Time to walk: LEJOG Day 29: Pandy to Longtown

Weather: Cloudy with dappled sunshine and cold wind

Distance covered today: 10.4km (6.5mi)

Last night's B&B: Brynhonddu (£35)

Cumulative distance: 545.4km (338.9mi)/ % Complete: 31.0%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 29 (click!)

The task first thing this morning was to scale the rather intimidating hill right outside our B&B. John sailed up the hill with seemingly little effort, while I battled with the weight of my backpack, newly reloaded with its full contents after Veronica had helped me the previous day. We eventually did make it to the top, but not before settling a disagreement about the best way ahead. John is using a 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey map and I have been using the official Offa’s Dyke guide which incorporates a 1:25,000 OS strip map. Every so often, we have had, shall we say, route issues, and have thus devised a point system to score our progress. The perpetrator of a route error is penalised, whereas an inspired choice gains a point. For instance, yesterday, John led me to a closed pub. It cost him a point. His route this morning meant that we didn’t have to descend a steep hill before climbing directly up again. He scored two points for this minor victory. I have to admit that the score at present is 4-0 in John’s favour. His sense of direction remains questionable, but there is no doubt about his negotiating skills!

We didn’t actually have very far to go on this leg of the journey, but again it was the location of available B&Bs that had determined my initial choice. Whether through serendipity or synchronicity, it just happened that I chose Longtown as the location of tonight’s rest and it turns out that this was the village in which John grew up. Walking with John through the village with him pointing out houses and the names of the erstwhile residents, buildings and their former function and venues he would frequent as a youth, gave the place a human dimension and a semi-historical context. At times, he grew quite animated, describing family life. His father had been a Head Master in the area and had played the organ in the elegant little local church. His father and mother had been inseparable and even when his father had later taken a position in Coventry for some days in the week, his mother had accompanied his father every week to spend the time in Coventry together. We talked of the deaths of our respective parents and of the traumas surrounding those events. I found the whole experience quite moving….

I still find it quite extraordinary that out of the many thousands of villages around the UK, John and I should have chanced to find ourselves together in the village of his youth. I have no idea what made me choose Offa’s Dyke as a component of my walk northwards as opposed to the more popular routes along the Severn through Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. John lives in Crete, so even taking the trouble and expense to join me for the three days of this walk was a substantial and unlikely commitment. We discussed all this and John expressed the view that these things can’t happen just through chance; there has to be something else out there that influences these things. I tend to the view though that all coincidences are the work of chance. My life, itself an almost unimaginably small possibility in the context of the chance meetings of just a few generations ago, let alone eons ago, is just a juxtaposition of chance events that tempt one to think are supernaturally ordered, because one would like to believe they have meaning, whereas they do not. Is this view too bleak?

We had by this time descended from the great hills above Longtown, but the views from the top of the hills had been just lovely. The moors themselves reminded me a little of Dartmoor on a smaller scale, contrasting starkly with the valleys to the west into Wales and the Brecon Beacons and to the east into England, dappled as they were by gentle sunshine and clouds, an intense shade of deep green, criss-crossed with darker green hedges and woods. There was a howling wind at the top of the watershed, sometimes almost strong enough to blow one sideways, and the guidebook warned of the potential dangers of extreme weather conditions, but it didn’t feel dangerous to me. Up there on the hills, I felt a quiet contentment, one of the more memorable days of my journey so far.

At one point though, as I was staggering up to the trig point near Hatterrall Hill, I noticed a solitary hiker, closing the gap on us from the rear. There was something in the fluid way the hiker was walking that persuaded me that we were being caught by a woman, and indeed in due course Kelly closed the gap and we agreed to walk together for a while. Kelly is visiting the UK from Washington DC for a week’s holiday, which she is spending walking the best bits of the country. She was obviously a high-powered and experienced walker and she described some of the extended trails that she had done in the US, including a trail from Canada to Mexico in California and of course the Appalachian Trail, which is 2,000 mile long, almost twice LEJOG. She works for a budget office associated with the White House in Washington DC, and it was clear, both from her direct and easy manner and her self-confidence that she is clearly a person of substance. She was also quite disarming in her openness and candour, and just cute being embarrassed about the fact that her trousers kept trying to fall down, because she was suffering belt-failure.

Just what she made of the two superannuated old friends traversing the hilltops, I have no idea, but we parted company as swiftly as we had joined; she headed down to see the ruin of the Priory of Llanthony and continue her travels, and we descended the other side of the hill to Longtown and John’s origins.