The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (29 page)

Even on the OS, it looks like no other. Crossing the shifting sands of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, the path arcs out from Hest Bank, ploughing a course so determined that alarm bells start ringing, for, more than any other path on the map, it looks to be all theory and no practice. The smooth line courses across seven miles of sandbank, mudflat and estuary, disgorging itself on the other side of the bay at Kents Bank, to the south of Grange-over-Sands. Before the turnpikes and railways, this was the only route across to Furness from the main body of Lancashire; a coach service ran six days a week until the railway opened in 1857. One of its last trips saw ten farm workers drown on their way to a hiring fair, when the coach driver, who was reported to be drunk, lost control in the middle of the sands and was subsumed by the tide.

Standing at Hest Bank, on the edge of the bay, I watched the sea sweep in. At first, it was low tide, when there are 120 square miles of sand in the bay, gleaming gold and silver against the fantastical backdrop of the Lakeland fells. Within half an hour, the whole bay was covered by water, and as I watched it race in faster than any man could escape it, I shuddered at the thought of being caught out there, in the cold, in the mist, in the gloopy half-world between land and sea. Remembering the 23 Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned there one winter’s night in 2004, so lost and confused and far from home, I felt physically sick.

The map makes it clear: ‘WARNING – Public rights of way across Morecambe Bay are dangerous. Seek local guidance.’ Signs on the bank make it equally plain: ‘Do not attempt to cross without the Official Guide.’ Since 1963, that’s meant digging out Cedric Robinson, the Queen’s Guide to the Sands, a post that dates back to the sixteenth century. It comes with an honorarium of £15 a year, the tenancy of Guides Farm, overlooking the sands at Kents Bank, and a modicum of danger: at least one of his predecessors has drowned on the job. Using nothing more sophisticated than a lifetime’s knowledge, a stick and a whistle, Cedric steers some 10,000 people a year across, mainly on charity walks (it seems to be today’s version of the Lyke Wake Walk, which is reason enough to be cautious). The designated route of the path on the map is irrelevant, as the river channels and quicksands are in a state of constant flux; every crossing is different. When the railway first arrived, numbers crossing the sands plummeted. Tramps continued to use it, however, and sometimes the Queen’s Guide of the day was known to give a tramp the rail fare to get across, so that he wouldn’t have to bother. This became something of a legend in the tramping fraternity, and others soon showed up in some number to claim their free pennies.

Should it still be marked on the OS? I’m not sure that it should, for it must invite people to think that it’s more passable than it really is. I tried walking out where it’s marked on the map, and couldn’t get further than a couple of hundred yards before coming across wobbly sands, apparently firm bits that suddenly gave way and treacherous, fast-flowing channels of water. When the first local authority definitive maps were being drawn up in the early 1950s, the path wasn’t included, but the local secretary of the Ramblers’ Association lodged an objection, which was upheld. When the route was reclassified in the early 1990s, there were suggestions that it should, for the sake of both safety and wildlife, be extinguished, but again rambling fundamentalists, glued to their dogma of once a path, always a path, managed to stop the idea after a lengthy, and expensive, public enquiry. Perhaps the most avid amongst them could exercise their right with a lovely Boxing Day walk on the path that they’ve so bravely saved. Sticking to the exact line on the map, of course. And without Cedric.

Not only are we surrounded by water, internally we drip and gush from every pore. Fly over Britain and it’s the sunlight suddenly glancing off the surface of so many rivers, canals and lakes that both impresses and moves us the most. On a global scale, our rivers – and indeed all of our natural features – are tiny, but within our own insular microcosm, they are mighty.

Being the capital’s grubby sewer, and the waterway in which we are most encouraged to admire our national reflection, the Thames is the river that bags most of our national adulation. The only consolation for those of us infected with an inverted snobbery against southern England is that, however much it is lauded and loved, the Thames will never be as long as the Severn. It will always be in second place. There are many in Ireland who have the same pride that the Shannon trumps both of Britain’s major rivers.

Both the Thames and the Severn have named paths following them, but it is the Thames Path that has been elevated to the status of National Trail. It was first considered as one of the first wave of long-distance paths in the early 1950s, but took until 1996 to be officially completed. Passing as it does some of the most sumptuous real estate in England, there were plenty of ruffled feathers to be smoothed about the idea of having the hoi polloi walking past their boathouses and helipads. Not that such problems were anything new. In the 150 miles between Cricklade and Teddington Lock, the path crosses the river 28 times; a hangover from the days when wealthy landowners refused to allow the towpath through the end of their garden, forcing bargees and their horses across the water on ferries as the path switched sides. If you want the spirit of the Thames Path, look no further than the brass plaque facing walkers at the foot of a particularly lavish garden in Dorney Reach, between Windsor and Maidenhead. ‘No Stopping – Right of Way Only’ it barks, and who would dare disagree?

The path itself has a slightly different profile to most other long-distance routes. For starters, the people walking it are generally younger than you’ll find elsewhere, especially in London, where the largest slice of the demographic is 25–34-year-olds. They also feel unable to put a foot into a boot without tweeting and blogging about it, uploading their photos of every boat, bridge and bar on to Facebook and/or bespoke websites especially created for The Project. It always is The Project. They make it sound as if they’re hoping to crack the Enigma code or solve the Middle East problem, rather than take a gentle, flattish stroll through southern England. And not even that, for many of them. Terrified of the lands beyond Zone 6, they’re only doing the stretch from Hampton Court to the Thames Barrier, but boy, do we hear about every inch of the way. And see it photographed. Videoed too, if we’re lucky. And measured. And mapped; interactively, of course. Looking at all that is more exhausting than doing the bloody walk. Takes longer too.

I take the mick, but I adore walking in London. As a student there in the late eighties, I’d often roll home on foot from a night’s excess in the West End, past the pimps and dealers of King’s Cross, the goths of Camden, through the kebab alleys of Kentish Town, and the au pair avenues of Hampstead and Highgate. These were the occasions when I most felt part of the city, one tiny cog in a gargantuan, greasy machine that never stopped roaring. The drunkenness helped, I think, blurring the harsh edges of daytime into impressionistic splashes of neon and reflections in puddles. With the collars of my leather jacket turned up against the cold, I shimmied through, feeling like Morrissey, but probably looking more like a walking Soft Cell album cover.

These days, my London walks are a little less dissolute. One of the best lately was from the Tower of London to Hyde Park Corner, via some of the many lovely eighteenth-century churches and old alleyways of the City, and the gluttonous boulevards of the West End. It was hearing my excitement about this walk that made my partner agree to accompany me on the Thames Path from the Barrier for what was planned to be a full day’s romantic promenade into central London. We landed on the north side of the river, in order to take a look at the Thames Barrier Park, and then realised that we had to cross the water to reach the path. The nearest option was walking up to catch the Woolwich Ferry, a treat I’d long been keen to sample. I can’t say he looked too excited by the prospect, and the flyblown streets of Silvertown, its derelict railway and the belching silos of the Tate & Lyle plant didn’t much help, but the rust-bucket ferry across the river was fun, and Woolwich looked interesting. Until we docked, anyway.

I’d promised him breakfast, and pulled out all the stops by getting us a bacon bap from a caravan in a car park. It was enough to send us on our way to North Greenwich and the Millennium Dome. This is another place I’d never been to, and it both fascinated and horrified me. I felt as if we’d been shrunk, like Raquel Welch in
Fantastic Voyage
, though instead of being pumped into a scientist’s arteries, we’d been dropped into an architect’s model. And one that they’d given up on half-way through, by the looks of things.

The Dome, that cathedral of political hubris, might well have been rescued and reborn as the O2 Arena, but it was still looking mighty tatty, with stains leeching down its sides and acres of redevelopment debris surrounding it. That’s all to change, though, at least according to the massive hoardings everywhere advertising this as yet another brand-new waterside quarter of London. The images were all of glossy people surfing on lap-tops and sipping lattes in funky bars, bluebells in woods, ducks splashing and sunshine dancing on water – well, isn’t that exactly what springs to mind when you think of Legoland houses built on a reclaimed toxic sludge pit? ‘Greenwich Peninsula: A place where you can’ was their slogan. Fill in your own punchline.

This demesne of plasticity and promise was a strange contrast with the gruff solidity of the river itself; the wharves, factories, chimneys and container ships, even the reed beds, swans and geese. Across the water, the towers of Canary Wharf glittered icily, looking way beyond reach or even belief. ‘This is great, isn’t it?’ I enthused to my cariad. ‘Hmmmm,’ he replied, which I took as a yes. We turned the corner of the peninsula and headed down towards Greenwich, but the Thames Path wasn’t playing. Signs announced a diversion, but it soon petered out and left us wandering hopelessly through industrial estates, along a busy dual carriageway, past cranes and concrete mixers, under CCTV cameras and hoops of razor wire. Eventually, after many wrong turns, we landed in the gentrified streets that announced our imminent arrival in Greenwich. ‘Er, I think I’ll go and see the Chelsea Physic Garden,’ he muttered as we sank a pint in the Cutty Sark Tavern on the quay. He was off before I could say, ‘But hang on in there, it’s Deptford and Rotherhithe next.’ Returning that evening, he pointedly compared the two halves of his day: my trip in the morning through noxious mud and rusty dereliction, his trip in the afternoon along perfumed walkways and shimmering walls of fern.

So much for the Thames. The Severn is my river – I grew up by it, went to school right next to it and have its source just a few miles from where I live in the otherwise foreign mountains. When I was considering moving to Wales, the Severn was the thread that kept me linked to all that had come before: it was the liquid guarantee that my old life and my new life could be bridged. I’ve paddled and swum in it, waded through it, fallen into it, skimmed stones across it, picnicked and gossiped and canoodled on its banks, sailed down it in dinghies, a narrowboat, a raft, a kayak, a party boat and even, between the two Severn Bridges, a 400-tonne sand dredger.

The Severn Way is the path that attempts to follow the river from its source on Pumlumon, a mountain disguised as an upland sponge, squatting like a fat, dripping toad in the very middle of Wales. On any old map, from the fourteenth-century Gough Map to those derived from the Tudor splendours of Saxton and Speed, Pumlumon is shown as Snowdon’s equal, despite being only the 49th-highest peak in Wales. It wasn’t the physical reality of the mountain being mapped, but its reputation; a place to bewilder and disorientate invaders coursing into Wales from the east. It’s likely too that such cartographic prominence was a nod to the mountain’s place as the birthplace of two great national rivers, the Severn and the Wye. The Severn Way steers quite a haphazard course, for there are many stretches of the river jealously guarded and out of bounds, so that you can sometimes walk it for hours without actually seeing the Severn itself. With only the slightest hint of disingenuousness, this is presented on the website promoting the trail as ‘the Severn Way does not simply follow riverside paths, but is routed to help the walker make the most of the countryside.’ There is a point there, I suppose, for sometimes it is good to break the hypnotic allure of the water and see a little more of the context of its sinuous course.

The best bits of the Severn Way, though, are undoubtedly the riverside stretches. Once it gets into its stride, the river is such a languid beast, and to follow it for mile after mile, with no need to check the map or work out where’s next, is an easy thrill like no other. My finest walk on it was the most recent, a day in May with my dad strolling from Worcester back up to his home near Stourport. We’d started the previous day on the Malvern Hills, at the border of Worcestershire and Herefordshire. Far below on the plain, the Severn beckoned us. It was a huge relief to meet it after a hot day’s walk across the dusty fields, even if we were doing so at one of its least appealing spots, directly beneath the new bypass bridge to the south of Worcester. We had to cross the bypass during evening rush hour, a moment that brought home just how quickly – in less than one day’s walking – we’d become completely desensitised to traffic. Dad and I stood timidly on the pavement, waiting for a break in the traffic that never came. Stone-faced drivers glared at us incomprehensibly as they slid by. After about ten minutes of nervy near-starts, a coach driver on the far lane took pity on us and stopped his bus for a couple of minutes, until there was enough of a break in the near-side stream of cars to let us scurry across.

Walking into Worcester, the path was diverted through the old wharfside district of Diglis. This is yet to be tarted up into some futureslum marina: the recession has stopped much of the transformation for now, so that half-built showpiece apartments sit under a carapace of new weeds. But there have always been plenty of people living down here, in streets of redbrick terraces tucked alongside little factories and warehouses. Diversion signs soon vanished, but suddenly the more powerful pointers of ancient memory brought it all back.