Walking with Plato (20 page)

What love I bore to thee.

—William Wordsworth, ‘I travelled among unknown men’

Chapter Six

Heart of England

Crowden – Chapel-en-Le-Frith – Hartington – Dimmingsdale – Little Haywood – Lichfield – Coleshill – Henley-in-Arden – Bidford-on-Avon – Dumbleton – Cheltenham – Painswick – Cam – Old Sodbury – Bath

The sixth stage of our End to End journey took us south along two long-distance walking trails: the Heart of England Way and the Cotswold Way.

The Heart of England Way runs for about a hundred miles through the Midlands, from Milford Common in Staffordshire to Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds. It skirts around the eastern rim of Birmingham, England’s second-largest city, and passes close to the city of Coventry. But, despite this, it’s not at all urban. In fact, for the most part, it feels deeply rural.

Of all of the National Trails, it is – with its woods, pastures, country lanes, canals, orchards, cultivated fields, steepled churches, and sleepy villages – perhaps the most quintessentially English.

The Cotswold Way is England’s newest National Trail. It runs 102 miles from Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire to Bath in Somerset. For most of its length, it follows the Cotswold Edge escarpment, zigzagging its way between the peaks and troughs of the Cotswold Hills.

It is absurdly pretty, running through a sculpted landscape so picturesque that it might have been designed by The Walt Disney Company. Among a host of other delights, it boasts exhilarating high-level views, lush meadows sprinkled with cattle and sheep, shady woodlands, and charming villages with houses of honey-coloured Cotswold stone.

But before Wendy and I could sample any of these delights, we had to spend four days walking an improvised route to the northern end of the Heart of England Way, at Milford Common.

The first instalment, from
Crowden
to
Chapel-en-Le-Frith
began pleasantly enough with a three-mile stretch along the Pennine Way and the Trans Pennine Trail. But after that it was road-walking all the way.

The highlight of the day came mid-morning when we stopped for coffee and cake in the centre of Glossop. Then it was down to business with a long damp trudge along the A624.

There’s no campsite near Chapel-en-Le-Frith. So the walk ended with a decadent stay at the Forest Lodge B&B, with a king-size bed, a corner bath, and a hospitality tray stocked with biscuits
and
chocolates.

Our onward journey to the village of
Hartington
was another dull, damp slog. We had intended to walk the first half-dozen miles along minor roads to the spa town of Buxton, and then head off into the moors, along the Midshires Way and the Pennine Bridleway, to Hartington. But the weather was so foul that from Buxton we decided to forget the moors and continue along minor roads, through hilly farmland, to our destination.

For the last few miles, we were walking into driving rain, which proved more than a match for my battered old waterproofs. By the time we arrived at the Hartington YHA, I was wet through and shivering, and had to stand in a hot shower for a full ten minutes before my teeth stopped chattering.

I have remarked more than once, in these pages, upon the fact that on JoGLE, as in life, good times never last, and neither do bad times. ‘Weeping may endure for a night,’ as the good book says, ‘but joy cometh in the morning.’

And at Hartington, joy
did
come in the morning.

Hartington is a pretty little village, situated in the Derbyshire Peak District, close to the Staffordshire border. It has everything an English village should have: a history dating back to the Middle Ages, stone houses and cottages, a sandstone church with a fine tower, a village square complete with duck pond, and a seventeenth-century manor house, Hartington Hall, which is now the YHA.

It’s the perfect place for weary, weather-beaten travellers to enjoy a rest day. And that’s precisely what Wendy and I did.

And, to cap it all, we had the thrill of posting home fifteen pounds of camping equipment.

The recent run of cold wet weather, which was only likely to worsen as autumn advanced, convinced us that, as far as we were concerned, the camping season was over. Consequently, we were able to lighten our backpacks to the tune of one tent, two sleeping-bags, two sleeping-bag liners, two sleeping-mats, two travel pillows, and sundry items of cooking equipment.

Unburdening ourselves of these items lightened our spirits no less than our backpacks. From that point onwards, there would be no more setting up and taking down camp, no more scraping slugs from the inside of a wet outer-tent, no more early-hours trudges to toilet blocks, and no more crouching over a one-ring burner to cook one-pan meals. Instead, it would be hostels and bed and breakfasts all the way – and budget be damned!

From Hartington, we walked sixteen forgettable miles, along minor roads, and along the banks of the River Manifold and the River Hamps, to
Dimmingsdale
, a forest area in the valley of the River Churnet.

That night, we had the Dimmingsdale YHA, a somewhat Spartan but splendidly isolated woodland retreat, all to ourselves. After dinner, as the evening hours rolled pleasantly and uneventfully by, I remember thinking how glad I was that I had agreed to walk from End to End.

I hadn’t set off upon JoGLE in the expectation that it would give me pleasure and make me happy. I had expected it to give
Wendy
pleasure and make
her
happy – and that was a big incentive. But for me, on a purely personal level, it had been about neither pleasure nor happiness. It had been about challenge.

JoGLE, in some vague sense, had seemed to be a challenging and worthwhile thing to do. So I decided to do it. And, having begun it, it never once occurred to me – not for a single moment – to stop.

No matter how footsore I got, or how weary, or how wet, or how bored, I plodded on. Not because I believed that enduring footsoreness, weariness, wetness, and boredom would make me a happier person in the long run, but simply because I knew that enduring those things would get me to Land’s End.

But, against all of my expectations, I discovered that plodding on, day after day, concerning myself only with getting to Land’s End, and concerning myself not at all with trying to becoming a happier person, I had become a happier person.

The nineteenth-century English philosopher and social reformer John Stuart Mill wrote:

Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit . . . Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

This profound truth – that you can find happiness only when you’re not looking for it – was expressed with admirable brevity by the English scientist and novelist C.P. Snow: ‘The pursuit of happiness is a ridiculous phrase, if you pursue happiness, you’ll never find it.’

This is precisely what I had found, and was learning more and more each day, on JoGLE. The quest to reach Land’s End was taking up so much of my time and energy and focus, and was absorbing me so completely, that I had forgotten to ask myself whether I was happy or not. And, as a result, I felt happier than I had done in years.

The next day’s walk was another purely functional one, designed to get us from Dimmingsdale to the village of
Little Haywood
, which lies close to the northern end of the Heart of England Way.

Our twenty-mile route took us almost entirely along country roads with the occasional farm track thrown in for good measure, and was memorable only for a couple of canine-related adventures.

The first of these occurred when we had to pass through a farmyard.

I always get nervous when I have to pass through farmyards. On account of the dogs.

There are a small but significant number of farmers (the few bad apples that spoil the bunch, no doubt) who like to use their dogs to deter walkers from passing through their farmyards, or, failing that, to make passing through as unpleasant as possible.

And note that I’m not talking about
trespassers
here. I’m talking about legitimate walkers using public rights of way, including National Trails.

Some of these farmers keep vicious, snarling brutes chained up or caged up, out of sight, in their farmyards. This means that hikers passing that way must either retreat and re-route, or must screw their courage to the sticking place and press on, trusting that the farmer isn’t such an out-and-out psychopath that he’d allow them to be torn limb from limb by free-range Rottweilers.