Hard Yards

This is well within your capabilities

Jane Smith

The little caravan had been a perfect pit stop. I wouldn’t mind coming back here for a longer stay. I woke again with the birdsong, which is such a lovely way to be woken up except if it is ASBO sparrows outside our bedroom windows at 5 o’clock in the morning — which was not the case here). I wanted to make an early start, and got away before 8am. This turned out to be a good idea, because as it was I didn’t get in at the end of the day until gone 6.00pm.

The minimart came up trumps last night with two amazing handmade crêpes filled with mushroom cream. The ingredients listed 46% mushrooms, 36% crêpes, and nothing else that you would not find in your own fridge. I heated them up in the microwave, which sounds revolting, but actually they were absolutely delicious! I would have loved to have got another pack to take with me today, but it was a long day and I didn’t want to add anything to my pack before I needed to.  At the end of today I had a gîte in a little village with no services, and in the walk tomorrow there are no shops until the end of the day, so I was going to have to buy supper, breakfast and lunch en route today. I had made a plan where to buy it, but I wanted to do that as late as possible in the day. I already had a kilo and a half of water, and I could really feel the difference over the litre I usually take, but I felt I was going to need it.

Speaking of water, the rain started almost as soon as I got into my stride. I did stop to put on my waterproof, but perhaps I needn’t have bothered as it was a very brief shower. There was a thick, lumpy layer of folded grey clouds covering the entire sky, though, and I wondered whether the larks singing above the field next to me had any sense that today they were rising and falling under a ceiling.

I pretty much had my head down for the first couple of hours, but I did notice a man dredging a pond, pumping the water through a long industrial hose into a thicket of coppiced hazel, which was filling up fast to create a new pond. He had built a sort of bank to hold the water in, but I didn’t think the hazels would particularly enjoy being waterlogged, and there was so much water it looked like it would soon overflow.

I also noticed (and I am very proud of this) the song of a corn bunting.  They are quite rare in the UK, but my friend Carrie had pointed them out to me when we were walking through the Kent marshes together (incidentally, she had also pointed out the nightingale that was singing at us out of a bush that I had not heard). The corn bunting has a very particular finish to its song: think a bright shower of electrical sparks, or the falling glitter of a firework.

Although it was a gray day, everything seemed freshened because of the rain. When I wasn’t walking on a paved surface the conditions underfoot were soft. In the cool damp air even the more delicate scents were enhanced, such as newly-opened apple blossom.

I was feeling quite positive about today’s walk.

Some of the route finding was quite fiddly for the first couple of hours of today, and I was helped by some new Via Francigena signage: a little stencil pilgrim, in white, black or red.

In the town of Jussy,  painted cement blocks to prevent car access looked as though they had invented new Francigena signage, and I wondered what the symbol could be used to indicate here.  Dig deep?

By the end of today I was thinking that this was pretty much what they’d been pointing to.

The  combination of the stepped gable of the Jussy Mairie and the Canal de Saint Quentin running through the town was very reminiscent of Amsterdam, and I’d been looking forward to getting off asphalt, gravel and cobbled surfaces, even if the latter were quite attractive and reminded me of some of the Dutch Old Master paintings of 18th c street scenes.

The guidebook instructs the walker to ‘inspect the condition of the path on the north side of the canal’ to see whether it is overgrown. I judged that it was nothing to be discouraged by so early in the season, especially since any long grass at the side of the narrow path simply provided an opportunity to try out both the alleged waterproofness of my shoes, and also use one of the few pieces of kit that I haven’t had to dig out of my pack yet: my gaiters.

The path was absolutely fine, and really, not even gaiter-worthy. The waterproof membrane in my shoes performed well (and certainly better than the experience I’d had walking in Brooks trainers along the Avon river a couple of summers ago, when my feet had been sodden in seconds and stayed so all day).

The canal and its path were absolutely deserted. Still air, still, stagnant water, deep blue green and in places thick with weeds and fallen leaves.

There was a soundscape of chiffchaff and robins, but the only movement was my regular footsteps. Added to the fact that everything was overgrown with nettles, goose grass, old man’s beard and brambles, and the fact that the canal and its pathway curved through the landscape with high banks on each side, gave quite an eerie feel.

If this had been a canal in England, there would’ve been narrow boats moored all along it, with their creative, oddball communities. It seemed this canal had been totally abandoned.  The birds and I had this place to ourselves. 

 I was just thinking how dreary this walk was, when two lovely things happened. The first was a pricking up of the ears and a hasty scrambling for the Merlin app, to confirm that yes I was hearing a Kingfisher. I stopped for a while to see if I could see it, but there was no visible sign. The song would have to do.

The second thing, also bird related but completely different, happened when I was thinking to myself how rubbish French graffiti was.  Under a road bridge was a signal example: a tag, badly executed, unimaginative, ugly. But, just beyond the bridge was an old signal or junction box of some kind, painted with the most wonderful picture of a goldfinch, with the word ‘love, love, love’ scattered all around it.

Just beyond this point, the bike path and the official canal path joined, and the paved cycle path, though hard underfoot,  allowed me to motor on past a lock and take my eyes off the ground for a while to appreciate the way the petals of the bird cherry were drifting down onto the waters surface, and how the tall aspens here created a different atmosphere despite being close together, and despite having the same vegetation in the understory.

Of course, it helped that the sun was now shining.

However, I was getting rather bored of tarmac canal towpath, and my feet were feeling a little bit bashed and my ankles a little bit sore. I sat on a wooden railing in the dry under a bridge and had some nuts, but they didn’t really do anything to make this walk more palatable. So I put on an audiobook for the first time on this walk, and marched on.

I tiptoed quietly past a fisherman checking his net, but I know enough about fisherman not to try and have a chat. A little way further along there was another fisherman, this one in camo gear, sitting under a tree. We looked at each other and then both simultaneously said in English, ‘Hello!’

This was Trevor from Southampton, fishing with the friend up river that I hadn’t spoken to. He’s been here for a few days, catching carp in the canals. There were huge fish here, he said. There is a particularly famous one lurking about in the water, weighing over 55lbs.’How big is that?’ I asked. ‘About this big!’ he said.

It’s extraordinary that the fish can grow so old and slow and huge in a canal like this. Trevor showed me a picture on his phone of the big old beast.

I sat on the tarmac next to Trevor’s tree and we chatted for about 45 minutes, about jobs, retirement, the benefits of running or walking (Trevor is about to do a triathlon… Good luck with that! ).  He was coming back in May to do more fishing. ‘I’ll still be walking then,’ I said, and we both laughed. Trevor, it was fantastic to meet you. Good luck with your last 45 minutes fishing, and don’t tell your mate that I shared half my lunch with you! Trevor helped me up off the ground which felt like an incredible luxury, and gave me a warm hug to see me on my way. He was one of those people who you feel you’ve always known, and chatting to him was the best part of today.

Whilst we were sitting chatting, a be-rucksacked family with three teenage children walked past. I recognise them from the campsite last night; they are doing the Via Francigena in chunks. I caught them up a little further on as they were sitting on a bank eating their lunch. I’m sure we will see each other again, and if we do, we might be able to walk together for a little bit of the way.

I had a plan to go to the huge Leclerk supermarket in a little town just off the canal.  Beautor proved to look like it had been conceived of as something of a garden city, but the idea hadn’t worked, perhaps because of the enormous electricity station and the railway that dominates both it and the attached neighbouring town of Tergnier.

But there were nonetheless efforts to make it beautiful, such as the public buildings planned in a semicircle, like a child setting out the municipal buildings in a toy town, the Salle Municipale (with a museum seemingly to ‘Resistance’ and ‘Déportation’?), a Dispenserie, the Mairie (without the same designation written in decorative tiles as the others, sadly), the Postes Télégraphes and, hilariously, the Foyer Carnegie.

Further on a more Brutalist-style park had uncomfortable-looking square benches of concrete, and regimented concrete flowerbeds which are now grassed over.  The little houses looking out over the grass and concrete were I think supposed to be the brave New World of affordable housing. It all looked rather tired and sad. A much less effective architectural scheme which had not fared well with time.

The long slog along the road brought me to the supermarket. There was a customer toilet. Result! I was feeling rather panicky about this first attempt at buying food for more than one meal, faced with almost infinite choices whilst making sure that I ate properly. My family have set the bar rather high for cooking, and I tried to remember the plan that Stephen and I had discussed back in Arras.

I don’t know why my pack had been feeling so unfeasibly heavy today, and the things that I bought made it weigh considerably more. I bought basic ingredients to make sausage and lentil stew for tonight, which I could then put into Micheline’s marvellous box as leftovers to take with me for lunch tomorrow. So I staggered on, finding a bench where I could make myself another cheese roll, after having given half my lunch to Trevor. After eating food I was definitely feeling better, and decided that this would be a learning experience. Perhaps choosing something to rehydrate would be better for an evening meal, instead of carrying so much water in things like a pouch of cooked lentils.

The town of La Fère, running on from the other two and separated from them only by the canal, had a famous favourite son, the count of something or other, upon whom Alexander Dumas based the character of Athos in the Three Musketeers.  It was a pretty place, far nicer than the working town over the other side of the canal that was Beautor.

Everything looked smarter: rows of pale peppermint and silver white beam trees set off the brick and white painted houses behind them, and the roads were being painted.

La Fère also has a number of criss-crossed streams going for it, which in the end flow into the Oise river. The water gives a completely different character to the place, in comparison with the down-at-heel canal.

The Via Francigena’s exit from the town, though, took me through a less salubrious atmosphere that I found quite intimidating. A wood had been ripped out seemingly by a herd of elephants,

and with quite a lot of feral teenagers on holiday and on the streets, I felt slightly unsafe walking through tunnels like this, no matter how brightly they were painted.

Seeing how heavy my rucksack was, by this point it was was annoying both that the last bit of the path wiggled unnecessarily through countryside to gain a few kilometres when it could’ve just hacked along the road. 

In addition, I was not at all liking the look of the threatening black clouds building up ahead.

In fact, I judged it a really good idea too cover my rucksack up and put my waterproof back on.

It was the right decision: all too soon a crow was blown ahead of a startling gust of wind coming seemingly out of nowhere. There was a sudden cloudburst, from 0-60 in an instant.

I had just read the route description and knew that somewhere up ahead was a culvert-like tunnel under a roadway, so I put down my head and ran down the grass path as fast as I could, despite my heavy rucksack.

I made it into the tunnel, wet but not nearly as wet as I would’ve been had I been caught out in the downpour without any shelter.  While I waited for the thunder and rain to stop, I texted my family and put on my gaiters again.

When I came out again the ground was soaked, puddles in the ruts and squodgy mud. The grassy muddy path took me to the top of the hill where I found myself looking at an attractive church, the windows of which were made out of panels of beautiful green glass.

As I was photographing, a woman tending the graves in the churchyard told me it was open, and called me through the gate. She took me over to the church doors, but they were locked. And then she unfolded to me her life story. How she had been one of six girls and six boys, and her mother said she’d wished the contraceptive pill had been invented back then. It was hard sometimes to make out what the woman was saying, because she made no allowances for the fact that I was a foreigner who spoke pretty imperfect French. She herself had had one son, but had never married. I understood that the father of her child was from Martinique, but had no contact with his son. The son had a daughter who was 24, and she had a 15-month old, which made the lady a great grandmother. There was more, very much more, but you will be grateful that as I say, I didn’t understand all of it.

By this time the sun had fully come out, and although I was struggling by this point, there was a rainbow cast behind me onto the black clouds, which I tried to take as an omen,

and ahead were spectacular cloud systems and sun shining on the oil seed rape fields. I thought I must be close.

But it was taking such a long time to get to my gîte, and the path was horrible scalpings laid thickly over a gravel road. The gîte turned out to be 2 km further down the road, right out of the village where its address suggested it was, and I began to feel that I would never get there.

But get there I eventually did, and although I could do little more than just sit while Pascal showed me around the place, I was thrilled to see that there was a washing machine, as well as a dishwasher. I made myself cook the food and put my clothes on to wash before having my own shower, and caught up with family and friends while I ate.

I’d come 30 km. It felt like a pretty long way, and I will assess in the morning how my feet have coped. But I was proud of myself for getting to the end of what has been the hardest day so far, and for cooking myself a proper meal from basic ingredients.

Stats for the Day

Distance: a long, long 30.3km

Time: walking time, 6hr 16, but I’d been out for ten hours. I still somehow managed to walk at an average for 4.8. Must be some internal metronome. I felt like I was definitely staggering for the last few hours.

Harry Potter Moment of the Day