24. The Kindness of Friends And Strangers

Post 24 of A Journey On Foot

August 9th 2013

I have been blessed with good weather since this journey began. It feels like the summers of my childhood, before I moved to Kenya. After three weeks of building heat, a thunderstorm was an inevitable pleasure, that descended shortly after I returned from my walk as the day awoke.

The previous day, my friend Eleanor and I had been pointed towards the magical, red deer filled valley of Martindale, by the manager of The Quiet Site. After a lazy day on a lake shore beach, making a fire for our Cumberland sausages, we made our way into the remote valley as the dusk unfolded. We knew we wanted to wild camp, but we also knew there are some farmers who do not take kindly to it, and have shot guns.

We had been pointed to the valley where the deer were most plentiful by a local, but to get there we had to go through a gate marked ‘Private’. But trust led  the way, and to our surprise there was a small corrugated iron house with a man sitting outside, enjoying the evening with a glass of wine.

It is one thing to be able to announce yourself as a Wayfarer, and quite another to be able to produce a Penguin business card to prove it! Within a few minutes we were being invited for a glass of wine with Alan and his wife Kathy. Alan used to come here as a child, and his family have been renting it as a refuge from city life since the 1950s, so he was a wealth of information as to its history. It was not long before Kathy said “have you eaten?” and emerged with an enormous plate of cheese!

Finally, a little wobbly with red wine and full of cheese, Alan escorted us to a little tongue of flat thick grass by the beck under a clutch of alders that would be a good place to camp, and where apparently “the Bishop of Carlisle’s daughter had camped”. A wild camp with a ‘claim to fame’ – a new one for me!

It is that dark, deer-scented night as I lay under these kind alders, that I was fully embraced by the realisation of how much kindness there is, if only one is open to it, and if folk find each other in places where their environment allows them to hear their instinct. Alan admitted he might not have been so open had I walked up to his door at home. But here, it was just us and the red deer.

From the beginning of my journey, I have noticed how friends and strangers alike have been very interested in what I am doing, and offered help in many forms – from : lifts, lunches, cups of tea, beds, company, conversation. Even a free copy of The Old Ways from Waterstone’s in Lancaster. I know that people are inherently kind. We simply need the opportunities to express it.

I have, for many footsteps, been trying to think of a word that could quantify this kindness. The weight of it; the lightness of it. The weight of it I carry around in my back pack in the form of uneaten food. The lightness of it makes me smile often and want to leap up in the morning and start walking. The sheer depth of it makes all the stories in my head, and the reality of my journey so far – without having made a single plan to start with. There is not one word that I can think of to describe all of this. Can anybody else?

As I traipsed up a hill that dawning morning in the valley of the red deer, with the first beams of warmth reaching over the ridge, I thought of a way to represent it though. Not to describe it, but to inscribe it. I am going to ask each person I meet who offers any kindness – be it advice, food, a story or a place to sleep, to carve a mark in my walking stick. That way the stick will become my journey, and the kindness its way markers. This would be far more fitting than any noun.

I started with Alan and Eleanor, and went back to people I had shared something with at the start of the journey. Here we have the good folks at and around Sprint Mill.

Hans and Mary Ullrich were the beginning of the journey really. I found out I had won the Wayfarer competition when they were visiting us in Iceland, and they offered their house as a base while I was in the Lakes. They have generally been wonderful, leading me to interesting folk and accompanying me sometimes on walks, and feeding me their wonderful home grown vegetables. I am indescribably grateful.

Hans, a potter, started with a fern. Mary carved the undulations of water, for all the wild swims we shared. Edward Acland of Sprint Mill, carved a path that keeps crossing, yet not interfering, back and forth across the river as I had gone from wherever I had been to his mill. Mary and Hans’ daughter, Eva (a painter) carved a moon – presumably for the evenings we shared chatting, wild swimming, and burning the midnight oil with our work.

As I sat taking in the late afternoon light after my unexpectedly long walk in Martindale, the thunder grumbled distantly, then was soon upon us with its fat warm raindrop deluge. We attempted (unsuccessfully) to shelter on this deserted verandah – one of only two houses at the top of the valley.

Kathy and Alan had kindly offered for us to shelter in their barn, and so we did – darting through a gap in the rain to gather our belongings from a rain drenched tent. Not because we needed to, but because it is kind to accept kindness offered.

Eleanor painted and I wrote as the rain pattered on the tin roof. We slept, warm and soundly, under a shrine of skulls delicately arranged by their daughter Anna after her many walks in the valley.

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23. A Walk As The Morning Awoke

Post 23 of A Journey On Foot

8th August 2013

One morning I woke early, ecstatically happy. I whispered to my friend Eleanor as she slept, “I’m going for a walk”. I did not know where I was going, or when I would be back.

 

27th July 2013. Awake early, bright eyed with excitement that we’ve made it here, to THIS place. The bottom of a valley filled with red deer! And thanks to the kindness of strangers, a belly filled with cheese & wine and a perfect wild camp on an inlet in the beck, under a large alder – trifurcate (or three trees?) like three sisters joined at birth. She will cast shade when the sun gets up but that’s not what woke me. Perhaps it was the light, but it felt more like the startling awareness of the kindness I’ve received, and an irrepressible urge to walk up the hill – made light by it.

Up the track still in morning shadow, the heads of red deer grazing in the long rushes. On the track straight in front of me is a large creature – solid and squat. Its long ears rotate towards my footsteps. I get quite close, at which point it bounds off – so large that for a moment I wonder if it is a fawn. No, the ears again. It’s a hare.

Onto the last stretch of tarmac, I pass some ancient barns flanked by foxglove spears and watched over by a half moon wishing to linger here. It is still cool enough to keep my jumper on, but to my right the mountain is bright and sun-lit and the sky is a pure blue. Down in the valley the deer bark their herd calls – the hundredfold sound of a heavy oak door creaking shut – and the sun shows signs of peeking above the opposite ridge.

A hay barn at Dale End is open sided and the first rays cascade through the portal as a swift skits out. And it’s up. Immediately I peel off my jumper. Up now; up a grassy track which hugs the dew glittered, sun bathed slope. The rhythm of my breath is foregrounded until the sudden swarming of flies from a glistening sheep’s carcass. The stench follows me for a while.

I pass a haphazard cairn and add a stone. The path proceeds higher in front of me but I cannot resist going up and over the brow to my right to see the valley on the other side: A breathtaking and breath giving view. The perfections of form carved and sanded by the glacier’s tool kit. Silvery ribbons of water finding the path of least resistance to the lake.

A spot of admin…

Taking a photo on the Penguin sponsored iPad, I realise I have network for the first time in two days. There have been thunderstorms recently (thankfully I was in a house at the time) and it seems to have created a communications black spot. Now I can publish yesterday’s blog post – a weight off my shoulders. A few emails to answer and minutes later I realise that I am frozen in my stance to review the photo – boots on, standing up, bent over a screen – totally inappropriate and awkward for being on top of a mountain. I feel self conscious about being one of those people with an iPad, staring at the screen rather than the wonder in front of me, when another early rising walker passes unexpectedly. I consider giving him a Wayfarer business card, as if to justify my sins, but that feels more inappropriate still.

I am hot now, and it is not yet eight o’clock. I am very ready to find Angle Tarn. Around the next bend there she is, a dawn reflection. A mica like flake cradled in the halfway-up-a-mountain. Their are islands trimmed with wildflower banks and dotted with rowan trees. I descend to its edge and strip off, my insect-acres of bare flesh immediately detected by a hungry mosquito. It is shallow and warm. Flat slabs of rock border the shoreline underfoot, then further out, the rich squidge of decomposition presses between my toes. I push off onto my back and wash off my yesterdays, looking at the ever bluing sky. Turning on my front I see the sky still – the surface a perfect mirror. Piercing the perfection are stubs of a water weed, doubled and hovering in the mirrored sky. A damselfly lands on one of them. I am totally enrapt by the twofold beauty.

I swim silently towards the island, not wanting to disturb the glassy surface. The edges of it are a festival of colour – deep pinks, yellows, whites. It is a hanging garden. I am naked and spy some wild campers on the far shore.  I crouch down low, suddenly aware that I am not alone. A self conscious Eve in her Eden. I wonder about coming back here with a sleeping bag to camp on the island, and returning to the shore I walk on the boggy bed to measure how deep it is.

 

I’m aware now that Eleanor might be getting concerned and decide to take the more ‘direct’ route back to my alder camp via The Nab. I have been gone for four hours but know she will have been asleep for most if them, thankfully. Like many ‘direct’ routes crossing the landscape without a pathway to follow it turns out to be less than straightforward. Parts of it steep, parts tufty and uneven. I am fine until I have passed the peat hags – dark blemishes in the smooth green curve of the Nab from a distance; deep, springy wadis that I descend into and clamber out of once upon them. The course of my boots through the air as my heels peel off the cushiony moss – left, right, left, right – flicks splashes of bog water on the backs of my ankles; an unexpected pleasure.

The only semblance of a path I spy heads upwards, and I want to go down. So I start down the flank of the Nab.  It is steep but my knees are still fresh. I follow the miniature terraces made by the sheep and the deer. Some deer raise their heads above the long grass. I cannot resist taking their photograph, and the light in that moment is beyond the sublime. The river wiggles down the bowl of the river valley – a mercury snake that will lead, at some point downstream, to my camp.

 

I am aware of ticks in the bracken having acquired one last week, burrowing just above my navel, so I make out a route that seems to avoid it. But the rushes are even taller, and whip at my bare legs. I resist covering them. It is too warm and at least this way I shall spot a tick straight away.

The descent seems endless and my knees are starting to tire. Sometimes there are small streams just below the meshwork of vegetation. Once, my foot plunges blindly into it, the grass hiding it like a boobie trap. I must not twist my ankle; that would be bad. Nobody knows where I am and I am not on a path, in a valley where apparently not many people come. Stupid on two counts, though only if something goes wrong. It’s also known as ‘just going for a wander’.

Finally I make it to a friendly grove of alders and lean on the topmost for some shade. Oh, another carcass. Strong stench. Continue descending. I find another alder. This one has a rowan growing from within its gnarly hollowed trunk. I take off my boots and enjoy the grass for a while. There is nowhere approaching horizontal to sit, so I stand propped against the tree.

At last I reach the dry stone wall at the valley bottom where, apparently just for me, a section has collapsed to ease my passage to the river. I consider wading to the camp in the river but I feel I should not linger. Parts of the way I can walk by the bank. Parts sheep have grazed low leaving only thistles to navigate. Again I find myself wading through spiky rushes.

I cross the river twice, eventually getting close to a place where it feels close to home. The trees bend over the stream making a hollow of green and small pools are churned by a miniature cascade. Up ahead I see a flash of Toby on his way to his lunch date. I want to shout “I’m OK!” but he was never aware that I might not have been. There is a sudden lift from my right. An eagle! I follow and he plays catch-me-up all the way downstream: landing, waiting, I catch up, he takes flight. That’s how it goes, until on the home stretch of the track nearing my camp, he lets me get within ten metres then disappears under a tree, not to be seen again.

I see El and get ready to apologise. I have been gone for seven hours. She is suitably unconcerned, as she has been awake for three. Her day is still new, and mine is already filled to brimming with adventure.

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