5th & 6th June 2024: Walks Revisited

The past couple of days have been days for retracing steps and trying to get things right this time.

On Wednesday, I decided to retrace Tuesday’s walk to see whether I could find the lost camera.  First, though, I had a look at the Oakleaf Café’s rota and saw that no-one was signed up to clear tables and wash cups on Wednesday morning.  I decided to get some miles in by taking a shortish early-morning walk around Benter, T’other Side the Hill and Badger’s Cross (did I mention how much I love Somerset place names?) and end up at the café around 10.30.

When I arrived, the kitchen was fairly full, as another volunteer had come in, but just hadn’t put her name down on the rota.  She needed to leave by 12.15, so I could have waited nearly two hours to cover the period from12.30 to 1, but I couldn’t be bothered.  I had a camera to search for, dropped somewhere either in the lanes, copses or fields south of Shepton Mallet, or somewhere along the A37 or Fosse Way, or somewhere in the lanes around Harridge Wood.

I didn’t find it.  Probably I didn’t look hard enough, but, when walking through a field of long grass without a marked path, I knew that I could be just a few feet away from the path I had taken the day before and not see it.  It might be more useful to post a notice on NextDoor, asking whether anyone has found a lost camera.  We could also ask Shepton Mallet Police Station if a camera has been handed in to them. 

I’ve never been into this police station, and I don’t even know whether they have a public-facing desk.  There are fewer and fewer police stations around, and fewer of them are open to the public than in the 1990s, when my brother as a child found a lost wristwatch and handed it in at the local branch, and came back a few weeks later to ask whether he could have it if no-one had claimed it.  As it was a very noisy watch, the officers were relieved to be rid of it, and perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that the owner hadn’t come to look for it.

The walk wasn’t a successful search mission.  But as an exercise in, well, exercising, it had taken me a fairly respectable 18 miles.

On Thursday, I decided to see whether I could find the West Mendip Way through the woods on Milton Hill.  It helped that I had now looked at satellite photos of the area to see how these compared with the Ordnance Survey map, and so it became much easier to find the path up the hill, down through the fields along the side of the wood, and to the village of Wookey Hole (not to be confused with the village of Wookey, which is about a mile and a half south-west of this, nor with Wookey Hole Cave itself, which is slightly further north than the village of Wookey Hole).

When you visit Wookey Hole Cave, there are noticeboards explaining how, at different times in history, these caves have been inhabited by humans or by hyenas.  I always wish they had been inhabited by actual Wookiees (perhaps a few bold explorers travelled here from Kashyyyk and established a colony in the then richly wooded landscape of prehistoric Britain?).  After all, Wookiees would be furry enough not to mind the cold, damp cave, and tough enough to beat off the hyenas.

I visited Wookey Hole on my first date with PDB11, just over nine years ago.  We went there partly because I hadn’t been to visit since I was a child and was looking forward to seeing it again, and partly because it was a rainy day and we wanted to be somewhere sheltered, so a cave worked.

Talking of Wookiees, also early in our relationship, PDB11 introduced me to the webcomic Darths & Droids which re-imagines Star Wars as a role-playing game.  In one scene, Chewbacca’s player, Ben, wants to swing on a liana, but his fellow players argue that, in a temperate forest, there are unlikely to be lianas, and it’s probably a snake.

Well, plenty of temperate forests around Somerset, especially on Milton Hill, have things hanging down from trees, sometimes wild clematis but mostly brambles.  If the Darths & Droids GM was being realistic, instead of having to roll for Save versus Venom, Ben would just have needed to roll against piercing damage from thorns when grasping the prickly branches.

I wondered whether to follow the West Mendip Way up through Ebbor Woods, and explore another dramatic landscape in Ebbor Gorge.  But I decided to save that, and, today, trace the path up and down around the triangle of woods leading up to Pen Hill and down through Biddle Combe. 

The ‘up’ part of this was easy to find, as I was just walking on a well-marked track along the edge of the woods.  However, on the Biddle Combe part of the walk, the path through the woods, along the stream, looked more like a muddy swamp – and anywhere that wasn’t precisely the public right of way bore a notice reminding me that this was private woodland and not open to the public.

Instead, I headed out to follow the public rights of way leading across the fields and down to South Horrington.  There wasn’t a clearly beaten path to follow, and when I stumbled out into a field a short way south of West Horrington, I felt lost and uneasy for a moment, as I wasn’t sure which field I was in, and therefore which way across it, if any, I was allowed to walk.

I willed myself to calm down, checked which way north was, and turned the map until it aligned with this, which made it easier to match up the shape of the field I was in with one on the map.  After this, it wasn’t too difficult to pick out a path.

Then I was back on Old Frome Road, and just had the tiring but familiar walk home, pausing periodically when there was a grassy verge by a roadside where I could take off my boots, shake bits of grit or seeds out of them, and stretch my tired and aching feet.  Even when I was barely a mile from home, at Ashwick Pound, I still needed to sit on a bench and rest my feet before I could continue.

Altogether, I walked 21 miles today, the longest I have done so far, bringing my total up to 112 miles.  I’m definitely not ready yet to walk 20 or 21 miles every day, but it’s encouraging to know that I can if I stretch myself. 

Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories are a series of fables, told in a folk-tale-like style, imagining if evolution had happened in the  lifetime of an individual animal, rather than over hundreds of generations of genetic change.  One story, told in a bouncing rhythm which feels more like a poem than prose, tells the story of a kangaroo evolving into a hopping animal to outrun a dingo.  Okay, historically, the ancestors of kangaroos would have been chased by thylacines, not dingoes, as dogs weren’t introduced to Australia until long after kangaroos had evolved, and thylacines could also hop, and there were even carnivorous kangaroos, but never mind the historicity, feel the rhythm:

First he hopped one yard; then he hopped three yards; then he hopped five yards; his legs growing stronger; his legs growing longer.  He hadn’t any time for rest or refreshment, and he wanted them very much.

Well, obviously I’m not evolving because in real life evolution is something that happens to species rather than individuals.  But I am getting fitter, and it’s encouraging.  And I’m glad that, not being chased by a hungry predator, I do have time for rest and refreshment from time to time.