I walked the first section of the day along a main road through Street and then found a footpath to take me out along the ridge of Walton Hill. I stopped by the windmill that stood proud on this little spine of land and looked down to the flat fields of the Levels. My eyes followed the rhynes, the local name for the drains as they ran their straight courses through the fields. I felt rain on the wind. Just for a second I felt cold. I decided the time had come for some avoiding action. I told myself that I had some time to kill. When it comes to wasting time - I’m your man!

As I walked I named players of the Chelsea cup side of the 1970’s. I named bands beginning with J that had hits in the Eighties. I-spy however proved a little dull and I quickly moved on to other fields of trivia. Farting however did prove a successful diversion and I composed a short piece called ‘the Fanfare of the Common Man’. I knew that I had reached a low when I found myself teasing the names of the four Banana Splitz out of my memory.

The brief summer shower did not last long. I steamed as I walked alone along the long straight lanes. I became distracted even from my distractions by a friendly group of women cyclists and moved on across Somerset enjoying the sun.

By early afternoon I had reached the hillock of Burrow Mump and sat with my back to its tower looking north. On the moor I could see Westonzoyland with its memorial to the men who died at the battle of Sedgemoor. Beyond that I could see Bridgwater, the M5 and the River Parrett, a line of light in a bright green land. I tried to imagine what this scene must have looked like before the drainage ditches were cut. The Mump and the other hills would have been islands in a sea of reeds. The Levels in the winter would have been a wet wilderness which come spring dried out into a sea of green fodder - this was the summer land of cattle still remembered in the name of Somerset. An impermanent place that man came to each year as a pastoral nomad, disturbing during the good months the peace of the Bittern and the Heron.

I had read somewhere that the sea on a high tide came inland for miles and even lapped at the foot of the hills around Glastonbury. It was the monks at the Abbey that co-ordinated the first successful draining of these fields. The material trappings that I had seen at the Abbey site I realised, came not from blessings of legends and saints but from sheep and humble ditches.

My dotted line finally ran out at North Petherton where I tried to find a bed for the night. Unfortunately a conference had come to town and all the rooms had gone. I walked into Bridgwater and found that full too. This, I decided, was an excuse to check-in to the best hotel.

Bridgewater was one of those places that had once been a pit-stop on family holidays. Unfortunately with the death of my Uncle Bert it had disappeared from the list of places that served high teas.

I remembered as a very small child being taken down by the River Parrett, peering at its acres of ooze and doubting my father’s sanity when he said that the town had once been a centre for building boats. I imagined the new boats going off slipway and hitting the mud with a splat like a falling cowpat.

Not that Bridgewater was the only place we saw Uncle Bert. Every year or so he would go on walkabout and come up to stay at our house. Even as an old man he rambled for miles and I would see him during my school cross country runs moving happily from pub to pub. Perhaps it was from Bert that I got my roving gene.

Uncle Bert was actually my great-uncle, an enigmatic old man with dextrous fingers. He talked very little and rolled up woodbines in a hand held machine. The thing that impressed me most about him during his visits was that he once drank in the ‘Jet’, a pub that was as friendly as a psychotic pitbull, which I for one was scared of going into. Bert had lied about his age to join the Great War. He spent four years in the trenches acting as a sniper. I guess that a few beer louts were never going to worry him.

One of the most inspiring things about Uncle Bert was his memory. He had trained near Leighton Buzzard before going off to war in 1914 and could still remember, sixty years later which pubs he liked and which were no good. My Dad tells a story of him sadly berating a landlord for no longer brewing his own ale when the buildings out the back had not been a brewery for fifty years.

I walked with Uncle Bert as I made my way out of Bridgewater next morning. I crossed over the canal and headed out into the flat lands marked on my map as the Meads. It was misty and cold and it felt like a brisk autumn morning. I imagined the rover coming this way, his breath billowing in the cold.

Even in his eighties Burt had gone walking to his favourite watering holes and I chatted in my head with him about the prospects of the pubs up ahead. He called me Boy, as he always did, with eyes twinkling and his face impassive. He asked whether I was old enough to take a drink.

Just for a change I felt very young that morning and I skipped along in a school boy dance as I tried to keep up with his imagined stride.

After an excellent meal at Timbercombe the rain and cloud cleared away. I always felt more adventurous when my stomach was full and immediately dashed off the road and into the nearest wood.

I was not on a footpath or a cut line through the trees but on a dainty deer path. It was a mere idea of a way that I followed, an occasional twisted twig marking an animal passing through the trees. The wind whipped the upper branches of the trees and the leaves dropped great dollops of water down my neck. I was a hunter moving through the wood. I was Herne. The rushing spirit of the Greenwood.

With all my thrashing around I did actually scare out a couple of deer. Small dotted creatures with legs made out of porcelain. I also scared off a number of angry squirrels who scampered up the trees and barked abuse at me.

It was not very long before I was out of the trees dropping down through the forestry plantation near Coblestone. I was coming down from the Quantocks and into the Vale of Taunton.

I had expected this area to be a mass of orchards, with cider apples on every tree. I associated the name Taunton with the making of cider. I knew that the makers of scrumpy add one or two odd things to the recipe to give it its tang but I assumed that the odd apple went in the making of the cider as well. I don’t think that I saw one tree on the route I took crossing the Vale.

I was back in bright sunshine. When I queued for a stamp in a local post office I used the old line - Do you mind if I smoke! - as vapour trails rose from my rucksack. I walked on with a skip in my step that told me I was happy.

I was walking again on country roads as I hit a back road out of the town of Milverton. The road took me away from Uncle Bert and Bridgewater into my dad’s world as an evacuee during the Second World War.

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© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004