Wednesday 12th June - Monarch's Way walk

At the start of this month, I resolved to walk as far as I could, every day that I could, health and weather permitting.  After all, there were bound to be days when it was pouring with rain and maybe even thundery, or when I was so tired that I needed a break, so I would need to make the most of the good walking days.

Wednesday 12^th June was an extremely good walking day.  I had done only a little walking – just 8 miles delivering election leaflets around Ashwick and Benter - on Tuesday, so I was ready to get out for a proper day of exploration on Wednesday, exploring the Monarch’s Way path further north. 

Sadly, the more northern reaches of the West Mendip Way were starting to be far enough west of my home that accessibility on day walks was becoming a difficulty, but the Monarch’s Way, which follows the escape route taken by King Charles II after being defeated at the Battle of Worcester, moves further east as it goes north here, coming nearer to the Chewton Mendip area.  Or, to be historically accurate about the route Charles actually took, the Monarch’s Way goes south through this part of Somerset, passing from Compton Martin through Wookey Hole to Wells, and I was walking along it in the wrong direction.  But never mind.

I started out by heading to Pen Hill and following the same path through the fields as the day before, heading west along Dursdon Drove, but then getting onto the Monarch’s Way and heading north towards St Cuthbert’s Swallet instead of south towards Wookey Hole.  I noticed two other walkers – older women – walking the same route as me, and after a while I caught up with them and overtook them. 

I felt rather irritated that they were doing the same walk as I was, and irritated with myself, because there was absolutely no reason to object.  I should have had the courtesy to pause and chat with them, instead of pressing on to put distance between me and them as quickly as possible.  Okay, I was trying to cover as many miles in one day as possible, but there was more to it than that, and it took me a few minutes to understand what it was.

I am not very mature for my age – I think that I have matured emotionally at approximately half my chronological age – and at forty-three, I am still trying to prove to myself that in at least some aspects of my life, I am capable of being an independent adult.  The presence of walkers older than myself felt, not like elderly people who might slow me down, but like parents who might try to help me find the right route when I needed the challenge of finding it for myself.

The path wound through Priddy Mineries Nature Reserve, which is owned by the Somerset Wildlife Trust and is one of the areas shaded in cream bordered in pale orange on the OS map, to indicate that this is open country (grassland and heath) to which the public has open access to roam.  Stock Hill, the wood next to it, is shaded in lime green, to indicate woodland to which the public has open access.

This was a reminder of one thing that Somerset, for all its beauty, doesn’t have that much of.  I grew up in Hampshire within easy reach of the New Forest, and spent most of my holidays as a child and teenager camping on Dartmoor, so I had grown up thinking of access land where you can roam freely as the norm.  Obviously, it’s wrong to damage a farmer’s crops, but over wild land you can go where you like, can’t you?

When I moved to Somerset, and found myself in countryside consisting mainly of farms and woods owned by individuals or conservation organisations, I had to learn a completely different way of navigating.  The method that had worked in the New Forest, of accepting that footpaths are temporary and the ones on the ground don’t correspond to what is printed on the map and so you just work out the general direction you need to head in and follow whatever path is nearest to that, was no longer appropriate when going off-road meant following public rights of way across a farmer’s fields.  Here, if I want to avoid trespassing I need to know precisely which side of a hedge I am allowed to walk on. 

Obviously there is room for flexibility – if the map prints a right of way as going diagonally across a field, but the farmer has sown across this but left a gap running around the edges of a field, I need to take the path that damages crops least.  But it is still a matter of working out where I am supposed to walk.

Here, I could have wandered about all day if I wanted to.  But I was on a walking challenge, so I moved briskly on.  I passed two more pairs of older walkers – in one case a man and a woman, and in the other two men.  This felt like the most popular part of the walk that I had done so far – which wasn’t a rational feeling, as I have frequently met other people on my walks, from joggers to dog-walkers.  Perhaps it was the fact that I was overtaking people on the same path, rather than passing them in the opposite direction, that made me feel oddly jostled.

Anyway, it was good to see the heathland of the nature reserve.  It reminded me of heathland in Hampshire, in contrast to the farmland I had mostly been walking through.  Then I crossed the road and arrived in Stock Hill, which felt even more reminiscent of home, because it’s a Forestry Commission plantation.

There is something about woods owned by the Forestry Commission, like the New Forest in Hampshire or Stock Hill and East Harptree Woods here, which marks them out from woods owned by conservation groups like the Woodland Trust or Somerset Wildlife Trust.  It is all too obvious that they were set up to farm timber for trade, usually in the form of monocultures of quick-growing conifers.  I had grown up walking through areas of the New Forest that looked like this.

However, Stock Hill was more varied by now than the map suggested.  Where the map showed almost nothing but conifers, part of Stock Hill had been cleared to allow the growth of heathland (not that deforestation is good, but heathland is an important habitat too).  Where there was conifer woodland, the trees weren’t necessarily all the same conifer. 

Also, more of the forest, particularly along the edges, now consisted of broadleaf trees.  Admittedly, many of them were beech, which, despite being deciduous, is nearly as bad as conifers for blocking out light and making it hard for flowers to grow, since it hangs onto its dead leaves through winter until the new ones grow in spring.  Not that I want to complain too much, as beeches are beautiful.  But I was glad that there were other broadleaf species too, such as oak, elder, and hawthorn.

I followed the Monarch’s Way north as far as where it skirted the edge of East Harptree Woods (I noticed that there were paths through this wood which looked worth exploring another time), and then started making my way back east, trying to stick to minor roads, heading for Chewto Mendip and the edge of the Mendip Hills West map, onto my home map of Mendip Hills East.

I took a couple of wrong turnings.  The first time I turned left too soon, I found that instead of a narrow country lane heading to Chewton Mendip, I was walking along the busy B3114, which was going to Litton and then Chewton Mendip.  Still, by the time I worked out where I had gone wrong, it would have taken longer to turn back than to go on along this route, and I had no objection to visiting Litton again, especially following it along the River Chew on the stretch between there and Chewton Mendip.  Time was already getting on, and I couldn’t afford more delays.

So then I had another delay.  From Cole’s Lane heading south-east, I found myself heading, not briefly east and then south towards Emborough, but north-east and then east along Chicks Lane, heading towards Ston Easton.  Except that I didn’t know that this was where I was.  I just knew that where the road lay and the direction that my compass told me I should be travelling in didn’t match up.  I started to feel quite panicky, especially as it was getting late and at this rate I might not be home until after 9pm. 

However, I couldn’t phone PDB11 and ask him to collect me and take me home when I couldn’t tell him where I was.  So the only thing to be done was to keep walking until I found out.  When the road turned north at a right angle, I could identify it as Chicks Lane, and followed it back until I found the junction where I had made my mistake.

Now I knew where I was, but it really was getting late.  I phoned PDB11 and explained about the delay, and he offered to collect me from Old Down Inn if I could make my way there.  I felt a bit embarrassed that, with the delays, again I hadn’t managed to complete a loop walk, but I had done 23 miles, as far as on Monday.

Thursday was another day on which I didn’t go for a full day’s walk, but did walk 7 miles delivering election leaflets in Withy Cottages and Gurney Slade, along with buying a box of teabags and some fruit at the post office. 

My mum has expressed dubiousness about my starting to support the Green party, as she is worried that there are too many weird and worrying far-left politicians joining it.  But my opinions are becoming more left-wing and libertarian at a time when the Greens are the main party in England representing this, as the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties are all drifting into the right-wing and authoritarian quadrant of the political compass (at the moment, there seems to be just Workers GB in the left-wing authoritarian quadrant, and pretty much no-one in right-wing libertarian), so I’m going to go with it. 

If you’re interested, you might want to take Political Compass’s test for which area of the quadrant your views are in, and Who Should You Vote For’s quiz on which party most nearly represents your views.  But, of course, neither of these says anything about whether your local candidate for any given party is someone you’d want to vote for.  In general, I’ll just say, ‘Whoever you vote for, please do vote.’

But at any rate, while most humans I have talked to in Somerset seemed sympathetic, plenty of their dogs were far more dubious about my politics than my mum is.  On Tuesday, a lovely black Labrador, returning from a walk with his owners as I was posting a card through their letterbox, ran up to me wagging his tail and allowed me to pet him until he heard which party I was canvassing for, at which point he started barking frantically.

I can live with barking, but on Thursday I met a couple of dogs who were happy to demonstrate that, noisy as their barking was, it was not worse than their bite.  In fairness, their owners were aware that they were dangerous and kept them shut in, but this didn’t help. The first one bit me through the railings of the garden fence as I was handing his owner a leaflet over the top, and managed to rip my jeans and gash my thigh.  The second, shut in the house, managed to nip my finger as I pushed a leaflet through the letterbox.

Of course, they were just being protective of their owners’ territory, and thankfully rabies has been eradicated in this country.  But for everyone distributing material about the various candidates standing for election, I hope whatever government we get at the end of this election is worth a few bites.

Anyway, I have now walked 199 miles, so I'm nearly halfway towards my target.  It has been a relief having a couple of wet days when I couldn't get out much and could spend more time with PDB11 - and it's certainly a relief for the garden that everything is getting watered.  But for now, it's time to get back into the habit of walking.