WHEN WALKING

Beating about the Bushes

Ewyas Harold to Hereford: 25km

In keeping with the spirit of sacrifice appropriate to pilgrimage, I cheated today. But more on that later.

Once again, the day began extraordinarily well: the post office in Ewyas Harold was open. The young man in the shop carefully guided me to everything I need and engaged quite spontaneously in a discussion of jelly sweets. I can’t trust myself with Jelly Babies and Fruit Pastels are out. So, again, on this day of sacrifices, I go for a packet of wine gums. The young man tells me that he buys those, in the vain hope that his wife won’t steal them. He couldn’t think of a less tempting jelly sweet. I decide to use the same logic on myself.

The path up the hill and out of the village couldn’t be clearer, and leads on to the stunning Ewyas Harold Common. Another wonder of wide grassy paths and bracken. Flatter this time, a muntjac deer runs across my path, the second deer I’ve seen and the closest. It’s the sort of path where you can’t go wrong if you know the general direction you’re going in.

After a happy stroll on the common, I see Dore Abbey beautifully framed beneath me, which I expect to be another highlight of the trip. What I’m not expecting, as I climb through the stile in the hedge onto the main road, is to hear a voice shouting out, “Hello! Darling!”

A man standing at the gate to the abbey turns round, surprised to see me appear. “Oh, I thought you were a bird in the bushes,” he said. “I’ve lost my wife and my dog.”

He’s another nice, chatty man who tells me a bit about the abbey. The acoustics, he adds, are wonderful, and when I tell him I don’t think I need to test them, he replies with, “Oh, but sometimes you just need a good hallelujah!”

Soon after, his wife and the dog appear, and she walks up to him, smiles and nods warily, and as she passes him, squeezes his arm, as if to say, come along now, you’re talking to strangers again.

The beauty of the abbey hits you as you walk in. Just the choir, the chancel, and the tower are still there; paintings on the walls, old stone scattered around the floor—and thus begins the sermon for today.

I was sent an article this morning, thank you, Emma, about a tradition across Holland of four evenings during one week each year when children are taken out en masse to walk and get to know their local neighbourhood. I’m taken by this idea. I don’t really take to the pictures of the crowds or the party atmosphere, but I do think how this could be very well channelled into getting them to maybe beat the bounds and maintain some of the footpaths, and obviously, free child labour aside, make them familiar with their surroundings and all the good stuff too.

[Link to article: Dutch children are unusually happy and healthy. Is it because of this walking tradition?]

And the main thing that comes into my head as I walk in – and a connection will become clear – is this is a place my dad would have brought me. Every Sunday afternoon it became a tradition. I can’t remember from what age, but I know as I started secondary school it was very much an antidote to the fear of going to school on Monday. His years as a Samaritan came through in calming down and keeping calm, his emotionally fraught pre-teen child. He would take me out places, see churches, castles, museums, ruins, always stopping off at the sweet shop on the main road near Polegate on the way back to buy a bag of sweets. I remember buying jelly beans once and him telling me they were Ronald Reagan’s favourite. It is a jelly choice I have not continued.

So it was him that got me to know the area where I live. My mum probably put in the strange fascination with walking and walking, but he explained what I saw. Everything I know about the area I grew up in and other areas we visited came from him.

And his powers to explain places didn’t stop with me. With my Hungarian friend Krisz – who spoke not a word of English apart from the names of football teams and numbers one to five, which was usually enough for the scores, in the five minutes it took my mum and me to go to the loo on a seafront walk, my father was able to explain exactly how the Weald and the Downs and the whole geology of the southeast of England was formed. When my dad told me of their conversation, I told him Krisz can’t possibly have understood. But then, on being questioned Krisz went through the whole thing with me in Hungarian, exactly as Dad had taught me as a child.

And so I guess by the time you read this, Dad, it will be nearly Father’s Day. You don’t need me to tell you, or maybe I should tell you more often, what an extraordinary dad you are. But let’s move on.

From this point onwards, the path goes back to form. Looking down from a ridge, I see what appears to be a beautiful path cut through the wheat in front of me, and indeed it is, but between each wheat field there is either a hedgerow growing over the gate or the stile, or a hayfield completely covering the path, and I have to high-step through it. It is a workout I hadn’t planned for.

I’m having a bit of a grumble to myself about farmers when one, whose field I’ve just broken into through the bramble, stops his tractor and drives over to me. He describes in great detail exactly how I get to Cockyard by showing me the stile and the tree I need to head for. And I realise I’m just taking advantage of local routes. These are his routes really, and he knows where to go. He doesn’t need a four-days-in-a-week evening walk to get to know his neighbourhood.

So I get to Cockyard and walk along the lanes to Kingstone, where again, I find a lovely friendly post office. While I hand over my postcards, a woman explains how the impossibly tiny baby she’s brought in with her had been accidentally born at home this week. Apparently, the baby came in 15 minutes before the ambulance arrived. She looks wonderfully well.

Then, after a brief pause in the church porch -sadly this one not open – I set off across a beautiful wide path cut into the crop field into a small wood, where sadly my journey comes to an end.

The wooded track, is covered with nettles and mud, and eventually I come to a bridge across a stream where a tree has crashed down upon it and the nettles and thorns have taken over completely. There’s no way through. I go back to the field and start walking round the edges, occasionally breaking into the wooded edge of the field and finding myself scratched in thorny thickets, but never able to get beyond the barriers of nettles or wire, always in the way between me and the onward path.

Having gone round the entirety of the field, probably about an hour in total, I find myself back on the lane where I started, with not enough time to walk into Hereford. I realise it would just be pretty much a repeat of the walk out here, and almost certainly as stressful as the bit I’ve just done.

So I give in. I walk to what doesn’t seem to possibly be a bus stop and wait for the one bus a day, which my phone tells me will appear. And miraculously, and on time, it turns up in the lane. I get off my high horse and I jump on. It’s a lovely half-hour ride into Hereford.

When I get there, I head straight to the cathedral, where the verger shows me in, takes me through the cloisters to my room in the beautiful old chapel. He gives me instructions as I look out onto the beautiful cloister gardens and hear the choir practising in the song school. There’s a Canadian choir come over to sing with us, he says, seeming disparagingly.

I get some food, make a bed out of the chairs, having had enough of campbed assembly, and turn up to join all the proud parents at evensong. The words may be in English, but it might as well be Latin. It’s all incomprehensible and beautiful to me.

And so, to my little chair bed, I pull down the blinds on the cloisters and the cottage garden and this little walking chapter.