The Scourge Part 7.

 Previously on The Sourge: Link to Part 1.

Part 7: On Our Way.

It was freezing. Hellishly freezing. What have I got myself in for? I woke at 7 wearing vastly more clothes than I had fallen asleep in. Dave was making green tea and looked rosy and alert. After a few sips I too was rosy. It was the first day of the walk, and we were almost on our way.

“A little bread and Snickers, and we’ll be on our way!” said Dave, stretching in the morning sun. It looked to be a good one. The clouds were high and ruffled, like silk sheets, and the sun was in the east, hardly peeking over the mountains and hills which we were soon to cross.

It was a tad ironic that our first stint towards the east was to be spent heading northwest. This was to reach St. Bees Head, the most westerly point of North West England. Before that, we were obliged by tradition to soak our boots in the sea. Before that, however, something had come to my attention which needed attention. After that, we'll be on our way, I told myself.

A rare sequence of logic had occurred in my head during the cold night. My passport, which was now at the Belorussian embassy, was going to be sent to Dave’s house while we were away. It dawned on me that it might need to be signed for, and then it dawned on me that Dave’s girlfriend was not going to be in the house. This could be a problem.

“It’ll be fine,” Dave said. It was the reassurance of someone whose life wasn’t going to be affected whether it turned out fine or not.

“How?” I retorted.

“A neighbour could sign for it, or you pick it up from the depot or something.”

I bit off a nail. “If it goes back to the depot, I won’t be able to get it before I have to go to France.” My schedule was tight: return from the North on Saturday, leave on a giant trip to Beijing on train on Sunday. “I’m going to phone my mum, and then we’ll be on our way.”

It was 10:30 before we were on our way. I won’t bore you with the arduous and contradictory obstacles which conspired to thwart my humble attempts to secure my passport, save for the simple fact that it was torturous and Homeric in its scope. And it wasn’t over: I’d have to find times (and phone signal) to phone my parents, the Belorussian embassy and, now, my aunt, during the week.

By the time I’d made some kind of vague arrangement, I was too fed up to do the stupid boots-in-the-sea nonsense. I found Dave reading by the beach and joined him. “Fuck it,” I said, “let’s go.”

The beginning of the walk is marked by a plaque. We were going to take a photo next to this plaque when an extended family chortled up to it and began taking a range of photos, as one would at a wedding. The two of us stood patiently for a moment, with me and my newly heightened stress levels radiating a conspicuous aura of impatience, and then we left. I shook my head in appalled disgust at these wretched foes and their dimwittery. Photos!

We left and marched up the hill. The walk was immediately taxing, the incline and heavy bags putting strain on our hitherto untested shoulders. The extended family, who we’d by now named the Fellowship, were right behind us, chuckling and whooping. They overtook us when I phoned my parents again to talk more about passports, and we overtook them when they stopped to drink water. Every time we passed we engaged in a quintessentially British bit of theatre, remarking on the weather and the challenges ahead. This peaked when we reached a river, cut deep into the high rock which we had to descend to cross. There was a bridge at the bottom and a kissing gate. A naive walker such as myself didn’t know the term ‘kissing gate’; for those as ignorant as me, it’s a gate on a spring which pushes against a fence which has to be pushed open and squeezed past before you let the gate fling back against the fence. It’s like an airlock for the countryside, stopping animals roam freely. On the other side of the gate and the river, Dave stopped to apply sun cream.

“They’re coming,” I warned him under my breath. But it was too late.

“Here we are again!” laughed the approaching woman, currently spearheading the Fellowship. With three generations, ranging from about 55 to twelve, they were surprisingly spritely. Embarrassingly so.

“Waiting for us at the kissing gate!” another woman chuckled.

“We’ll have to stop meeting like this!” said a man, presumably some kind of uncle, who’d begun to enjoy the euphemistic shenanigans.

“We couldn’t resist,” I said.

They stopped this time to exchange backgrounds. We explained that we were from London (which isn’t strictly true but makes the conversation simpler) and this is our first big walk. They were more local than us, from Coventry, and one in their ranks had done it before. This time, they planned only to walk half way. They all had two walking sticks each, which looked professional but seemed, to us, superfluous. As for the kids, it was their first time doing a long-distance walk, and although they shrieked with delight and a zest for adventure, I pitied them.

“See you next time!” Dave yelled as they strolled up the valley, before lamenting to me in a quieter tone, “We’ll never be rid of them.” Wanting to escape the Fellowship was no trifling matter: our grand visions of the untamed country, the rugged path trodden down by a couple of silent, hardy wanderers, was not aided by the happy-go-luckiness of an extended family high on fresh air and good spirits. It was far too nice.

The next time we passed them we did it at such speed that I was tempted to make race car sounds as we overtook. We’d gotten our act together, with water and sun cream and snacks all in reaching distance. Bag straps were all tightened and our march was seriously on; it was our Nazgul to the Fellowship on the next hill. This time, we’d decided, we’d leave them for dust.

We achieved this, and spent another two hours hugging the cracked clifftop walking north. The rock was red and aged, freckled with clumps of grass. We considered the few sheltered spots hidden in the sloping grassland, weighing them up for potential camping spots, practicing for the coming evenings. Across the Irish Sea was the Isle of Man and the peaks of southern Scotland, and besides us was St. Bees Lighthouse, which has been guiding the local ships in some form since 1718. The one we were passing was built in 1822 after the previous had met its fate in the embers of a fire which killed the lighthouse keeper’s wife and their five children. An image of the Fellowship huddled in the corner under a blanket of smoke flashed across my mind – I couldn’t help it. On that note, we banked eastwards and said goodbye to the coast. Finally, we agreed, we were on our way.

The Scourge Part IV

Previously on The Scourge... Link to Part 1

Part IV: Pepys Road, London.

Alfred Wainright, spiritual father of the Coast to Coast walk, wrote “I want to encourage in others the ambition to devise with the aid of maps their own cross-country marathons and not be merely followers of other people's routes: there is no end to the possibilities for originality and initiative.” With this in mind, we decided to merely follow Wainright’s route.

I had suggested walking east to west, following the sun, but Dave rightly pointed out that I was being an idiot. Going east, he said, laying out his case, means that you walk towards the sun in the morning, and have it on your back as the afternoon draws on. It also means that we can follow the book, Henry Steadman’s map-cum-guidebook Coast to Coast Path, to the letter. I realised I had developed a rather naïve sense of what trekking was to be like – just go forward in the direction you want. It hadn’t really occurred to me that trees, rivers, fences or cows might get in the way.

At Dave’s house, on the eve of the Big Walk, we took inventory and spread out our things. Dave’s backpack was roughly twice the size of mine, as was his tent. I had bought a one-man tent which was little bigger than a Smarties tube; Dave had a mansion.

“That’s heavy,” I said. “You’re going to regret it, mark my words.”

“When I’m stretched out diagonally in my tent – my Taj Mahal – enjoying a spacious and peaceful night’s rest, you’ll be the one who’s regretting it. I might put a small bar in the corner with a selection of scotches, so I can read my books with a pleasant tipple.”

The bar idea may have been a slight exaggeration, but Dave hadn’t scrimped. He really hadn’t. I examined his procurements which were now spread over the floor (a result of not being able to get them all in the bag): apart from the massive tent, a chunky sleeping bag and a yoga mat to sleep on, he had three books, a variety of wardrobe changes, two gas canisters, plenty of plates and cutlery, a flask, two mugs, a torch that one could use to beat an intruder of the night, an axe, an penknife, and four flat halogen lights.

“We’re not helping planes land,” I said, looking at the lights.

He paused. “I’ll leave one of the lights.”

The evening passed in this fashion – me telling Dave he had too much stuff and was going to regret it, and him finally accepting this argument and leaving something. I managed to convince him to leave the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but he wouldn’t budge on Rashomon by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, nor the Saga of Gunnlaugr Serpent-Tongue, a 13^th century Icelandic epic. These were, Dave insisted, vital for taking our minds, as well as our bodies, truly into the wilderness.

Each item was a battle, and we would never have gotten through it if we hadn’t had the aid of some decent single malt scotch. After this evening, I had told Dave, I wouldn’t drink for the entire journey. He eyed me with suspicion when I said this.

With our packs loaded, we went to bed. Dave, to the last night with his partner Cinthya; me, to the first night in a superlite sleeping bag, on a sofa. Superlite, I quickly realised, also meant superthin and supercold. If I am cold in this sleeping bag in a flat in London, then what about when... I pushed out the doubts. Tents are, like... insulated with body warmth, or something... I was sure it would be fine.

Take me to part 5.

Scourge of the Trail

Part 1: Proximity

I suppose I should've known better. After all, it was summertime in England - a wretched time that even the most hardy seaside go-getter can attest to. Perhaps I had been away from home too long, and a cosy fog which suggested warmth had clouded my judgement, and filled my head with the English summer of pub gardens, beach parties and cocktails on the lawn. Pym's. On top of that, I hadn't erected a tent and shivered my way into a sleeping bag in a good fifteen years, and I had long since ceased to remember the discomfort, the sheer depravity of camping in England. More than once did I consider uttering that immortal line, that of the sacrificial Captain Oates - "I'm just going outside and may be some time," in order to save my frozen friend, Dave, from certain doom. I'm sure he thought the same thing.

Our mutual friend, the generally-more-reluctant Chris, had declined to join us, citing an absence of hair straighteners and naturally sourced lime and aloe moisturiser on the trail. "There are a thousand better reasons to reject this trip, Chris," I said to him, number 1 being me and number 2 being Dave. Proximity, it could be said, is the greatest test of a person. It has to be delicately handled. If you're stealing oxygen from your neighbour, oftentimes this is too close.

One tent each, said Dave. That should be enough. Enough to save us from ourselves. Lord of the Flies was flickering across the back of my eyelids, crossed with some twisted version of a weekend getaway on the Goode Life. I pushed the idea of murder (which had now evolved to murder-suicide) from my mind – seriously, the chances of being killed while camping in the English countryside must be tiny, perhaps as high as being killed in a terrorist attack, which, I assure you, is lower than you’d think – and looked over at Dave. His pale brown flop of hair had been recently shawn and he peered through his glasses with an alert keen. His newly shaved head accentuated his neck, somehow increasing the enthusiasm in his eyes. “I’m really looking forward to this,” he said.

the idea had been raised a few months before, while I was in China. Coast to coast, said Dave, west to east. “it’s Wainright’s walk,” he iterated, “and a woman did it on TV. With a film crew.” A film crew, I pondered. There could be something to this. Just shy of 200 miles, the walk stretches from the sea to the sea, starting at St. Bee’s and ending at Robin Hood’s Bay. Before you ask, we saw no bees at St. Bees and no Robin Hood at Robin Hood’s bay. Alfred Wainright, grumpy countryside wanderer par excellence, did the walk over a number of occasions – not in one go ­– and wrote about it in 1973. Since then, the trail has been tweaked a little and attracts 10,000 people a year (according to Henry Steadman’s map-cum-guidebook Coast to Coast Path), mostly in summer when the weather is it its shittest, each of whom curse the skies, their friends, and the long-dead Wainright for coming up with the blasted idea in the first place.

But, as I mentioned just a paragraph ago, I was in China. And I had to return to China because of work. This meant my trip east from St. Bees was going to take on something of a marathon quality far beyond the 192 miles of Wainright’s puny walk. It did, but that’s a story for a later time. Before that, we had planning to do, and as everybody knows – planning is cool and always, always fun.

Take me to Part II.

C2C, the rest.

The night in Keld was exhausting. The sunset betrayed a coming chill cold enough to make Captain Oates pack up and march off. And so it was for me. At 1am I realised the worst was still to come. My microlite tent was forming icicles and my ripped tent was letting in a cruel draft. I got out and burst into Dave's tent saying 'I'm coming in.'

  It's fucking cold in here too, he said, perhaps by way of deterrent. But who cared? A thousand Celtic warriors couldn't have removed me from this tent. 

The remainder of the trip was on lower ground. We stayed in a hunting lodge yha and got lost looking for a 'lone oak' in a friend with many lone oaks near Richmond. We lost Ali but found her again at the end. In the meantime out cohort grew to include four oldies from Burnley and a stubborn father and daughter, whom we called Strongarm Sue on account of her dismissing other people's packs as light. She cried her way to Robin Hoods Bay, and we think developed something of a romance with Mark, the ex-hippy brummie. 

We rolled in to the bay spent and ready for a bed and breakfast and a pint. We got both. Next day, we said bye to the north and hi to the

business of London, where cars took on the form of large indifferent farmyard animals, and people were, god forbid, not walkers. 

Day...7?

Just got to the tiny hamlet of Keld. Finally left the Lake District. Camping the last few nights is cold! Done 98 miles. 

A few days back we met Ali, whom we swam in Ennerdale Water with. She's become a regular on this trip, someone to share cookies and green tea and even the occasional political tete-a-tete with. 

Others we see often are an Australian occupational therapist and her mum. The OT glumly told Dave to rest his battered leg, advice he didn't like, but did take. 

Nice sunset tonight. 

 

Day...4?

Ennerdale to Grasmere. Done about 40 miles now. In quite a lot of pain. Dave has pulled muscle in his leg. It rained terribly today, and we are in a Youth Hostel tonight, in much needed warmth.

Day 2, C2C

Seems a lot further in than day two... We two travellers are now sturdy and worn hikers with 14 miles behind us. It's not a great feat, you might say, but oh with those bags and down that hill. That hill was Raven Crag , a spot so steep that people complain to the guide book for putting it on the trail. Actually it wasn't on Wainright's original walk, but has since become standard. Your knees shiver and begin to numb, and you continually wonder about sliding down on your bag. 

Most beautiful part of the walk was just after that descent, on the cusp of the Lake District, through a meandering valley. We met one man and his dog. Having coffee now in the Fox and Hounds, gotta run.