I had been learning about the wind, about how to avoid it. Donald, my host of the night before, had told me that there was an art to getting into the lee of a hedge. So next morning I set off tucked into the windward hedgerow and kept the air moving over my head. I found that indeed it was easier than standing further out into the breeze.
I dreamed the dream of Roman Legions as I slept, the steady tramp of foot-weary soldiers. I marched and felt the marching beat. I followed the Eagle far from home. Was my unconscious listening to the track beside me, or was this story coming from the guide book that kept the sun out of my eyes?
The Peddars Way.
A Roman road which was originally built in the 1st century
AD to help the Romans subdue the Iceni after the crushing defeat of
Queen Boudicca
by the Legions. Once this was a mighty military road, but after twenty centuries of
sleeping, the PeddarsWay has faded into being a quiet and dusty lane. A ruler straight
route that runs like a white line across the Norfolk from Ringstead, to my bed for the
night at Castle Acre. Unlike Watling Street or some of the other Roman roads which
have remained arterial routes throughout history, the Peddars Way’s early slip into
obscurity has made it a perfect route for a walker. The quiet peacefulness of the
countryside can of course be deceptive.
My day dream was shattered by a low flying Tornado hammering its way through the sky. I opened my eyes, forgetting about the bloody battles of the past, and caught a glimpse of the jet I had last seen in the footage of the Gulf War. For the first time on the walk I became aware of the presence of the military planes which would intrude on my peace until I reached the Lake District. A noisy wake up call from reality.
This area of Norfolk has long had associations with military flying. At lunch I stopped at a pub in Great Massingham which was an unofficial shrine to the airmen lost during the Second World War. My father had served here with the RAF while doing National Service in the Fifties and the names of the bases, like the still active West Raynham were familiar to me.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like during the war. For the aircrews who made it home, stepping out of their planes into the quiet of the day, to the sleepiness of Norfolk I felt this afternoon. It must have been like heaven after the tension of their hours in the air in those thundering aircraft. They must have looked at the blue skies above and wondered where the ack-ack fire was, where all the broken and falling planes had gone to. No wonder they found the pub so attractive in the evening.
Castle Acre
is a little gem. A pub or two, an arch, the ruins of a castle and just
to complete its gothic theme, a ruined priory, testimony to a time when one tenth of
the countryside was in the hands of the Church. It also has a charmingly eccentric
youth hostel at the Old Red Lion,
which as I will explain in a moment, is more of a
holistic experience than a place to stay.
I had arranged to rendezvous with Alistair there. This was an opportunity to see Alistair and his Norwich co-workers at work, as they had arranged for a visiting German agricultural speaker to talk to some local farmers. Against the background of British tabloid hysteria about BSE it was pleasing to see that the farmers of Norfolk felt that they had some common ground with their neighbours in Germany. The evening had the special flavour of the Old Red Lion as I was treated to the sight of a number of burly tweed-jacketed farmers sitting on chairs in their bare feet. No shoes was Rule One of the hostel.
At its simplest, this meeting exemplified what Development Education can do. It makes people aware of their common problems. Through promoting issues such as Fair Trade with the rest of the world it challenges stereotypes and our natural inclinations to be insular. I slowly began to understand the work I was supporting. ADEC, the charity I was collecting money for, carried out similar work in the Aylesbury region.
I slept well that night and for the first time since I had set out I did not wake up feeling knackered. The combination of the short day yesterday and eating well had finally got me back from the land of the dead. This was just as well as the first thing that happened when I finally announced that I was awake was that I was taken on a whirlwind tour of the goings on at the Old Red Lion. I would like to apologise here to the various crystal healers, shiatsu practitioners and reiki healers that I crashed in on that morning, but I was experiencing a problem that I had never encountered before - slight celebrity. At the time I did not realise that periodically you have to say no to people, that you are not that important. Later on, I became accustomed to the strange way that English people deal with someone doing something slightly out of the ordinary. Either they disregarded what I was doing altogether, so that if I had told them that I had just space hoppered across Mars they would have retreated into a polite smile, or else they treated me like visiting royalty giving me a tour of the minutiae of their daily lives. Here, at the Castle Acre I failed to act with regal aloof.
The route I had selected for the day had come out of conversation with a friendly voice at Norfolk County Council who had recommended the Nar Valley Walk as being ‘pretty’. ‘Pretty’, not an inspiring adjective I thought, a word I normally associated with the unmarried daughters of my mother’s friends. But somehow the conviction of the voice rang true on the phone. I was glad I went this way.
Pretty it was, as the path wended its way out of Castle Acre, heading west past the remains of the Priory. Past the rich green of the water meadow grasses dotted with the endless small flowers. Past the River Nar itself, a moderate sized stream, filled with sort of brisk flowing water that made me want to be re-incarnated as an otter.
After a section of lane that took me away from the river itself, the Nar Valley took on a wooded character, which on this hot May morning was fine by me, as the shade of the trees kept me cool. Occasionally through breaks in the wood I got a view of the river and over to Narford Hall. When the path did come back to the stream it had changed and taken on a different character. Now it was more mysterious, covered over by trees that gave this spot the feel of a bayou. A spell-binding place, perfect for the setting of a Pre-Raphaelite drowning. Perhaps it was the crystals that I had had with my breakfast, but the river seemed to be talking to me, tempting me to bathe.
Once again my work ethic forbade me to play. I was still in the early days of the walk and I had yet to grasp the simple concept that I was allowed to enjoy myself. I marched sternly onwards.
After Narborough the river changed character once again and for the first time I was facing towards the Fens. In front of me the flat land ran to the coast, broken only by the raised banks of the river.
Like the siege embankments of an iron age fort this landscape is shaped by a battle, the battle to control the water level, to keep the land separate from the sea. I did not realise at the time what a battle the Fens were going to be for me. I thought that because they were flat they would make for easy walking.
In the midday sun, with a muddying heat haze, the raised footpath was an exposed, empty place. Hot and featureless without even the interest of sharp shadows. The essential sense of scale that a walker needs to keep going, got distorted. The miles were marked by the occasional sluice, the junction with a track that you picked out on the map an hour ago.
Later when I saw the sun set for the first time this landscape, I realised that I should have planned some of this section of the walk to take place in the evening. The sky is so big here and the sun departs with an explosion of colour which is sprayed right across the western skyline.
The designers of this path were aware of the value of a little of everything, and after a few miles of the Nar the path took a detour along the sides of the fields to the plantations of Shouldham Warren. The trees felt intimate after the open sky. The path then passed through a village and then back to the Nar along whose bank it ran like a faithful retriever until it came to its end at the mighty Ouse.
After the Otter and the Ophelia-under-the-trees phase this last section of the Nar was bleak. The wind in the rushes marked a mournful note and man’s huge interventions on the horizon were more noticeable for not being buried by the rolls of the landscape.
I felt like I was exposed to it all. The roar of the cars and lorries on the A10, the rattle of the train, the Olympian pylons striding across the landscape. I walked on towards the lowering shadow of the sugar factory.
© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004
