extended with the grace of a dancer’s leg flung out across the water. The twin towers brought to mind two strong backed men, arms outstretched in mutual support. This bridge was an active structure, sublime but not effortless, vast but delicate. The thick steel cables hung like strands of silk against the enormous space of water and sky that the bridge managed to frame.

I felt the bridge vibrate as I walked with the traffic passing beside me. It took me three quarters of an hour to stride out across its span, crossing from Lincolnshire to the Yorkshire Wolds.

The team of experts who had specified the original route of the Wolds Way and made it a National Trail chose well. From a car the Yorkshire Wolds are a barely noticeable feature, an undulating open land which encourages drivers to go faster and faster as they attempt to pull the horizon towards them. When you get off the A-roads and on to the small lanes the Wolds are a bit more interesting, these routes take you from village to village like a Viking raider, dropping down into the dales to tidy farms and red-roofed cottages. But it is on foot however, on the National Trail that the Wolds really come into their own, for as well as the village and the vastness of the Wolds’ tops you get to see the tiny uninhabited dales tucked into the chalk hills.

I like the scale of this is intimate landscape. The valleys are small and cosy like living rooms. They are the perfect size for a good days walking. To add to the lounge effect these valleys are often carpeted with close cropped grass, a springing dry covering that was a joy to walk on.

As I walked I found myself more and more drawn by the geography of these dales. I thought that their flat bottoms and the curved sides look like they had been sculpted by a furtive finger dipped into a bowl of whipped cream.

I would imagine that if you constructed a three dimensional image of the whole of the Yorkshire Wolds on a computer they would look a little like the top of a brain. The Wolds are essentially domed, a flat topped chalk mass with deep curved folds cut into its sides with smaller dales taking sharp twisting turn to the left or right. I walked like a neurologist for the next three days through the folded lobes of eastern Yorkshire.

Pauline and Judith had taken a house in Sherburn in the North of the Wolds and for the next week they shuttled me backwards and forwards through this bit of the country as I completed length after length of the Wolds Way heading towards Filey on the coast. In between eating and getting enough sleep I did little else but walk. I was immersed.

The Southern Wolds that face down towards the Humber were wooded and as I walked up through East Dale next morning I was under a canopy of mature trees. It seemed like a lifetime since I had last walked in a decent sized wood and I relished the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves. It was about this time I came across what looked like a giant metallic cheese in the woods, but which on closer inspection turned out to be a charcoal burner. The voice of Daniel Defoe spoke to me again and I decided to find out more about this traditional use of woodlands. The problem being, as before, who to ask? Despite a pile of tools laid nearby and a half filled wheel barrow of charcoal no one answered to my hellos. I walked on through the wood calling out. Perhaps, even as I write, there is a legend springing up amongst the Wolds woodsmen of a ghost that shouts to you while you are off answering the call of nature. I climbed on up East Dale coming up on to the dome of the wold.

This is corn country, up here on the tops, the land of the modern combine harvester and huge fields of arable crops. It is open and the farm tracks and lanes that I took that day were exposed, not even flanked by a protective hedge. Needless to say the weather turned bad as I reached this part of the days walking. I kitted myself up in my rain gear as I headed up over Newbold Wold. I knew what to expect.

Some of the strongest images that I have kept from the long walk up the East Coast of England were the moments when my feelings about what I was doing changed. Moments of self-revelation when I went from a swearing mood of despondency to a buoyant mood of belief. Often the change from one state to the other was gradual or weather-induced but on one occasion in the Yorkshire Wolds the change came about in an all important second.

I was standing at the bottom of Sylvan Dale, a steep sided fold in the side of Wolds. The hill in front of me was probably no more than a one hundred and fifty foot climb (a climb that on any other day I would not even have noticed) but it might have been Everest because of the way I was feeling. How had I got so tired?

I had ignored my body in my anger at the continuing bad weather. It had been an act of will-power just to keep moving in the murky twilight for the last hour. I wondered what on earth I was up to, even the justification of a seeing a good view of York Minster had evaporated into the inky gloom. Off to my left the dale ran down to a road from which I was sure I could get Pauline to pick me up. It was the easy way out. Down the dale was out, up the path meant effort and the real likelihood of my legs folding underneath me. I was tempted to fail myself before my tiredness did the job for me.

I surprised myself when I set off up the slope. I had accepted facing potential failure rather than avoiding the issue. I had decided to take the day on.

The spirit of the adventure suddenly possessed me. This was my walk. Where I chose to go was my decision, a decision that not even the tiredness or the Yorkshire weather were going to determine. The golf ball was never still for long.

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© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004