Like hitting your head on the brick wall, it’s great when you stop. It’s a blessed and sunny day and it’s a great day not for walking. We stay once again with kind and indulgent friends: we get up late and drive slowly home. We calculate how many thank you letters we will be delighted …
Category: 2016 Walk
Oct 04
Day 22: Hadleigh to Ipswich
End Game We never saw a signpost to “Ipswich” until today, our final day. I was beginning to think the place was bewitched and did not actually exist, but at long last we found ourselves crawling through the suburbs towards our finishing point, the Grammar School. It is a fine place perched atop a series …
Oct 04
Day 21: Sudbury to Hadleigh
Well, only one more day to go and then our own bed. Not that today’s experience was anything to carp about: a beautiful warm and sunny day where the cows all smile milkily at us as we pass by. We travel through some of the loveliest countryside we are blessed with in this blessed plot, …
Oct 03
Day 20: Little Thurlow to Sudbury
A very long walk today, or at least so it seemed to be! Never ending plodding through ploughed fields, all slightly tilted upwards, managed to exhaust and drain us of breath and humour in equal measure; we were faced with several hooded paths and collapsing styles all smothered with brambles and vicious thorns that all …
Oct 02
Day 19: Fulbourn to Little Thurlow
We walk along the ‘Fleam Dyke”, astoundingly dug by hand by Saxons sometime in the fifth century. We read on the council notice boards that it was constructed in order to enable the authorities “to monitor the countryside”. Perhaps an early and forlorn attempt to control Roman immigration and seemingly so it has been ever …
Sep 30
Day 18: Hardwick to Fulbourn
We stay with old friends bang smack in the middle of Cambridge, delightful conversation and great company. Today we walked through Cambridge, the second time we have done this, the last time three years ago while we were walking from York to Canterbury. In the morning we tottered over freshly ploughed fields as the farmer …
Sep 29
Day 17: St Neots to Hardwick
We walk our miles in record time over flat country with huge grey skies. Moses, (the dog) goes mad with ecstasy as he rolls in the wheat stubble that scratches his tummy. We sit in the pub Marcus has chosen with trepidation as all his choices thus far have been poor. But we are greeted …
Sep 29
Day 16: Rest Day
Great news all round. We are staying just outside Cambridge. A blessed day away from my Plod as guests of one of my favourite people, our younger son, Oliver and his wife Lois and their not so baby girls, Amelie and Annabel. I visited Kings College Chapel, one of the wondrous things you should mark …
Sep 27
Day 15: Goldington to St Neots
Now we approach the outskirts of Cambridge, facing flat, straight walks where I imagine Roman soldiers tramped their extra mile all those centuries ago. Moses (our dog) stirred up a fox and then an otter by the River Ouse and we are fortunate that Moses didn’t see it. We lunched in a garden centre – …
Sep 27
Day 14: Hardmead to Goldington
A long haul through flat Bedfordshire fields coated in stubble and clay. In the most part it was particularly hard going as many farmers score out the paths, perhaps to spite walkers. We lunched with Anne Atkins, one of the most ballsy people I know. She meets adversity with a head butt and a two …