this little world - Chapter 20

Offa’s Dyke

My boots had been a source of worry to me right through the walk and now it had become obvious on the Welsh Borders that they were not going to make it. Pauline and I had stopped with an old college friend of hers overnight and Chris had tried to glue my boots back together. Unfortunately he did not have long enough to let the glue dry and had been forced to use some bright blue tape to hold the sole to the upper. That morning in the mirror I had noted that my nose had got burnt in the sun and my hair had now grown out like a gardener’s first attempt at topiary. I was Coco the Clown kicking off that morning from Chirk. The carefully positioned tape snapped off a couple of miles down the road and my soles starting flapping wildly as I set off to walk down Offa’s Dyke.

Even the most superficial glance at a map shows the walker where Wales and England divide. On the border itself the English and Welsh names mingle but the divide between the English sounding names of Shropshire villages -Weston Lullingfields, Baschurch and Brownhill and the villages five miles to the west- Llynclys, Llannymynech and Llanyblodwel is quite a sharp one. The geography of the land here, just like the Red Stone Fault, defines England, in this case the hills mark the territory the Welsh Princes were able to defend against the Anglo-Saxon Kings. To recognise this natural limit to England, one eighth century English King called Offa had built a banked-up ditch to mark the border. Twelve hundred years later we still call this structure that marks out the edge of England, Offa’s Dyke.

Personally I think Offa had never actually seen the border he marked out on his map. Despite my general comments about Wales and England being separated by geography, when I marched myself down the line that he marked as the great border of his kingdom I noticed that he had not taken the detailed aspects of local geography into account at all. Offa’s Dyke simply goes up and over the steep hills marking an arbitrary north-south line. Perhaps his underlings at court who had the job of supervising the digging had a nice percentage on the labour going into the work. It can’t have been easy digging out the Dyke on some of those hills. Either way for the next four days I enjoyed a hardy collection of hills that rivalled the Pennines for steepness.

It became obvious to me this afternoon that modern Britain is obsessed by roads. If a road gets blocked by a building project there is an outcry and motorist are warned to take alternative routes. With a footpath, however, no matter that it is often more tiring and time consuming for a walker to make a diversion, no such warning seems to be thought necessary. I spent a merry hour that afternoon lost in a land of piles of sand and by the time I escaped the moonscape that the contractors had produced I was seething at being treated as a second class citizen.

The leafy green walk along the side of the unused canal running into Welshpool was a perfect antidote to my terrible mood. Despite the nearby A-road it was quiet in what amounted to a green tunnel. The calm and coolness of the trees was only disturbed by the occasional plopping of a large fish taking insects on the canal’s surface.

My bad mood returned, however, when I reached Welshpool. Every time I marched up to a door with a ‘Vacancies’ sign they somehow never had any space. The fourth door that I tried confirmed my fears. The man that answered the door simply slammed it in my face before I had chance to speak. If I had not been vexed by the destruction of my chosen route I would have probably found this all funny but as it was I found that my spirits began to sink.

I am used to being unexceptional in appearance. Ordinarily, I am human wallpaper. Average. I am run of the mill. I did not enjoy my first experience of prejudice.

After being treated like a tramp in Welshpool I felt like a king next morning strolling up the driveway to Powys Castle. I had decided not to care what I looked like and that was liberating feeling. The walk through the parkland was the perfect way to start a good stroll. I had a long day ahead of me, after ringing around to try and find somewhere to sleep, I now faced having to walk all the way to Knighton.

I was coming to like the Welsh Borders with its castles and hill top forts. This is an area of the country through which most people pass by. This border region is more than just a line on a map. It is a diffuse zone whose charms are subtle. It is also an area whose economy has gone to sleep, so that the towns are still small and retain an almost medieval compactness, surrounded by traditional sheep farms. I have a particularly soft spot for Montgomery. The last time Pauline and I were there we watched the fire brigade use their elevating platform to take down the Christmas decorations. It was like staying in a real live version of Trumpton.

The first part of the day was on a broad, almost flat expanse of farmland where I marched alongside the Dyke through thickets and hedges of thorn. Over to the west the landscape was dominated by the stark ruin of Montgomery Castle and behind it the even older hillfort of Ffrith Faldwyn. It was somewhere in one of these thickets that I first bumped into Jack.

I was used now to the idea that I walked faster than most of the walkers I met on the trail but Jack was slow by anyone’s standards. He also walked in an erratic crab-like shuffle and as I got close to him I was pretty sure that he was suffering from the heat. He mumbled as he walked and, speaking from experience, that is never a very good sign.

Jack was one of those characters who made the walk worth while. A bachelor eccentric who simply enjoyed being outside. Jack could squeeze a swear word in spaces in a sentence where most people could not fit a full stop, but he was never offensive. Despite his meandering line, he was a lightning quick story teller who told me more jokes in an hour than I have told in a year. By the time we parted company about five miles down the road I was confident that I had been told the major facts of Jack’s life, though due to the strength of his accent I am not sure that I got much of the detail.

One of the reasons for Jack’s slow progress was that he liked to stop at every water trough and tap to fill his hat up with water. The first time he did this he did not even bother to break off his conversation and kept talking to me about his tip for some horse race somwhere while the water rained down his face and into his mouth. He told me that in days gone by he actually used to get bodily into these tanks though now his joints were not good enough to allow him to climb in. At the time this seemed like odd behaviour though later in the walk I tried out the cattle trough myself and found it an excellent way to cool down.

Another reason for his slow course was that he liked to have a pint. As we sat together at lunching in a pub near Church Stoke we made an interesting pair. I ate a sandwich and drank a soft drink while Jack made his way through a pie and two pints liberally spraying me as he told me his latest anecdote. Progress in the afternoon was even more erratic.

Shortly after the pub the path began to rise and even by stopping I could not go slow enough to keep pace with my partner. I was enjoying his company so much that I was tempted to stop short of my planned B and B. However, with nothing for miles, this did not make any sense and we parted company with a view to meeting up again.

After hearing my story, Jack had become really excited and had promised to catch a bus to be on the trail in front of me next morning. Over the next couple of days I met other walkers who met Jack and said he had added my life’s story to his tales about himself. Unfortunately for me I never caught him up. Despite being the slowest of the walker on the trail he always seemed to stay ahead of me.

This was a long walk. The hills just kept coming. In May, I would have been concerned about this but I had gained confidence from the Pennines and I now enjoyed walking on into the early evening.

When I eventually came to the woods above Knighton I had covered twenty five miles. I felt that I had proved something to myself and set out on an easy bit down to the town centre. Unfortunately no one had told my knees about this lap of honour and they went completely to jelly as I wobbled my way down this last long drop.

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