The Motion in Water

It’s a grand thing to get leave to live

Nan Shepherd

After our 5.30am start, Stephen drove me out to Leominster station, where once again we said our goodbyes.

He set off for school, and I hoisted my pack on my back and waited for the Holyhead train; the irony that I could stay on this train all the way to a station within a mile of my brother’s house on Anglesey did not escape me… but I resisted the temptation.

The view from the train window was inspirationally beautiful. Hares in the fields were unbothered by us. The rolling green countryside I’d walked through so laboriously back in September flashed effortlessly by. I missed taking the iconic photograph of Stokesay Castle and its lake, but I tell you, it’s worth travelling on the train just for that sight. There were plenty other lovely views of the Shropshire Hills though, plenty enough to make me wistful for last year’s beginning to this long route.

I spent quite a lot of the journey chatting to guard David Williams, talking about what you learn from serving a long time in an institution, and the pleasures and difficulties exiting into the real world from a boarding school, in my case, or the army, in David’s. We discussed how important it is to develop the essential skills of forward planning and good preparation (ironic, considering the shambolic nature of my own, this time around), and the importance of staying hydrated. David disappeared off to signal to the driver at one of the stops, and returned with a can of spring water to keep my fluids up — just what I needed! As I sipped, we continued our conversation, and I wish his son the very best of luck in finishing his musical theatre course, and in his auditions for Hamilton, Chicago, and the Book of Mormon.

The perfectly clear weather suddenly thickened into a fog. The views of hills disappeared, and in their place the shapes of the ghostly trees became points of eerie interest.

The fog lasted whilst I changed trains at Shrewsbury

and then evaporated as fast as it came.

I changed trains for a second and final time at Machynlleth, and watched eagerly out of the window as the estuary opened up in the morning sun.

I felt an instant rush of connection to the excitement I had felt at the first sight of the estuary as I got to the end of the first section of this walk, back in September. This early in the morning, the oystercatchers, herons, and increasingly common white egrets had it to themselves.

There are two stations in Aberdovey and I went to the further one – an error, I thought, because I then had to walk back into town for the ice cream that I had promised to myself to launch the walk. When I got there I was horrified to see that the ice cream parlour was closed.

In fact, as a beautician resting in the sun outside her salon told me, everything is closed until the afternoon. My detour backwards on myself was not total waste of time, though, because I changed into my shorts and T-shirt in the impeccably clean public toilets. I bid a swift farewell to the sugared-almond houses on the seafront,

and dipped my feet back in the sea where I had left the route back in September.

Everything was a delight: the wide rockpools warming in the brilliant sun,

an egg which must have fallen somehow into the water and been left beached on the sand,

the characteristic estuarine braided channels leading down to the water.

I walked on, reflecting how those criss-crossing tracks might be thought of as a metaphor for our lives.

Aberdovey is the elbow of my walk, if you like. Before I had headed west, now I turned the corner and faced north. Ahead of me, the highest hills of the Lleyn peninsula rose like blue islands in the hazy distance, and after my uncertain start, I now, got a satisfying, rhythmic pace going, looking at the striations of the shells, listening to the hiss and suck of the sea to my left, long, parallel lines of deep blue water, surf and backwash.

Underfoot the sandy surface made for swift walking, simultaneously sturdy and firm, yet also cushioning and gentle. Low dunes rose to my right, although I avoided them because loose sand is much more of a struggle to walk through and so much gets in your shoes.

The receding tide had deposited a mess of broken shells, sections of crab carapaces and severed legs, and masses of razor clams. Some of the shells were enormous: mussels, and the lower valves of oysters. I came across one enormous, whole spider crab, dead, its armour protecting its flesh beyond death from being picked at by the many gulls standing on the shoreline, or leaving their prints in the sand.

The crab reminded me of a rather grim poem by Ted Hughes (but nonetheless, one of my favourite):

Relic

I found this jawbone at the sea's edge: 
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold: 
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.

Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws, 
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws
Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach: 
This is the sea's achievement; with shells, 
Verterbrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

It didn’t seem long before I reached Tywyn, and, because I had been too nervous to eat this morning, I stopped at the beach café for brunch.

More importantly, I needed to investigate the reason why my water bladder wasn’t drawing any water through it. Having disassembled it, I ascertained the issue was with the valve which joined two shorter sections of hose, but I couldn’t see how to make it work. The ladies in the café suggested I went to the hardware store on the High Street, so after a loo stop at a public convenience (which took a little while to decode),

off I toiled (without my favourite headband, which I later realised I had left in the loo). On the way, I came across Jonathan with a promising-looking spray bottle talking to householder John, for whom he had done a little bit of weedkilling. He looked like a handy kind of chap, so I asked him about the valve. I got my pack off again, got the bladder out again and disassembled it again, explaining what the issue was and demonstrating that I couldn’t suck the air through the valves. I switched the valve round and sucked through the other end: lo and behold, it worked. ‘Aha!’ diagnosed Jonathan, ‘you have yourself a return valve!’ ‘I knew you could solve the problem,’ I said, at which point he asked me for a £50 callout fee.

I fitted the various sections of the water bladder together again and carried on, slightly frustrated by all the stop and starting. I seemed to have had the best part of the day: the clouds that had been gathering over the mountains had solidified over the sky. I hadn’t gotten very far, when I realised that the bladder was still not drawing. Buggeration. And it was past 12 o’clock, so I didn’t feel I could really take any more time to divert into the village proper to see what could be done. I had an idea for a workaround, although it would involve a little field surgery with my multitool later in the day. Good thing the sky had clouded over and it wasn’t so hot for walking. And MORE than a good thing David had given me that water to drink earlier on.

The coast path came off the beach at this point and headed inland to track alongside the surpassingly ugly coastal train track. Rather then look at that (although the sedge warblers chattering in the brambles were nice to listen to) I turned my eyes inland, past the rushy drain full of stonechats calling to each other, and across the river valley up to where mighty Cadair Idris reaches nearly 900m into the sky.

I have a new fun app! It’s called ‘Peak Finder’. It overlays an outline of ranges of hills and mountains onto your phone camera. It has been such a long time since I have been here that I wouldn’t have confidently recognised the shape of the mountain without it. We came here a couple of decades ago with Ros and her family, and I do remember the lump of Bird Rock, Craig yr Aderyn, further up the left hand Valley from where we were staying, as well as worrying for Stephen when he set off on a whole-day circular walk up Cadair Idris.

I was worried about my water situation. You can walk without food for long stretches of time, but water is absolutely essential. I decided to go for one last shot and asked Darren, Max and Dai whether they could help. Dai had on a Millennium Falcon engineering T-shirt, so I was pretty confident he could handle a malfunctioning non-returnable valve. It was not a simple problem. Eventually, we removed the valve entirely, and attached the mouthpiece to the very short section of hose. Darren suggested I could carry the bladder in the lid of my rucksack and still be able to drink from it as I walked. Dai recommended some fantastic future walking routes, and Darren offered to go back to Tywyn and search the ladies toilets for my headband. A brave man, as well as a kind one! Once again, it struck me how odd it is that so many people ask me whether I feel safe walking on my own. It is my confirmed experience, time and again, that the people I meet are thoughtful, sympathetic and humane.

I had not gone very far when I fancied a little sip of water.

Intercalation: a short extract from a WhatsApp conversation

The Welsh coast path carries on on this quiet unclassified road,

and eventually turns away from the sea to track a little way inland, at which point I left the sea views to the sheep and cows, and the lucky travellers on the train.

As you know, I am a sucker for a hedgerow, and the ones I now wakes between were particularly beautiful: deep, pink spires of foxgloves, oxeye daisies and medic,

and a scented drift of Queen Anne’s lace, and hawthorn. A colony of web-spinning caterpillars seemed to have got going too. I haven’t been able to identify them, but I am sure Gill can help out!

It started to spit with rain so I put on my jacket, stopping again a short while later by a field gate to put my waterproof trousers on as well, when the rain started to come down harder. On the other side of the gate three horses came to investigate

and apparently the sight of my full wets was shocking, so alarming as to make them buck away from me and my rucksack,

although the lead horse, the grey, returned cautiously to check me out by gently nuzzling my hand.

But this was mostly upland sheep territory. Gated or cattle gridded roads allowed the sheep to wander freely between the iconic wind-sculpted hawthorne trees that are so characteristic of Welsh hills,

and the equally characteristic coconut-scented yellow gorse. Stonechats laid claim to the fence posts, more concerned about signalling their territory with song than about my proximity.

The rain was coming from the hills, and the views back to the coast were still fairly clear, Tywyn surprisingly far away, and Aberdovey simply invisible in the distance.

I suppose that on a clear day, this high road would give spectacular views of the mountains, but now they were all but invisible, and I was glad I had caught my earlier glimpse of Cadair Idris before the rain had started.

There were the usual ever-present herds of cows, however,

one of which tracked me suspiciously at a trot, the full length of the field behind their fence.

All the way along the flat top of the hill, the rain hammered down. I was pleased that my feet were not hurting at all, and that there were no signs of the blisters that have plagued me in all my walks over the last two years. Even on my way down to Bristol these same shoes had proved problematic. The difference this time may be due to the cranial osteopathy sessions that I have had since the Bristol walk, where Liz diagnosed and corrected a twist and a shear in the right knee which has been so unsettlingly apt to give way, and permanently makes its presence known with pain and twingeing to the extent that I have been favouring my left knee for more than two years. She surprised me by saying there was nothing wrong with the joint itself, and indeed, I walked out of the third session pain-free. Astounding.

I think the twist and the shear must have made me plant my feet oddly. In any case, there was absolutely no sign today of the pressure blisters which have been such depressingly familiar elements of all my walks for the last two years.

Eventually, I could see ahead of me the little village of Llwyngwril, and beyond it, the shoulder of the hill behind which my campsite lay. It was still pounding down with rain, and I very gingerly tackled the long, very steep descent off the hill down into the village at sea level.

On the corner was a church dedicated to St Celynin, and seeing that the door was ajar, I went in on the spur of the moment for a look. Miracle of miracles, there was a well-kept toilet open to the public, and I decided I would sit in the welcoming space of the church for a while, rest my feet, and perhaps dry off a little. I was very, very wet, and really not looking forward to walking another 6km with 300m of climb, putting up my tent in the pouring rain and then being unable to dry anything overnight. I wondered whether sanctuary was available in the church. It would make a comfortable and most importantly dry place to sleep.

I couldn’t find any numbers to call on the noticeboards except for a vicar in Tywyn. I tried calling her, but the line wasn’t good enough for her to hear me, so emailed to ask instead.

While I waited for a reply, I donated to the church mend-the-leak fund, the design of the Scottish banknote resonating with me: a drawing of renowned hillwaker and nature writer Nan Shepherd, and a quotation from her work which suggested the title and header quotation for today’s blogpost. A little bit of internet research and m some phone calls, and I had the name of Hendre Hall in the village, which might have a pod to sleep in. At any rate, it certainly had a little café bar, and when I arrived, the surpassingly lovely Lucy had put the heater on in the glamping pod for me, and asked the lad to light the woodburner for me in the café bar. Almost instantly the fire threw out a wonderful heat, and I sat by it, steaming, gratefully enyoying lemon drizzle cake and cappuccino, warming myself inside and out while my wet shoes and socks and rucksack dried by the fire. There was even a little dog, Spot, to complete the air of total comfort and welcome.

Mei the owner had spent last year renovating this old house to the highest standards, and soon there will be six rooms to rent upstairs. For now there was the bar, open til late, an excellent wi-fi connection, and boiling water to rehydrate my camping meal. There are glamping pods and caravan pitches, everything kept immaculately. All the staff could not have been more welcoming or accommodating.

There was also a lovely tableful of company: Donna, Jane, Ian and Bob-Ian. Jane’s family have owned caravan pitches here for more than 50 years and has holidayed in this quiet place her whole life, and Jane and Bob-Ian not much less. They had plenty of tips for my walk tomorrow, and were the most convivial company.

By the time I left for my glamping pod, everything was dry, and although it was still raining hard, I had somewhere not only warm and weatherproof, but pretty luxurious as well.

The perfect end to a thoroughly enjoyable first day. Tomorrow is set to be dry, and, fingers crossed, it should stay fine for the rest of my walk.