You know when you’re driving along in the rain—the kind that your wipers can’t really cope with, and they go into a sort of frantic ineffectual fastwipe which is slightly silly, somehow, in the way that a powerwalk is—and you see walkers trudging along the verge, heads bowed, sheathed almost entirely in rustling nylon, their huge packs, also nylon-sheathed, rearing behind them like a doom they can’t shake; and you think casually, in passing, ‘Poor bastards’? Well. On day three of the pilgrimage, those poor bastards were us. (more…)
Tag: pilgrimage
thing 24: ‘… and miles to go before I sleep’: St Bega’s way, part (ii)
It was one of those days Messrs Ordnance & Survey tend to put on the covers of their 1:25,000s: deep green hills, and water sparkling under a sky whose few meringues of cloud only emphasised the depth of the blue.
Usually, stopping for a squint at the map during a trudge across the rain-wreathed landscape, your cag hood rustling about your ears and your face screwed up against the wind, you regard these images with a sort of resentful disbelief. (I call this look ‘the (more…)
thing 24: ‘he tells her that the earth is flat…’: St Bega’s way, part (i)
‘[It is without any perceptible trace of actual regret that] we regret to announce the cancellation of the 5.01 Northern Trains service to Carlisle’.
At least I think that’s what the announcement said; Margaret and I were too busy exchanging dismayed glances to notice all the details. Fortunately the patient staff at Lancaster found us an alternative service and we’d only be an hour delayed. Unfortunately, they’d also had to find the same alternative for the other 759 people who’d hoped to get the cancelled service, so (more…)
thing 4: ‘world enough, and time’: a water-pilgrimage (part ii)
So: we walked the 25ish miles from Frome to Bath, stopping to swim, eat and pour water at various points along the way.
Sounds like a kicking weekend, huh? But this turned out to be one of those experiences where time seems to expand to accommodate all the stuff its brings. I think of this as herniated time—time which bulges sideways and intrudes into eternity, or timelessness, or both (if they’re not the same).* All this to be obtained merely by putting one foot in front of the other.
The morning’s walk on day one took us across fields, past poplar-copses (we stopped to listen to the wind in the leaves) (more…)
thing 4: ‘so pricketh hem Natur in hir corages…’: a water pilgrimage (part i)
There must be some kind of equation for packing.
If N=number of things you’d like to take, C the number of things you feel you can carry, and P what you can actually fit in your pack, the initial relationship between N, C and P can be assumed to be something like N>C≥P. After that it gets a bit confusing; but the net result is definitely F, which is what you say when you pick it up for the fifteenth time that day and your shoulders are very, very angry.
I was off to Somerset for a two-day water pilgrimage from the Holy Well at Frome to Aquae Sulis, the springs which feed the baths in, well, Bath. (more…)