When Fraser and I got down to breakfast next morning we found Henry surrounded by maps. Other people who were having breakfast at the same time seemed to take it in good part, saying politely that they didn’t want to disturb him but if he looked under the two or three sheets nearest the window they thought he might find a jar of marmalade. One of them even suggested giving the salt-pot a grid reference so that they could all relocate it without disturbing him.
This of course was Henry laying down an elaborate ground-bait as an excuse for not doing any serious walking. Henry’s philosophy is that if you arm yourself with enough in the way of equipment and charts you can pass the day pleasantly enough browsing over it all without rising from a sitting position. Old hands like Henry can actually start panting and perspiring just at the sight of a hill on a map which they pretend to themselves they are going to be walking up around the middle of the day.
He should have known it wouldn’t wash with us. Fraser and I merely put him in charge of map-reading for the whole of the holiday and went outside to deal with the car and the luggage.
I don’t know how many years it is since I last looked at a map, but in principle I refuse to do it. Among the male sex I am unique in this respect. Women have much more sense.
I remember going for a walk one day with two men and their wives in the highlands of Scotland. There were children involved as well, which only made it worse. The men said we were going to strike up Ben Boggart by the back route, take a look at the view and then toddle down again. I asked them whether we ought to take any equipment, and they smiled indulgently at each other over their toast and told me not to worry my head about that sort of thing. They said we’d only be gone a couple of hours, and they thrust a map under my nose and told me to take a look for myself. Then they called the waiter over - we were staying in a shooting-hotel - and asked him to tell the manager that we would be wanting venison for lunch.
I went up to my room and stuffed my pockets full of chocolate and tied up four blankets with a dressing-gown cord. I told them it would make it more comfortable if we decided to sit down for a rest.
We all started off in grand style. We strode down the drive of the hotel, with the children skipping along in front, and we came to the road. We walked along it for a little way and then turned off through a gate, which the two men said was clearly marked on the map. About a mile further on, the track we were walking along faded out in the heather, but my friends said it didn’t matter because they had been planning to cut the corner off anyway, and we could join the unmetalled mountain road further down.
We walked on for about half an hour when suddenly one of the wives stopped and asked her husband which of the hills Ben Boggart actually was.
‘It’s that one over there, sweetheart,’ he replied encouragingly, selecting a peak from the thirty or more within view. ‘We’re a good half-way to it by now.’
She asked him whether he was sure it was that one, because it didn’t look the same shape as the one we’d seen from the hotel.
He said he was absolutely sure, and then the other man came and looked at the map for some time and said he felt pretty certain that that was probably the one as well. He said the outline of the summit changed when you approached it from an unfamiliar angle, and the fact that it looked so different now was a sure sign of the progress we had made.
About half a mile further on my two friends fell into a squabble about which peak they had both agreed they were aiming for ten minutes before.
‘That’s it there,’ one would say, pointing dramatically towards the left.
‘Oh don’t be a fool,’ the other would tell him. ‘It’s this one on the right. Can’t you read a map? Look, we are here...’
‘Here?’ the first one would exclaim, scornfully dabbing his finger at the page. ‘We’re not here! We’re over here!’
Then the other wife suggested that wherever we were we should all turn and go back. And they both rounded on her and told her not to be idiotic. They said that if they couldn’t take their families for a short stroll without them throwing in the towel after the first couple of fields things had come to a pretty pass.
The wife replied with some spirit that she was afraid we might all get lost and die of exposure without ever being found again, and they told her that was quite impossible and she shouldn’t make jokes about things she didn’t understand.
Then, about twenty minutes later, we came across the carcass of a sheep, which set the children crying, and after that they all had to be carried on our shoulders.
At noon I shared out half my chocolate. We ate it beside a small loch which seemed not to be on the map at all. At tea-time we huddled into a gulley in the side of a hill and had half of what was left. Nobody had any idea where we were, but the more they got us lost the more enthusiastic my two friends became about their ability to map-read us out. At last, at about six o’clock - and without a word of advance warning from our guides - we stumbled over the top of a gentle rise in the heather and found ourselves standing on a wide tarmacked road. As a party we were pretty well dead-beat, but the appearance of this sudden aid to navigation seemed rather to annoy my friends than the reverse. Although the two of them had wildly conflicting opinions as to where we were actually standing, they both agreed that the road had no business being there in the first place. They seemed to look upon it as a sort of mirage, and they said the important thing was to establish which way north was so that we could strike out from the road at the correct angle. They said this could easily be done by putting a stick in the ground and observing which way the shadow of the sun was pointing at midday, but the wives said they weren’t prepared to wait.
Five minutes later a lorry came round the corner and I waved it down and asked the driver if he would take us back to the hotel. He said he didn’t have enough petrol for that length of journey, but if we cared to jump in he could run us into Inverness which was just a couple of miles away and then we could hire a taxi from there.
So I’m always happy to be guided by someone else when it comes to map-reading. It’s not that I have any particular faith in their skill at finding the way, but at least it means that I don’t get any of the blame when we go wrong.
Fraser and I got the back-packs assembled, and we threw all the luggage which we had thought we were going to need but didn’t back into the car. There’s nothing like a real-life situation for making you practical. Everyone can have theories about how a back-pack goes together. Everyone can sit round at home and draw up lists of what is essential and what isn’t; but lay it all down at the feet of the man who is just setting off, and he will sort out what’s to be carried and how before you can say knife.
We parked the car at Gobowen station and I phoned home to Widget to tell her where it was. As we came out of the station a man appeared from the ticket office and told us we couldn’t leave the car there. He said it was against the by-laws, and it was reserved for the district manager, and the parking charge would be two pounds seventy-five a day. I was all for telling him to belt up and clear off, but Fraser said I didn’t understand the psychology of the man. He wasn’t basically obstreperous, he said, just bored to tears from having nothing to do, and his appalling lack of courtesy was in reality a cry for help. So we asked him to quote us for two adults and five children travelling from Gobowen to Prague via Weymouth on a family railcard during the off-peak season and said we would return for the information the next day. The last we saw of him he was surrounded by four time-tables busily telephoning Paddington and looking the picture of contentment.
Fraser dashed into a chemist’s shop and bought a razor - notice how long that non-shaving resolution of his lasted. Then we loaded Henry up into his pack, and after a short dispute as to which bundle was the heavier we set off walking along the road to Selattyn. You have to take a strong line with Henry when it comes to demarcation disputes.
Our plan was - and we kept to it well - to avoid as far as possible anything that resembled a main road. By-roads are fine when you’re hiking. Busy roads are a nightmare. To hop from the hard surface on to the verge whenever a car comes round the corner is an easy enough thing for a jogger in a tracksuit, but for a man in a full pack and boots a steady uninterrupted roll of forward movement is essential. So, instead of turning north to Selattyn when we struck the Oswestry road, we crossed it leaving the little town on our right and made on up the narrowing lanes towards Pant-glas and Caregy-big.
The sun shone brightly but not too hot, and from the west a refreshing wind was sending tufts of torn cloud across his face, their shadows sweeping the hillsides like squadrons of horse. Ahead and far across the border the dark peak of Cadair Bronwen, the seat of Arthur, towered prophetically above its greener slopes.
It is a strange thing about Wales, but it is one of those countries which seems to overspill its boundaries along the whole length of its border. It does it in every way it can - in the landscape, in the place names, in the accents and attitudes of the people - so that several miles before you actually come to the dividing line you have the sensation of being in Wales already. Now suppose you were to move the border five miles east. You would probably swing the balance the other way and everybody would remark how English all the altered counties seemed to be and they would set up a boundary commission which would worry over the problem for years and years and eventually move the line back to where it was in the first place. Some frontiers just seem to behave themselves naturally, and others never quite will: the Mediterranean boundary between France and Italy has not - so far as I know - caused anyone any problems for years. On one side they smoke Gauloises and on the other side they eat spaghetti, and each inhabitant seems to be quite clear about which of the two he is supposed to be doing. But run a little way north up into Alsace, and there you have a population which has actually taught itself to speak two languages - one for present use, and the other to have up its sleeve for the next time somebody moves the frontier about.
I shared these thoughts of mine with Fraser. He said that most of the problems over frontiers arose because the people who fixed the boundaries started from false premises. He said the ordinary man wasn’t interested in high-blown cultural distinctions. What he was interested in was which town he was going to drive to on market day to get himself a roll of chicken-wire, and so long as the line traced its way accurately between the catchment areas of the various border towns a frontier could work perfectly well for centuries.
Henry didn’t contribute to this conversation. It was probably too philanthropic for him. Henry is quite as capable as the next man of having his own flights of fancy - poetry, abstract theory, call it what you will - but his muse does really like something personal to get its teeth into.
A purple passage of Henry’s Reflections will go something like this:
So here we are walking along a road towards the Welsh border. My feet are warm and that is quite satisfactory. Ahead of me there is a large mountain, but since we are not planning to climb it I don’t particularly mind. In point of fact its outline reminds me of a cheese sandwich. Ah, cheese, cheese, how manifold are the blessings you have conferred upon a grateful mankind! Were I to list the various forms and flavours that you assume, how many volumes might I not fill! So I will confine myself to mentioning toasted cheese grilled till it’s brown on top and rounded off with a pinch of red pepper or tabasco. Incidentally I don’t think we ought to delay lunch too long today. It’s all very well saying we’ll stop somewhere five miles on and that should take us an hour and a half, but what’s the land like in between? Now if Offa had really wanted to make a name for himself, he could have designed the dyke so that it ran downhill all the way and had leisure centres and amenity areas dotted along it at three-mile intervals. I hope it doesn’t rain ...
And so on. That is the stream of consciousness as far as Henry is concerned. If Henry had lived in the eighteenth century and had gone on the Grand Tour he would have been the only one who didn’t fall back gasping with romantic wonderment at the sight of Mont Blanc. He would merely have shuffled uneasily from foot to foot and asked the guide if they had to go over the top or whether there was a quick way round the side.
On the far edge of Pant-glas we met a man standing beside a shooting-brake. We asked him if we were near to Offa’s Dyke, and he said No. This cheered us up no end. I should explain that this wasn’t a helpful prefatory sort of No, the sort of No you may give to a foreign tourist who has found his way into the post office and has to be set back on course for the railway station. The No that we got was the all-encompassing black-as-night variety. The type of No that grips the heart of the inexperienced hiker in a manacle of despair and sends him back home again to Potter’s Bar wondering how he could ever have been so weak-minded as to believe that the place he was walking to ever existed at all. Then he wanders listlessly around the house making himself scrambled eggs and trying to play games of pelmanism with himself to see how far his mind has deteriorated. And the following week he gives his boots and knapsack away to Oxfam and buys himself a book on growing indoor geraniums.
Of course the experienced hiker knows these massive doom-laden No’s of old, and he doesn’t flinch from them one bit. In fact after the first five or six that he runs up against in his lifetime - more or less the point that Henry and Fraser and I have got to by now - he actually begins to enjoy them and takes them as a welcome sign that he is getting near his destination.
There are naturally several forms of the doom-laden No. There is the Rustic Stupidity variety: ‘Oi’ve lived here man and boy for getting on seventy year or darned near, and dang me if oi’ve ever heerd of any house or mansion or such round these parts. No, oi’m darned if oi ‘ave.’ This type is generally delivered in, say, the churchyard at Woodstock with the heroic silhouette of Blenheim Palace framed as a backdrop. Then there’s the man who knows that what you’re looking for isn’t there, because he’s walking in the opposite direction and he hasn’t passed anything more interesting than a silo.
But of all these No’s by far the most devastating are those delivered by the landowner of affluence and education whose roots lie deep in the soil you are standing on - in a word, by the Squire. What he says really must be right.
‘Battlefield? Battle field?’ one such man exclaimed to me a few years ago as we stood on the point outside the village of Naseby, whence Cromwell had launched the charge that changed the entire course of English history. ‘No. N ... no. Nothing like that round here. You wouldn’t be thinking of Stonehenge by any chance?’
So it was with our man in the shooting-brake - a good example of the genre. Were we getting close to Offa’s Dyke? No. Did the Dyke run along this part of the country at all? No - not so far as he was aware. Did he have any idea where we might hope to bump into it? He couldn’t say. He gave the impression that anyone who wanted to try their hand at dyke-making in his neighbourhood would have to ask him about it first.
We thanked him courteously and moved on.
We found the Dyke about half a mile up the road. You can’t mistake it. It’s about thirty feet deep with giant banks of green turf on both sides of it. It is about as unobtrusive as a tidal wave.
With the pre-planned efficiency of true professionals we spun a coin to decide whether to turn left or right and eventually set off southwards. We walked along the floor of the Dyke in an unsteady line. I led the way, chiefly to prevent Fraser from setting too wild a pace. Fraser brought up the rear to make sure that Henry didn’t sit down and fall asleep over his maps. That’s how we work, Fraser and Henry and I - as a team.
I suppose it was just because it was our first day out but we really found ourselves in the mood for walking. By the time we actually reached the Dyke it was eleven o’clock in the morning, an hour which normally catches us in a reflective frame of mind and looking for a quiet spot to chew over the day’s progress so far. But today we were all zest and spring - and we stuck to it.
We hadn’t been out for five minutes before the message came up the line from Fraser telling me to stop dawdling and step it out, and Henry said he endorsed the opinion with brass knobs on. Then I said to Fraser that it seemed a pity to stop for lunch - just when we were getting on so well, as it were - and Fraser agreed. He said sandwiches and pints in pubs were the walker’s prize for a job well done, and by definition you couldn’t win a prize when you were only half-way through the race. Henry said he thought we ought to give it a try to see whether you could or not, but we told him he would be left behind if he did, and this seemed to steady his nerve and keep him going.
So we strode along right through the middle of the day without so much as a pause.
You, Gentle Reader, will want to know from me what the countryside was like.
Well, we went up over a hill and round the edge of another and past a sort of thingummy in the side of the bank which was made of stone and looked like an Anglo-Saxon bus-shelter, which of course it can’t be. Then we went down a very steep bit and over a river and up the other side where it was all covered with ivy, and we had to pull ourselves up by tugging at the tufts of it growing out of the slope. Then we found ourselves suddenly skirting the edge of a golf-course, and Fraser said that that reminded him of a joke. And Henry said if it was his one about the Ladies’ Champion and the No.4 iron could he please start with the punchline and work backwards so we could all get our laughs in while we were still fresh. And Fraser said it wasn’t that joke, but if that was the way Henry felt about it he wouldn’t tell a joke at all. And Henry said he bet it was that joke really, and Fraser was obviously refusing to tell another because he didn’t know any more.
Then we walked through a village at about tea-time and alongside a road and past a disused railway station and back into some fields again, where we found the Dyke very decently waiting for us - because we seemed to have lost it for the past ten minutes or so.
Now you may say that this is a very unromantic description of Offa’s Dyke, and so it is. But consider what Fraser and I had to put up with as we went along, and you will see why I prefer to tell it that way. Unbeknown to us, Henry, our official map-reader, also seemed to have appointed himself as unofficial Guardian of the Guidebooks. This sort of thing has happened before, so we can’t exactly say we didn’t know about it - the trouble is that you don’t notice these attacks coming on until they’ve really got a grip on a man.
You’ve probably experienced the agony of the ever-present guidebook carrier. Properly and sparingly used - and used in the right place - a guidebook is exactly what we need to keep us informed: ‘We now enter the main quadrangle of Baldwyn College, Oxford. The stone gateway with its elaborate fluted niches bears the arms of the founder, Egwyte, Bishop of Winchester (1021). Visitors should notice the finely carved statue of Walpole which occupies the left-hand recess and try to ignore the present-day Provost who has propped himself up on the right to sleep it off.’ This sort of thing is helpful.
What is not helpful is when you are rushing across the platform at Euston for a train which is just pulling out and your companion with the guidebook draws you aside to point out that the domed roof is the work of Arnold Crump the Younger (1864-1927) and that the stained-glass portrait of a dachshund over the clock is generally considered to be his finest achievement.
Nor, to come back to our case, when your feet have slipped and you are hanging on to a hillside for dear life - something which happened to me briefly on those ivy-clad slopes - are you best pleased to be touched on the arm by your nearest and dearest and informed in a confidential whisper that Offa’s Dyke never fails to command the view to the westward. One can see that for oneself: it just seems a pity that Offa didn’t put a little more landscape between the view and the man who is about to fall into it.
Yes, we had trouble with Henry. Not a corner did we round, not a hill did we breast, but Henry was one jump ahead of us with some prepared comment or other. If these guidebooks would only confine themselves to straightforward major facts they might be just bearable: The 120 foot Dorian column which dominates the western skyline was erected by the Duchess of Beaufort in 1743 in memory of her favourite spaniel, Ruffles. But no. Minor facts - the silliest minor facts you ever met - are studded through the whole concoction like currants. ‘By now you are walking on gravel,’ the book may say fatuously, or ‘You enter the Huntsman’s Arms by the front door’ - as though you had to be restrained from sliding down the chimney and jumping out of the fireplace in the saloon bar and saying ‘Boo’.
And as for the opinions - you know, ‘Probably the finest panorama in south-west Montgomeryshire’, or ‘What richer enjoyment can there be than to stretch out amid the luxuriant pastures of this enamoured vale and gaze upon the laughing springs of the Llemonaydd as, dashing out between the rocks of Vyrnwy, it hurtles, turbulent, towards its confluence with the majestic Severn.’ Not a word about the fact that the alleged stream is bone dry for four months in the summer. No mention of the mosquitoes. Dead silence on the cow-pats which litter the bank like mushrooms in a grow-bag. Huh.
That evening, when Henry wasn’t looking, Fraser and I collected together every map and guide and leaflet that we could find and we gave them to the landlord of the Llanbader Arms. And we gave him a five-pound note as well. And we asked him to put them in a parcel and post them off back home. But I’m running ahead ...