As I headed off from Hay on Wye three days later into the sweet coldness of the morning I remember the times that my father used to get up at the crack of dawn when I lived at home to put in three hours work on his allotment before the rest of the family had stirred. At the time I used to think that he was mad. He would return from his early morning jaunts and sit at the breakfast table wrapped up in a purposeful self-contentment while the rest of us suffered from the night before. Nothing at the time seemed to compare with an evening out. However as I headed out of Hay I could feel a whole host of romantic poets sighing in my bones wishing to praise in couplets this particular morning and the beauties of early rising.

I had been getting up earlier and earlier over the last three days and enjoying leisurely sections of Offa’s Dyke before the day got too hot, letting the path roll out before me like a great green carpet.

I’d reached halfway. A thousand miles, coming out of the cold wet of May and into a brilliant jewel of June. A thousand miles of England! Something to shout out and hear echoed off the distant hills of Wales. From Knighton to Kington. From Kington to Hay on Wye. I walked on. My days on Offa’s Dyke flew by. This was a high water mark of the walk and I was happy that I had found company that shared my joy. There were a lot of people out on the National Trail and I made friends with those that I met. It was good not to be sticking together or in strict competition but to repeatedly pass each other on the trail and then to enjoy a drink in the pub at the end of the day.

While I had been walking the border, England had gone to war. Even I had been unable to avoid the jingoistic tone of the words that had spilled off the sports pages of the tabloids and onto the front pages of serious papers. Germany, once again was the enemy.

This time Germany was the baddie because it would not buy British Beef and because once again they had drawn England in the semi-final of the European Football Championships. In pubs up and down the country I heard people chanting - "Two World Wars and One World Cup". An unpleasant flavour tainted the editorials that most the papers were carrying. Hoary old words like 'kraut' sprouted out of the headlines.

It is fascinating how these symbolic clashes are thrown up by sport and by football in particular. One of the most memorable birthdays that I have ever celebrated was when England got to play Argentina in the World Cup against the background of conflict in the Falklands War. I remember the wave of expectation in the room which only subsided after England were beaten by the hand of God (or was it Diego Maradona). I love football, though like many fans I have no talent at playing it whatsoever. I managed to kick myself in the face the last time I played on tour with a company team in Switzerland. By now I also knew that I loved England. The national team’s efforts had got themselves wrapped up in my psyche as I marched over the country. On the tops of hills in the whispering silence I heard commentaries in my head.. Shearer.. Sheringham! In my dreams I wore Three Lions on my shirt.

I tried to break up my walk to take in the games as England progressed through the competition and wherever I sat down to catch the game I made friends in those ninety minutes. I felt linked to what was going on. I think that I genuinely expected to see England in the final. But I was glad that they weren’t when I walked away from Hay after spending the night in the pub. I had really warmed to the crowd of strangers I watched the football with - right up to the moment that England lost on penalties. I wanted to be proud of how the national team played. I wanted England to win the game. But I wanted no part in the racist post-match recriminations.

I climbed steeply from the Wye Valley that morning, rising up to meet the vast mass of the Black Mountains. The pastures that I passed on the lower slopes were steeply inclined and bordered by mature trees so that the view back down the hill looked like an Alp that morning. However besotted I was with the beauty of that Summer morning I manfully resisted the urge to turn into Julie Andrews and skip around singing the ‘Sound of Music’.

Just as well really, as I progressed up the hill the grass under foot lost its lushness and the scene changed from the rolling landscape of the border hills to the stone harshness of the Black Mountains. Hay Bluff rose like a head in front of me, with the twelve miles of the Hatterall Ridge behind it like a body. Hunched on its haunches like a sphinx, the hill waits to ask the casual walker questions.

The breeze was light and welcoming. The heat again was proving a problem. I sweated but had to go sparingly with my water bottle as I knew that there was no water on the ridge until I reached Pandy.

The quiet on Hatterall Ridge was striking, interrupted only by the modem twitterings of birds and the ubiquitous bleat of lambs. I padded along the soft almost sandy path.

Despite being so high, this part of the Offa’s Dyke footpath did not afford me a good view. I knew from walking here before that the beautiful ruins of the abbey at Llanthony were off to my right but up here on the broad back of the hill you were quite unaware of the valley below. Instead this hilltop ridge gave me a sense of the size of the sky. I felt small and humble under the vast cloudless blue canopy of the day.

I was literally walking the border of England on this ridge - for miles my left foot was in England while my right was in Wales - a border defined naturally by geography. Looking west beyond the valley I could just make out the tops of the other ridges of the Black Mountains and then beyond them were the big hills of South Wales - the Brecon Beacons and Mynydd Epynt.

From here I was tempted to characterise the two countries. England is green, an open rolling country while Wales is a world of long thin valleys divided up endlessly by the massive bulk of high stone hills. I felt myself compelled to think about the personalities of the two people as well. I didn’t get very far as I found it hard to get past my memories of the drunken crowd last night bending the wing mirrors of German-made cars.

There had been times on the walk when I felt the whole physical effort was just too much. After coming down to meet the road at Pandy I felt suddenly deflated and I wanted to curl up into a ball and sleep. However, I managed to walk another ten miles that day after being shamed by an eighty three year old walker who passed me on the trail. We talked at a stile while we got our breath back and he told me how he had been walking along Offa’s Dyke for the last fifty years. The secret, he told me was to do a little but often. My ego ordered my legs to get up and march. My legs reminded my ego about nearly giving up in Essex.

After the isolation of the top of the Black mountain ridge the countryside south of Pandy was intimate. A folded land of farms and small streams dotted about with tiny Welsh hamlets built from the local stone. As this lower ground was less of a natural defence it is one of the features of this part of the country, possessing a splendid array of castles built to control the borderland between the English and Welsh.

I can not explain my deep fascination with castles. They have always struck in me a romantic chord. I was delighted at the very end of the day when the route of the Offa’s Dyke footpath brought me right under the walls of the White Castle. I ran like a child around its ruins, standing up on the high walls peering over battlements at a herd of enemy sheep. I had the castle to myself and indulged myself in a sword wielding fantasy. Finally I found a release for the anger I had kept pent up since the mob hostility of last night.

Next morning I lay in the tent next to Pauline with my eyes closed enjoying an early morning concerto. ‘Rain on canvas’.

First on stage came the percussion - the skiffle pitter-patter of soft brushes. Then came the strings as the wind got up and the ropes on the tents started to hum. Finally I heard a fanfare of brass in the campers panicky voices

"Better check the tent!"
"Tighten up that guy rope"
But this was summer and just as the performance took on a threatening tone it was over with a quick reprise of the soft shoe shuffle.

The birds, the woodwind, picked up the refrain as the kettle drum marked time with another drop of water falling on a tent from an overhanging tree.

The rustling leaves were their own applause.

The walk from Llantilio Crosseny back to where we had pitched our tent at Monmouth was the shortest stretch I had done all Summer. A bridging section that linked the castle country to the drama of the Wye valley as it flowed south past Tintern Abbey. The rain in the night had freshened up the fields and left a gentle dampness on the grass that twinkled as my boots flicked drops of dew ahead of my stride. My feet felt light after carrying a heavy pack and I walked like Puck tripping across the grass.

One of the revelations of the summer was how pleasant it was to walk in pasture, to follow a small river through water meadows and bankside copses. This morning I walked alongside the tiny River Trothy through a mayfly’s world of dryads and nymphs.

It was on this section of the Offa’s Dyke Walk that I started to meet walkers going north. After days of passing hardly anyone it seemed odd that I should come across five parties in as many minutes. I had noticed a similar phenomenon when on the Pennine Way and after racking my brain on the subject I concluded that this bunching effect was because most people walk in their holidays and start on Saturdays from the official start points.

Despite being a short day there was plenty of contrast on my walk down to meet the Wye. A mile or so after leaving the river the path started to rise as it approached the dark ranks of trees.

The path got darker and just for a second I felt the world close in. The trees seemed to swallow up both sound and light. I remembered one of my childhood nightmares, inspired (if that is the right word) by Bilbo Baggins entering the evil forest of Mirkwood. A classic claustrophobic fear of the trees reaching out and smothering me.

Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ and then later his ‘Lord of the Rings’ were great childhood friends of mine. I even produced a great fantasy yarn of my own when I was eight based on the unlikely hero Winpo, a mauve giraffe. Unlike Tolkien, who was happy to stay in the romantic shadows of the Dark Ages, I added to his formula of swords and dragons by sprinkling in a few tanks and war planes. The resulting chaos taught me a lot about the need for realism in stories, even ones as fantastic as those of Middle Earth. It’s difficult to remain a hero in an unheroic world.

This was not the first time that I had felt the shadow of the Ring while I walked. Up on the great stone sides of the pass above Mickleden in the Lakes I had also felt Frodo’s presence as he shivered his way passed Minas Mogul. At first I thought it was odd that my mind should go back to my childhood reading. But it struck me as I walked on through the wood that the fantastic world of Middle Earth was rooted in the real world of England. Tolkien’s imagination had been fired up by his reading of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon myth and these myths were rooted in the landscape. It also struck me that each of his stories had involved a long winding journey. Journeys that elapsed at the speed of a walking man.

That afternoon I tested out a theory. I realised that a journey motif ran through all of my favourite books. From Bilbo and Frodo I walked on to Kidnapped. Later I read George Orwell, Bruce Chatwin and ‘Jupiter’s Travels’. Even with the classics I liked, the journeying theme cropped up again and again in Don Quixote and Gawain and the Green Knight.

I was almost named Gawain. My mum was reading the Green Knight when she was pregnant and after a dangerous birth it would have been suitable revenge. Fortunately my father saved me from years of being bullied.

Gavin on the outside, a scruffy looking school boy. Gawain on the inside, knight in shining armour. Perhaps this journey was my inheritance from my name. A quest.

I walked now in a romantic twilight which had nothing to do with reality. I had become an unreliable witness caught again in the snare of name-checking books. That evening I stared across at the silhouette of Monmouth and only had eyes for the wreck of the castle. From the Lord of the Rings I tripped along the bookshelf until I came to Wordsworth. The next day I would walk the "Sylvan Wye".

One of the questions I found myself being asked over and again was - how did you really organise the walk. The logistics seemed to fascinate people.

The truth was that I didn’t really organise anything. I picked the route and pored over maps and footpaths books for hours. I decided that I was going to do this thing. It was Pauline who did the hard part of co-ordinating dates, of talking to people on the phone. Both of us were amazed at the generosity of our friends who simply pitched in and came up with the names of their friends and relations filling in the holes between the network of our families. When all else failed I stayed at B and B’s or camped or used hotels.

I was particularly lucky in the Wye Valley to be walking to the home of a friend of a friend. Andrew had also offered to walk with me for the day and I was able to enjoy this special spot without the hindrance of a map.

When I planned the walk my day dreams always brought me to the Devil’s Pulpit and the woods above Tintern Abbey. For me it has always been a place that defines the human spirit. When I sat through the dog days in the office dying of boredom it was here to Tintern that I came following William Wordsworth.

Even now as I write in the night I can hear the wind funnelling through the high cliffs that guard the river. I can feel the touch of the elements from the bracing blast. The wind working the big trees that cling to the valley’s sides.

Tintern was also, though, a place that stank of my old love affairs. As I walked I picked at my old memories like a scab. I had come here too often seeking renewal. The Phoenix trapped by his own ability to re-invent himself. I remembered all the half truths that I told at the time. All the smiles and hugs I left in other people’s photo albums. I remembered how I had only been concerned with myself.

I behaved like a pinball after splitting up with Pauline. I rebounded my way from relationship to relationship gathering momentum in random directions as I gained reasons, excuses, justifications for my behaviour. I took myself less and less seriously. I joked - there’s less to me than meets the eye.

Lunch was a particularly fine affair. My good friend Iain had arranged to meet me by the Wye. Andrew’s family had met up with Pauline and we were quite a crowd as we sat on the hillside enjoying the view back down to the river. We looked like a photograph of a Victorian outing with a hamper and plates spread out on our cloth.

After a photograph on the Pulpit looking back to Tintern Parva the rest of the party left Andrew and me to walk to his house at Sedbury. The A-road that serves Tintern Parva and Monmouth was far off on the other side of the river and its intruding noise was drowned out by the song of the trees. We walked on enjoying the company of the trees.

Towards the end of the day the Offa’s Dyke footpath ran very close to the high cliffs at Wintour’s Leap. As I was not concentrating on the map I was not aware of the cliffs until suddenly there was nothing on my right. As we looked down Andrew told me various local stories of how people had survived jumping off the cliff. Looking again at the rock strewn river as it executed a dramatic one hundred and eighty degree turn it seemed unlikely to me that anyone would survive jumping into the river. If the drop itself did not kill you then the wicked current of the stream certainly would.

The Wye was a mad motorbike of a river. A white water charge under the rocky cliffs. A rush of hormones on a hot summer’s night.

Andrew had brought me almost to the end of Offa’s Dyke. All that remained now was for us to skirt around the sewage works and the back gardens of newly built housing estates in Sedbury and then we were at the end. The last few feet of the Dyke ran out on the muddy tops of the Sedbury cliffs. Beyond the cliffs the border of Offa’s kingdom was emphatically marked by the body of the river Severn as it became the Bristol Channel.

If the Wye was a motorbike then the Severn was a juggernaut, a rolling sea on which even a large boat would be just a speck.

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© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004