Bred of Heaven (34 page)

I AM BACK
where I began. Across the broad waters of the Severn estuary the old bridge hangs suspended between two countries. As children, speeding to Carmarthen on the motorway, we used to look out for this staggering landmark for hours upon end. On a drizzly afternoon such as this we would never have found it until it was right on top of us. The magnificent struts are barely more than a rumour against a backcloth of grey August skies. That's England over there. Over here, under my feet, is the southernmost tip of what is known as the debatable land.

The dividing line between England and Wales has been nudged hither and thither like a boundary rope on a cricket ground. Along a turbulent corridor of terrain, tears and blood have been spilled, fists and swords swung. The current compromise is a botched job. There are some places with English names in Wales, others with Welsh names in England. And yet in the minds of both nations there is a border that everyone can sort of agree on. Over the centuries it has mutated from a fact into a symbol. And it starts here at Sedbury Cliff.

A notice on a big stone says as much: ‘Llwybr Clawdd Offa'.
Llwybr
means ‘path'.
Clawdd
means ‘boundary' or ‘fence'. Offa was the King of Mercia in the second half of the ninth century. More than a millennium ago, it was Offa who defined where Wales ends and England begins – or rather the bit of England that abuts Wales. The inhabitants of this island know little of figures in our collective history before the Norman landing in 1066. But this one name from the murky era of Anglo-Saxon primacy has imprinted itself on the very landscape in the form of a bank of earth, flanked by a ditch, which runs intermittently from the Severn estuary to the mouth of the Dee. And that's what I'm going to walk along, for 180 miles.

I say I. I mean we. For this bit of my quest, I am not alone. One hundred and eighty miles is a lot of yardage to cover on your tod. Coming in the opposite direction will be several solitary walkers, all of them men in their thirties or forties lugging rucksacks the size of coracles. I tend to agree with the Revd Richard Warner, who embarked on
A Walk Through Wales in August 1797
in the same week, 213 years earlier, in the company of someone he referred to as C—. ‘Solitary pleasures are, at the best, but imperfect,' he explained in his opening dispatch; ‘and with respect to travelling in particular, the gratification arising from it depends so much upon having a companion, with whom one can interchange sentiment, and communicate observation, as leads me entirely to coincide with Cicero in thinking that even a journey to the stars without society would be but a dull kind of expedition.'

This journey is to Prestatyn, at the other end of the Offa's Dyke Path, and I shall be walking there with E—. She and I have given ourselves eleven days to march up the eastern flank of Wales.

‘Never heard of it,' people say when I tell them. ‘What's that?' I need hardly add which side of the border these people live. But
it's easy not to know about Offa's Dyke, even when it's right under your nose.

We turn our backs on England and set off downhill through a meadow. There's a slippery path cut into a conveniently raised rib of earth bisecting the field. This is to be the final test. I am going to measure out my Welshness in mileage and gradient, toil and sweat. It's only in the next field that I do a double take.

‘Wasn't that it?' I say.

‘Wasn't that what?'

‘That raised bit of earth we just walked down. Wasn't that Offa's Dyke?' We look back up the hill. Give or take the odd hawthorn bush, it's quite distinct: a thick grassy spine interrupting the natural contour of the slope. So that's a good scholarly start then.

In mitigation, I'm not the only one who's missed it. A Mr Hutton, examining the remains of Offa's Dyke in 1803, reported that ‘the traveller would pass it unheeded if not pointed out. All that remains is a small hollow which runs along the cultivated fields, perhaps not eighteen inches deep in the centre, nor of more than twenty yards width.' Whatever its physical size, its meaning cannot be mistaken. The Welsh have been known since time immemorial as the people who live on the other side of Offa's Dyke.

It's a bit of a bummer that we have to trudge through England for most of the first day. On the far bank of the Wye, whenever the path strays close enough, are tantalising glimpses of the land of my fathers. We are in that little tongue of Gloucestershire between the Severn and the Wye. Both sprout out of the earth hundreds of miles back on the bald flanks of Pumlumon in Mid Wales – I poetically recall that I've sipped the trickle that is the Wye's very source – and now the two rivers are surging towards reunion. I used to think the narrative of the two twisting rivers was a marvellous metaphor, but now that I'm wedged between them I can't quite work out what for.
The Archdruid should bash out an
englyn
on it, and all such meanings would soon surface like a developing photograph.

Anyway, here we are in England. It's green and pleasant enough. There are stubbly fields, a whole bunch of hedges. I have fed such data into my calculations when pondering the key decision: which way to walk – north to south, or south to north? I twist myself in knots about this, much like the Wye writhing and swivelling down there to the left. At first I judged it preferable to complete this journey where it began, at the bridge. How very trim, I thought; how jolly mathematical. But the more I looked at the map, the more it seemed somehow regressive, like wishing for the womb. In life we must stride away from what we know. Besides, the prospect of fetching up in England at the end of eleven days and 177 miles is indigestible. This whole venture is about walking towards Welshness. So south to north it is.

It's a scorcher as we leave Chepstow. The Revd Warner sounded a jaded note as he trod the same road. The scenery, he scribbled, ‘has already been described by tourists out of number, who have been so particular in their details, as to leave nothing to be gleaned by such birds of passage as C— and myself'. I must say I entertain similar feelings as the path takes us into woodland where we start to encounter day-trippers. They are shod in plimsolls, sandals, even flip-flops as they walk the ancient border. Not a rucksack in sight. ‘We are dykers,' I want to say after all of three miles. ‘I'll thank you please to step aside.'

But then the Wye took a grip on Warner's imagination as he and C—clambered up an elevation and ‘were suddenly astonished with a scene grand and unbounded. Immediately under the cliff is seen the Wye, following a course the most whimsical and sinuous that can be conceived, and discharging its waters into the Severn.' We stop and perch at Wintour's Leap, a similar spot slightly upriver.
It's so called because a royalist on horseback is said to have flown over the 200-foot limestone cliffs to escape chasing Roundheads. We look down at the loops of the muddy river. An apocryphal story, one suspects.

My backpack is insanely heavy. I've been told it becomes part of your anatomy after three days. Which means after fifty-two and a half miles, including today's frankly overambitious twenty-miler. It seems like a long process of acclimatisation. My fancy new breathable top – it would be beyond eccentric to do the dyke in my Welsh rugby shirt – clings damply to my spine. The rucksack, for the record, consists of 1 pr jeans, 1 shirt, 1 fleece, 1 pr shoes, 3 pr walking socks, 5 pr gentleman's briefs, 1 pr waterproof trousers, 1 anorak, 6 pckts crisps, 10 bars choc, 2 bottles water, 1 pr binocs, 1 copy
Kilvert's Diary
, 1 guidebook. It feels like 2 tons boulders. After half a morning on the dyke I know more or less how Aeneas felt as he carried his old man Anchises from the incinerated ruins of Troy. (The Welsh, lest we forget Gerald of Wales's theory, are ethnically Trojan.)

Once upon a time, of course, a change of clothes was a luxury for the gentlemen of leisure who went pedestrianising in Wales. George Borrow, setting out from Llangollen to traverse South Wales, packed into his small leather satchel a pair of worsted stockings, a razor, a white linen shirt and a prayer book. (The last two were reserved for Sundays.) He also had his boots resoled and his umbrella mended. In all weathers he must have looked a mess. On his summer outing from Llangollen to Anglesey he complains often of insupportable heat. But if the heavens opened he might find himself ‘up to the knees in quags'. As for Warner and C—, having walked from Builth to Rhayader they entered the Angel Inn looking, he confesses, ‘marvellously foul'. There was little for it but to pull on the same outer clothes the next morning. Warner packed ‘a single change of
raiment, and some other little articles for the comfort of the person' into a specially customised pocket of his coat ‘that sweeps from one side to the other, and allows room sufficient for all the articles necessary to be carried'. C— had extra-large pockets sewn in each side of his. They regretted their choice when, passing three gentlemen in Cardiganshire, they noted that each ‘carried a handsome leathern bag, covered with neat net-work, which, being suspended from the right shoulder by a strap, hung under the left arm, in the manner of a shooting-bag'. To Warner and C— the arrangement looked not only ergonomic and comfortable, it also ‘gave the wearer much less the appearance of a pedlar than attached to us'.

After a few sweaty miles walking along a high escarpment through old forests we come to a glade where, beyond a clearing between trees, there is a lovely distant prospect of Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth returned to this bend in the river when still a young man in 1798. Meditating on the sublimity of the place, he found memories of its many ‘forms of beauty' still miraculously clustered. ‘ … oft, in lonely rooms,' he quivered,

Whenever marooned too long at the wrong end of the M4, that's sort of how I feel about Welsh landscapes all the time now. We get the poem up on my phone and read quite a lot of it out loud. Neither of us has ever been to the mother abbey of the Cistercians in Wales. How it beckons seductively in the flat bright light. I think
of my uncle Teilo, in the last monastery still extant in Wales where brothers work and worship in the old Cistercian way of which Gerald so approved. We are all for deviating into Wales to pay our respects. It's only a mile out of our way in total. But at the signpost to Tintern and without a second thought we drop the idea like a stone. An extra mile? We've still got fourteen to go.

Onwards, alongwards, down to the Wye where we lunch on its bank, the peace and solitude broken only as intermittent cars yammer by along the A466. A swan floats regally past, parked on driftwood. The way to travel.

‘That's Wales across the river,' I say, just so we're both in the loop.

And that's where it stays for much of the first day. Technically we're in what Offa deemed to be Wales, but one can't entirely ignore the reality that England snatched it all back again. Not that there's much sign of the dyke round here. The views of various valleys are of course marvellous; one's spirits soar at all the right sights. But as the afternoon lengthens I'm inclined to think mostly of suffering feet and groaning limbs. The advice from all and sundry was to train hard for this multi-marathon, but the memory of being smashed to smithereens in rugby has cast a long shadow.

The good news is that we've crossed the border. ‘Croeso i Gymru'. I feel perky as anything as we tear up the Kymin – two miles swallowed up in a trice – and find ourselves gazing out at most of Monmouthshire. I have borrowed binoculars for just such an occasion. Mountains recede as far as the eye can see. I try to work out which one's which. The ones clustering around Abergavenny are easy: Sugar Loaf, Blorenge, Skirrid. Some people refer to these and other Welsh peaks as hills, but they really must keep their English traps shut. Henry James, who persisted in thinking he was in England, describes how he and a companion ‘scrambled up the little Skirrid'. However, from his
description of it – ‘the aspect of a magnified extinguisher … the grassy cone … as smooth-faced as a garden mound' – it is clear he'd confused it with the Sugar Loaf. We sit in silence and watch the west. This is why we came.

The less said about day two the better. It's a mere twelve miles, ten fewer than yesterday factoring in a missed signpost in a darkening forest. But that's much more than enough. One's body has largely shut down. Legs cooperate only under the direst duress. The Offa's Dyke signposts send us across soft arable undulations, but I am old and weary. And tetchy. I've gone right off the Sugar Loaf, which like an attention-seeking tot plays a tiresome game of peek-a-boo behind a fringe of hills. As for the Skirrid …

‘I'm thinking of compiling a list of Welsh mountains there's no point in climbing.' This over lunch at the top of a meadow from where we can look at a cinemascopic array of peaks. My walking companion looks at me quizzically.

‘Starting with the Skirrid. It's meant to have a famous notch in it. The summit was split in two on the day of the Crucifixion. I've never seen the notch once. So you can put that on the list. An entirely pointless mountain.'

‘What else is on the list?' E— chooses to humour me.

‘I'll get back to you on that.'

The afternoon unfolds at snail's pace. A mile is an infinitely flexible concept. We are down to fewer than two of them an hour despite easy terrain. Crusty little churches in Llanfihangel Ystum Llewern and Llantilio Crossenny are not enough to keep spirits from wilting. On the map, Llangattock Lingoed seems somehow to be getting further away.