I caught sight of myself in one of the mirrored glass doors of an upmarket Poole Hotel. I had to laugh. I looked like a pirate amongst the Armani men. There was no danger here of me melting into the crowd.

Before me was a ten mile strip of bustle, beach huts, hot dogs and holiday makers. This was Bournemouth. Brits pretending to be Californians, complete with the roller bladers, joggers and blokes with big muscles. I felt quite exhilarated at the sight of so many people. Behind my shades I felt a little detached at first but I soon came to enjoy a morning amongst the crowds.

Yesterday I had marched. Today I sauntered.

I had spent so long alone. I had relished isolated spots of England. My time away from people had given me a new perspective. I felt the grating noise of the cars in the town. I smelt the fumes. But despite these oppressive distractions I warmed to being back around people.

I finally left the sea at Southbourne just before Hengistbury Head and made my way inland towards Christchurch. As I lumbered my way towards the centre of the town I came across a number of unoccupied cars sitting in a pub car park with their stereos blaring out at full blast. The noise was quite deafening, an arrhythmic thump of heavy machinery. While I wondered at the empty cars, a strange looking figure in industrial ear protectors moved between them taking readings with a microphone. What I had stumbled into, was not a noise abatement raid but a car stereo rally. The chap with the meter was trying to work out which of the cars had won first prize by having the loudest stereo. This seemed like a fairly reasonable sort of competition I supposed, until someone pointed out to me that some of the five thousand pound car systems being tested were so powerful that no human could sit inside the car when the stereo was going. I just had to stop and meet someone who had deliberately ripped out the back seat of his car so that he could fit a set of speakers that he could never safely listen to. Instead of meeting one nut, I happened across two hundred.

I guessed that like all extreme human endeavours, car stereo made sense at some point in the past. Some lads got together to put some slightly special speakers in their car. Now it had become an endurance test. A straight competition to be the loudest regardless. I decided that car stereo was beyond my comprehension but who was I to decide on what makes sense.

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland .

It was while I was standing up to my ankles in the River Avon later that afternoon that I decided that I had not selected the best route. Off to my right was the New Forest, but instead of walking through the most striking bit of open country in Southern England I had elected to follow a flooded long distance footpath up the Avon. This route so far had given me some interesting views of the main road, the backs of a parade of shops and a housing estate. Only further up the path did I come to recognise the special charm of the River Avon. At Downton I watched trout torpedoing through the mill race, flitting like thoughts across the light, bright gravel of the river bottom.

It was a shame that the Avon Valley Walk did not take me right into the centre of Salisbury, as it would make an impressive waterside path into the town. Instead the way was blocked by the bulk of the Longford Castle estate and I guessed that the owners were not too keen to have me cross their land. I had begun to see the whole countryside as a continuum of paths and ways. I needed to remind myself that other people had rights, especially if they had bought the land.

Salisbury was dominated by the spire of the cathedral which soared up to heaven from the wide lawns of the Cathedral Close. Even from the outskirts of the town I was able to see its rocket-like tip over the houses and look forward to a quiet half an hour pottering around in the nave. By the time I had negotiated the traffic troubled centre of Salisbury I had a real need for a place of peace. Unfortuately the Cathedral was closed to visitors.

I turned due east after lunch and headed up out of Salisbury towards the woods that hide the scant remains of the royal residence of Clarendon Palace. There was not a lot left to see of this once illustrious hunting lodge. I simply enjoyed being out of the sun. Shade, along with chairs and sleep was one of the great discoveries of the latter parts of my walk. What could be better on a hot afternoon than to sleep in the shade of the leaves and listen to the whispered stories of the wind in the trees.

All the next morning as I headed east towards Winchester I could hear the sound of rotor blades. I knew from the map that Nether Wallop was nearby. I also knew from a recent TV documentary that the army’s helicopter pilots were based there. I tried to ignore the occasional disturbances but as I carried on along the route, the sound of helicopters just got louder and louder. Coming out of a small copse along the way I felt like I had stepped into a scene from a Vietnam war film. There, spread out in the field in front of me, were a whole squadron of military helicopters hovering stationary just above the ground. With their tapering green bodies and silver rotorblades they looked like angry hornets rising out of the hillside. It only took a short step of the imagination to seeing the paddy fields and panic of Apocalypse Now.

I tried to walk on into the back draft from the hovering craft. It was like walking into a wall of air- a thousand hairdryers blowing in my face. I must have stood still on that hillside for about ten minutes, stunned by the sheer power of being so close to so many helicopters. Eventually I had the good sense to get out my camera. After taking about three snaps, at no more than ten feet, the nearest pilot shifted his plane away from the footpath allowing me to walk past in the relative quiet.

There is something rather grand in Winchester’s smallness. Something about the town reminded me that it was once an important capital. Alfred the Great ruled England from here. The city certainly has the trappings of a long history. The compulsory statue of a man at arms which seemed to be required for all the world’s capitals. On the streets there was an impressive commercial buzz of shoppers on the crowded streets. Perhaps most importantly for its claim to be a city, Winchester has a fine cathedral church.

Over the years I have spent a lot of time around cathedrals. At college in Durham I used to wake up every morning to the view of the dragon-like bulk of Durham Cathedral sitting across the twists in the River Wear. Later in London I used to escape from the boredom of the office by eating my sandwiches in the churchyard of St Paul’s. It would be hard to say which of these characteristically English buildings I regard as the finest, but Winchester would be high on my list.

It is a very human building, Winchester Cathedral, almost intimate in its design which is quite an achievement for such a large lump of masonry. Whereas at Salisbury the temptation is to stand before it like a gormless idiot with your mouth open staring up at the spire, here at Winchester my eyes were kept focused on the West of the building where a small entrance seemed to beckon me in.

I felt that I was standing in a cave in the cool air of the nave. Shafts of light landed in pools at my feet. The cathedral had the acoustics to make anyone sound like an angel. Even in the quiet between services the cathedral murmured in a swirl of old echoes - a hush of the deepest of voices which remember generation after generation of the finest choirs. I felt myself moved by the peace of the Cathedral and I happily added this pleasant calm to the list of icons that I had been appropriating for my new England.

After my trip to the Cathedral I was invited to take tea in the dignified surroundings of the Cathedral Close. Behind the polite facade of the Close, the buildings are places of work. I was being constantly surprised by what I learnt. I was about to become aware of the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines.

Before the involvement of Diana, Princess of Wales a number of unsung heroes had struggled for years to get the rest of us to see the horrors being created by British-made landmines. Small inexpensive anti-personnel mines which went on maiming and killing innocent civilians long after the war in which they had been used was over.

My initial reaction was - what has a war in Angola got to do with the serenity of Winchester Cathedral? I was surprised to learn a number of these weapons are made in the area. After my meeting with the army that morning it struck me that one would not make many friends campaigning against these weapons in a diocese which has so many military associations. I was told that even the Bishop had been reluctant to endorse the campaign at first, as a number of important companies in the area were the manufacturers of these weapons. Jobs, I was told was the reason why these weapons could not be banned. I was disgusted as I walked away from Winchester.

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© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004