Soon after I returned from South Uist I began planning. For a good while I had been wondering about a walk along one of the ancient roadways of prehistoric Britain. Since seeking that lost Roman road through my homelands in the heat of the summer months, the impetus had grown ever stronger.
For this adventure, an accomplice was needed – a friend who would happily walk for miles in silence but who would talk when those miles began to drag. I knew Paul would be perfect. Our friendship had been forged beside fire pits and in pubs over pints across fifteen years or so. He lived two villages over in Alphamstone. He’d been brought up in rural Wales, the eldest of three boys. He had been a surfer, a dry-stone waller and a philosophy student. I’d met him soon after moving from London to the fields of Essex and life experiences had brought us close. I knew that though I might struggle, Paul would have no problems with walking fifty miles in two days. He did triathlons. He worked as a gardener, keeping a small rural estate perpetually in glorious natural beauty. Last year, he’d done the forty-odd-mile Lyke Wake walk across the North Yorkshire moors in a day.
In The King’s Head one night, I asked if he fancied walking the Peddars Way.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Definitely.’
The only matter to sort was juggling our family commitments so I popped round one weekday night. His wife, Amanda, arrived back from a late night at the school where she taught. Paul and I had been getting overexcited over a glass of red, looking at possible dates. There was a window at the end of September.
‘Sure,’ agreed Amanda. ‘That works.’
Suddenly, we were sorted. We’d both drive to Burnham Overy Staithe on the North Norfolk coast. We would stay in the bungalow on the Saturday night, and then take one car to Thetford the next morning. After that, it was simply a case of stepping into two pairs of prehistoric boots and strolling the Peddars Way through the Norfolk countryside. We would pitch tents around Castle Acre on the Sunday night and get a good meal and a few pints in a pub. Then we would head off again on Monday morning and arrive at Holme on the Norfolk coast that evening to see the site of the early Bronze Age wooden wonder of Seahenge – though the oak henge itself had been removed for preservation. Then it was either walk the extra ten miles or so along the coast to Burnham Overy Staithe or camp in Holme the night and complete those miles the next morning.
‘We could catch the bus,’ I said with a smile.
I knew that the reality of the extra ten miles along the Norfolk coast might not be that appealing.
‘Or get a taxi,’ Paul suggested.
Either way, by Tuesday afternoon, we’d be back in Essex – me to collect Eva and Molly from school and Paul in time for his son Marley’s parent consultation. Perfect.
September grew more glorious as the days shortened. On the lanes and footpaths, dog walkers happily stopped to chat in the sunshine. Talk was of an Indian summer. I spent the time inside. The task of unearthing the history of the Peddars Way was proving rather more involved than I’d imagined. Essentially, the Peddars Way as a walkable path today ran from Knettishall Heath in Suffolk for some forty-six and a half miles to Holme-next-the-Sea on the North Norfolk coast. Most agreed that rather than a prehistoric road it was probably Roman in origin. A glance at the arrow-like precision of much of the route running on a NNW to SSE axis made you instinctively agree. Yet the far more ancient chalk ridge route of the Icknield Way, which ran for some two hundred miles from south-west England, led precisely to the starting point of the Peddars Way.
I had borrowed from the library three Ordnance Survey maps that covered the route of the Peddars Way and unfurled them with inelegant haste in the kitchen. I found Thetford, and then Knettishall Heath four miles to the east where a large white letter P in a pale blue square box marked the seemingly far too convenient point where the prehistoric Icknield Way transformed into the Roman Peddars Way.
I had read somewhere that the Stone Age travellers who followed the Icknield Way could well have followed a path that ran west of the Peddars Way, winding via the flint mines at Grimes Graves a few miles from Thetford and then on north along the raised chalk ridge to the sea at Holme. On the map that now covered the kitchen table I followed the high ground marked in the form of serpentine orange contour lines. I traced the parallel swirls of forty-five- and fifty-metre markers, spotting the tiny ‘45’ and ‘50’ orange numbers as they appeared just above Ickburgh, scattered here and there like tumuli markers. I followed them to the northern edge of the map and then, with further inelegant unfurling, tracked them north on to the next map – the chalk ridge running a roughly parallel path to the straight line of the Roman Peddars Way.
Here was a perfect illustration of the variance between prehistoric and Roman roadways. One wound a path along the contours of the landscape. The other tore through the land. Both might take a route roughly from A to B – Knettishall Heath to Holme in this case – and yet each told of a very different relationship to the ground they travelled over. The chalk-ridge route of that northern arm of the Icknield Way meandered gently through the sandy Brecklands towards the coast just as Edward Thomas had declared that ‘the earliest roads wandered like rivers through the land’.1 The Roman Peddars Way told quite another tale – even in the manner in which it was constructed as a hard agger upon these soft soils. The road was a route to be marched along. It was suddenly so brutally clear, so obvious. The Peddars Way was a military road just as Margary’s 33a was. And what I suddenly realised in my utter blindness to the absolutely obvious was that it ran directly through the centre of Iceni tribal lands. These were Iceni territories that the Peddars Way ripped through.
It might well have been the case that an earlier, pre-Roman route had run close to the Peddars Way. That road could well have been part of the Icknield Way and so also part of The Great Ridgeway which ran through Neolithic southern Britain to the tin- and gold-mining lands of Cornwall way off in the south-west. So the earlier route was part of that network of prehistoric roads that criss-crossed Britain. Yet the Peddars Way, as visible today, was part of that rigid pattern of lines that had been etched across the British lands by the Romans. I turned back to my photocopied pages of Ivan Margary’s Roman Roads in Britain. On the map labelled as ‘The East Anglian Network’ a mesh of fragmentary bold black lines illustrated the pattern of Roman roads, both those whose course was ‘certain’ and those whose course was ‘inferred’. The Great Road 3a ran from London to Chelmsford where it forked – the 3b thrust on towards Colchester, the 33a struck north to Braintree and boldly on before splintering to a fractured line of dashes. That was the missing Roman Road I had spent the summer searching for. I knew well that hiatus, that lacuna on the landscape of Roman Britain, knew those white spaces between the dashes as sods of earth walked and rewalked, as holes in corners of fields dug down to where the hard agger of 33a should be. The road reappeared in bold black again as a stubby line below Long Melford, then more confidently headed north-east, on past Ixworth. At Coney Weston, Margary had another fork – the 33b – which after striking north to Roudham Heath, edged west and ran arrow-straight to the Norfolk coast. It was labelled in neat, quaint and capitalised copperplate letters: PEDDARS WAY. So the Peddars Way which Paul and I were due to walk was actually an extension of the Roman road I had spent much of the summer seeking.
Sunday morning was sunny. All seemed auspicious as we reached Knettishall Heath and a leaf-litter strewn car park. It was the perfect day for a walk. A party of walkers were crossing the wooden stile nearby. Fingerposts pointed to north and south. To the south: Icknield Way–Ivinghoe Beacon 105 miles (169 km). To the north: Peddars Way–Holme-next-the-Sea 46 miles (74 km). The sign seemed to be stating that it was on this very spot that the prehistoric pathway of the Icknield Way actually transformed into the Peddars Way. I puzzled at the sign a second more and then noticed the symbols on each wooden marker: the Icknield Way fingerpost had a round, white circle like a perfect full moon; the Peddars Way had a stylised pale acorn against a black background. I frowned and returned to matters in hand. I laced up my walking boots and lifted the rucksack to my back.
I felt the load on my shoulders.
‘Not too bad,’ I thought.
We each had a tent, sleeping bag, minimal change of clothes, snacks and water. We’d divided the other essentials. I had a Thermos of tea. Paul had his well-worn Trangia stove and some meths for fuel. I had somehow already managed to misplace the National Trail Guidebook to the Peddars Way I’d got from the library which had neat sections of Ordnance Survey maps to guide our way. My thinking had been that it saved bringing the three OS Explorer maps needed to cover the route of the walk and avoided the faff of unfurling them. Now we had none.
‘We don’t really need a map, anyway,’ I said. ‘It’s a straight line to Holme.’
We just needed to walk. And that was what we did – stepping enthusiastically over the stile on to the soft ground of the beech woodland at a brave, bold pace. We had already been chatting confidently – cockily even – on the speed we would walk.
‘Four miles an hour is certainly doable,’ I’d reckoned the night before. ‘And, for some sections, maybe five.’
My back-of-a-fag-packet calculations told that at an average of four mph we would only need to walk for six hours each day to cover the forty-six-odd miles to Holme. That meant if we pushed it for the first couple of hours we could pretty much stroll the rest of the day.
We struck out through Blackwater Carr and soon were stepping via the footbridge over the Little Ouse whose waters formed the county border between Suffolk and Norfolk. The path wove into a tree-lined avenue.
‘Spindle,’ Paul said rather suddenly.
He reached a hand out and, without halting or breaking stride, neatly took one of the bright pink pods that were hanging from the shrubs all around us.
‘Eh?’ I called back.
The path had forced us to walk Indian file.
‘These are spindle shrubs,’ Paul said.
‘Oh, right,’ I said.
They were certainly quite a startling sight, drooping with lurid pink colour.
‘Erm … Euonymus europaeus, I think,’ he added.
‘Impressive,’ I said.
They were everywhere, on each side of the pathway and shrouding our route with a ridiculous pink vibrancy. I pulled at one of the pods without dropping my pace. It fell to the floor. On the third attempt, I caught one in my hand and examined it as I marched on. The pod was a centimetre across and made up of four segments. It was that gorgeously rich, rosy colour that amazed. I stared closer.
When I glanced back to the spindle bushes they looked as though they were bearing some surreal offering of fluorescent popcorn – hanging freshly cooked and ready for passing wayfarers to munch on. They even looked oven warm.
‘Can you eat them?’ I asked.
Paul laughed.
‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘And as we’ve got forty-odd miles still to go, perhaps best not.’
‘True,’ I agreed.
He offered a handful of sweets instead: toffees in pale gold wrappers and brown-striped humbugs. I took a humbug – Paul passing the sweet rather like a baton in a relay, both of us shaving a tad off our pace and then stepping up again once the handover was safely complete.
We were having a ball. The sun was still shining. The forecast was good for tomorrow, too. It was the end of September but camping out was going to be fine. No rain, no cold to contend with. The ground was dry and sandy. The path opened up and we sped along, crossing the River Thet and then on, the path steering dead straight and true now apparently on a setting for the magnetic north.
Two miles on, we passed another ancient roadway, the Harling Drove or the Great Fen Road, which wove off west through the sandy Breckland soils and eventually away to the even flatter, black soils of the fenlands. Drovers may have driven their animals along that track for hundreds of years, but for thousands more it had been one of that prehistoric network of paths connecting together significant sites of ancient Britain. We walked on north over Roudham Heath. I had read some time back that this common land had been the gathering place of the Iceni, the legendary Celtic tribe of southern Britain who, under the leadership of Boudicca, had risen up against the Roman presence on these isles. If it was true then it was here that those Iron Age warriors gathered back inAD 60 before they headed south to burn the Roman colonia of Colchester to the ground. I found the reference some days later. Even if not from a primary source, it was still intriguing:
It has been suggested that Boudicca’s call to arms was met here on Roudham Heath. This was the place where they started their march to Colchester by heading, presumably along a path that became the Peddars Way, to Knettishall and on to Coney Weston.2
Boudicca had led the Britons on, massacring much of the Roman Ninth Legion sent in to relieve Colchester, before heading south with ever increasing numbers of British rebels to burn down both the Roman cities of London and Verulamium (St Albans). Though the Romans had been on the ground for nearly twenty years, Roman rule over ancient Britain was only truly established after the death of Boudicca. The re-securing of Roman control over these lands by the Roman Emperor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus after the Boudiccan Uprising meant a banishing of the old pagan ways that had prevailed for so long. The battle that took place inAD 61 probably somewhere in the West Midlands, perhaps close to the Roman road of Watling Street, had been fought between the pagan forces of the past and the soldiers of the new militarism which Roman invasion had brought. And that battle, fought in the heart of England, was for the dominance of a way of living: either the old ways of the Britons, or the new-fangled materialism of Rome. Rome won. The death of Boudicca ended a way of existing in the landscapes of this archipelago that traced an ancestry back to the earliest Stone Age.
We struck on. Our way was dead straight – not the gentle, contoured route of an ancient path through the land. On we went, marching along as seemed so fitting with the increasing signs of military activity in the area. We had ventured into the eastern edge of a vast section of the Norfolk landscape that had been sectioned off for military training in 1942. Some 30,000 acres had been requisitioned. It had been a huge enterprise, undertaken to ensure the creation of a secret military training zone tucked away in the middle of Norfolk. One thousand people had been evicted from their homes.3 Villages and hamlets such as West Tofts, Stanford, Sturston and Tottington were abandoned. They still are. Their churches remain but no parishioners live within their parishes. And even today the area is used by the military for live firing exercises, for mass parachute drops and large-scale battle enactments. Paul and I marched on oblivious. Birdsong rather than bullets filled the air. Perhaps it was one of the few days each year when the military put down their weapons. We sucked on humbugs and chatted happily away.
At the village sign for East Wretham, we halted a moment to take a photo of the roadside that simply read ‘Peddars Way’. That was the moment I discovered my smart new camera wasn’t working.
‘It might be the batteries,’ Paul suggested reassuringly.
‘Might be,’ I said even though I knew the batteries were new. ‘I’ve got spares somewhere.’
It mattered not. We were making good progress. We’d done some six and a half miles already. I had a quick delve in one of side pockets of my rucksack for batteries and pulled out the Peddars Way guidebook instead.
I put it straight back. We didn’t need it.
The night before, in the simple shelter of the bungalow at Burnham Overy Staithe, we had talked about a scenario to play with on the walk.
‘Just to pass the time, really,’ I’d said.
In order to step into those prehistoric boots, we would try to imagine, as we plodded on for mile upon mile, that we were two brothers, or cousins, or close kin of some kind from those vital years that marked the very start of the Bronze Age, about 2300 BC.
Understandably, Paul seemed to frown a little.
‘I mean,’ I stuttered. ‘Just as a bit of a laugh; a way of trying to get into the mindset of those who walked this path in prehistory.’
I continued to talk, knowing I was starting to waffle.
‘Not that they would have walked exactly this route,’ I said, leafing through the accumulated maps of the Peddars Way seeking our start point at Knettishall Heath. ‘I mean, obviously not if it’s really a Roman road.’
On the table, the three OS maps lay unfurled, covering the worn lino. On top of the maps sat a scattering of books, many of which had already travelled with me to South Uist and back that summer.
Paul laughed.
‘So …’ he said slowly. ‘Period dress?’
I laughed.
‘If you want.’
I’d found the book I was after. It was a children’s book titled ‘The Bronze Age’. I turned to the first page:
Bringer of Gold
Occasionally an invention comes along that completely changes the way that people live. Around 4,300 years ago people in Britain learned how to make and work with metal. We call this the beginning of the Bronze Age.4
The book was part of a series called ‘Britain in the Past’, full of short, digestible chunks of facts about the Bronze Age and lots of colour photos. I’d seen it in the children’s section of Halstead library and got it out on my daughter Molly’s card.
It was the photo of that skeletal figure I was after – the Amesbury Archer.
‘There.’
There was a blur of brown from which some bones could be made out and a body lying in the earth surrounded by specks of white chalk. There wasn’t that much to see. But then, no one looks that impressive dead and rotten.
The Amesbury Archer.
He was one of the Beaker people – that cultural collective who appeared in prehistoric Europe from around 2500 BC and seemed to be the first to work with metal. Beaker people were defined by the style of pots they were buried with. The Amesbury Archer had been buried around 2300 BC with five such funerary pots. When he had been found in 2002, he had been nicknamed ‘The King of Stonehenge’ – for the wealth of his grave goods and the proximity to Stonehenge of his burial both in date and distance. His collection of artefacts to take into the next world included clothes, pots, tools and arrowheads for hunting. There were also copper knives, stone wristguards to be worn against the action of the bow string of his arch and, finest of all treasures: gold. There were two small rolled shards of gold – most probably hair tresses. They were the oldest known pieces of gold ever found in Britain.5
I showed Paul the colour photo in the book.
‘Wow,’ he said.
Those fragments of worked gold were a wonder in themselves. The photo showed a band of gold wrapped around a semi-circle of gold sheet that had been rolled together and seemed to have ornamental markings etched around its rim. The object reminded me of one of those metal clasps used to secure dreadlocks.
But there was one further fact about the Amesbury Archer that made his burial in prehistoric Britain so significant. He was not British. Analysis of his teeth showed that he had spent his childhood in the Alps. He was European. At some point in his life, he had migrated from continental Europe to Britain.
Paul and I would pretend to be two sons of the Amesbury Archer. We would be British-born early Bronze Agers who were leading a new wave of metalworking across Britain. We would be part of those spreading the word of wondrous new things to the furthest corners of Britain. We would be heading to those who ran the port at Holme, where wooden seahenges marked the route across the water from one chalk ridge to the other. We were bringers of change. We were Bronze Agers stepping into a land of stone, into the heart of the flint industry of Britain which had been centred here for millennia. Here in the Brecklands of Norfolk, the finest quality flints were sourced and worked and carried north up to Holme where they could be shipped out over the Wash to Lincolnshire and on to northern Britain or away on boats that steered about the sunken isles of Doggerland and took the flint away to other worlds, other lands that were barren of this vital stuff of stone age tools.
In my mind, the scenario was swirling into fantasy. The only problem was that early Bronze Agers wouldn’t have been walking this road – they would have used the winding route of the ancient ridgeways that criss-crossed Britain. The arrow-straight path of the Peddars Way wouldn’t actually exist on the prehistoric map we would have been carrying in our heads. Nor would the sons of the Amesbury Archer really be working with bronze. It would be a few more generations before the shift from copper to bronze would occur. And then there was the fact that the seahenge discovered on the beach at Holme dated to around 2000 BC.
Still, it was just a game.
We headed on. Our walking boots kicked up flint fragments from the exposed earth. We strode the straight road north, edging the Merton Estate and light-heartedly playing with our ‘sons of the Amesbury Archer’ scenario, walking on until the path had become fenced in on either side. Then we hit a B-road.
‘Fancy a break?’ I said.
Thankfully, Paul agreed. I inched the rucksack to the ground beside a wooden fingerpost that read Peddars Way.
We snacked and rested for a few moments. A dog-walker passed by with an aged Golden Retriever. We passed pleasantries.
‘So where are we?’ Paul asked.
I retrieved the guidebook from a side pocket. The B-road was the Brandon Road.
‘Erm,’ I said.
According to the map, we should have had fields before us. Instead, we had a string of suburban bungalows.
‘Erm,’ I repeated.
It took a while and two minds rather than one to work out what had happened. We had marched on past a left turning just over a mile back. We were on the fringe of a market town called Watton. So now we had to walk back another mile or so along the B-road in order to rejoin the Peddars Way.
Two more miles added to the tally.
We set off again, now walking on paving stones. On the tarmac of the B-road as the pavement vanished we were forced to dodge speeding cars for half a mile on the long road to Little Cressingham. From now on, I resolved to carry the guidebook in my hand.
‘Back on track,’ I said as we finally slipped off the tarmac on to rough grassland.
The reality was that the modern-day route of the Peddars Way was a compromised one. It was obvious really. The dead reckoning of that Roman road ran through people’s front rooms and the fields of unfriendly farmers. Instead, a path of best fit had been created when the trail was formed in the 1980s. In sections, it followed the actual agger of the Roman road. In other parts, like this, it rather meandered away. I checked the map. We were heading west. I frowned. The ancient Peddars Way ran NNW. Though back on the modern-day Peddars Way trail, we were sailing forty degrees off the correct compass direction for Holme.
‘Mmm.’
We reached the village of Little Cressingham and swung back to north. I still clutched the guidebook. We had done fourteen and a half miles – not including that two-mile detour to Watton. Now the road rose gradually before us. We marched on, now silently for another mile or so, struggling to keep to anything like the pace we had been maintaining, even though the farm road was metalled under foot. Halfway up Caudle Hill, Paul halted abruptly.
‘Look at that,’ he said.
On the tarmac lay a snake.
‘Grass snake, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Paul.
The snake was tiny.
‘I thought it might be a slow worm, it’s so small,’ he added. ‘But it’s definitely a grass snake. There’s that white collar on the neck.’
He leant over and pointed.
‘They’re normally more yellow.’
The snake didn’t move.
‘It must just be a young one,’ I said.
Paul remained close to the ground. He touched it gently with a forefinger. It didn’t move. He rose to upright, the rucksack rolling on his back. For a moment we stood in silence above it, staring down at the still creature. Its body was curved in a peculiar wave that made it look a little like a six-inch long question mark on the road.
‘You think it’s dead?’ Paul asked.
‘Hasn’t moved, has it?’ I said and bent lower. ‘I guess it could be playing dead.’
Paul took a photo and we left the being be. It was only a few days later, when I looked at that photo, I realised that the snake’s body was pointed north, the neck and head orientated perfectly along the line of the ancient trackway towards Holme and the seahenge. I did some checks. Grass snakes do commonly practise thanatosis or playing dead. But what I couldn’t confirm was whether that particular individual creature was pretending to be dead or really was.
The day was marching on. The sun now sat on my left shoulder. By the time we reached North Pickenham there was only an hour or so of sunlight left. We halted and sprawled across a welcome bench beside a farm. A rusty tractor sat between two huge silos. I unlaced my walking boots, tugged them off and then peeled my socks from my feet. It was becoming hard going. I retrieved the guidebook.
‘Right,’ I said, trying to sound unfazed. ‘We’ve done nineteen and half miles.’
We both knew there was a pub marked at North Pickenham but we also both knew we hadn’t reached anything like halfway. We both knew that halfway was at Castle Acre – another seven miles on.
‘So,’ said Paul. ‘We could pile on to Castle Acre but we’d get there in the dark and then have to find somewhere to camp as close to the path as possible and only then head to the pub …’
‘Or if we halted close to here,’ I started.
My feet were killing me already. Even the prospect of a ridiculous figure like thirty miles for tomorrow’s walk seemed better than walking on through the night.
The matter was solved by two passing locals. The pub in North Pickenham had shut two years back. They were heading to a new ‘pop-up’ pub that had just started in the village hall. Our hearts lifted.
‘Come along if you want,’ they offered.
The only problem was there wouldn’t be food. We could get that well-earned pint but we’d have no supper.
‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘That’s a shame.’
It was. We needed food. We wouldn’t make it to Holme tomorrow without a great big pub meal to keep us going. I had my heart set on eating a lamb.
There was one other possibility. We could walk on some three more miles and then pitch camp in a field just off the route of the Peddars Way. We would be able to reach there before sunset and so put up the tents in sunlight, or rather the dying embers of.
‘See there’s that pub marked at Sporle,’ I pointed out to Paul.
It would mean a half-mile detour to the pub and the same back to the tents but at least we’d be rucksack free.
Paul got going at trying to reach some semblance of the Internet out here, seeking a phone number for the pub. I stared closer at the map.
‘It should be perfect for camping there. No houses anywhere near.’
We packed up with renewed enthusiasm. Paul’s initial search had revealed a second pub in Sporle. He had no signal to call either though. But things were looking rosier, even if that included the western horizon. The day was dying.
We marched on again, or rather hobbled for the first few hundred yards, steeling feet to the task. To distract from my increasingly painful heels, I turned back to our imaginary Bronze Age scenario.
‘So we are carrying some of the first Bronze axe heads in Britain,’ I said.
‘OK,’ said Paul.
We had left North Pickenham and were back among the fields. We were also back on the Peddars Way proper, on the true Processional Way of the Romans – even if we were pretending to be from well over two thousand years before the road was built.
‘We’ve brought them all the way from Wessex,’ I continued.
‘OK,’ said Paul a little more slowly.
Bronze axes must have been viewed as incredible when first seen by prehistoric people only used to stone. They had both extra precision and cutting strength over traditional flint axeheads. And when brand new they shone like sunlight. Most significantly, the new bronze version didn’t splinter and break. The trees that were cut down to form seahenge at Holme had been felled by bronze axes. Because each axe had been individually forged, each cutting edge could be individually told apart by microscopic analysis of the cut-markings on those oak trunks that had formed the seahenge at Holme around 2050 BC. Such precise scientific methods meant archaeologists could state that fifty-one different bronze axes were used in working those giant oaks into the wooden henge.6
Paul and I had leapt on a few hundred years. We were musing instead on the appearance of bronze swords.
‘Didn’t people just start killing each other?’ asked Paul
‘It must have bloody mayhem,’ I said.
We wondered together how so suddenly across the society of ancient Britain, the ability to produce a sharp, long splint of toughened metal must have altered everything. That brutal killing technology that arrived with the bronze sword had never been seen before. That line of thought, of a kind of evil brought into mankind by the appearance of the first implements that could sever in one blow a man’s head from his body, in turn led our talk to the violence that can be inflicted by man upon man and, soon, before we knew it, we had crossed the last miles of the day and were close to seeking a place to hide away for the night.
‘That’s the road to Sporle,’ I said, suddenly realising where we had reached.
‘Brilliant.’
A gap in the hedge beside us opened to an empty field. The sun was setting beyond in a flurry of murderous reds.
It was perfect.
Within minutes we had our tents up in the fringe of the field, a few feet from the Peddars Way. We were well hidden from any farmer’s eyes. Paul was lighting his battered Trangia stove. I turned back from the sunset to the sight of the methylated spirits aflame, pouring purple fire out into the darkening night. We would have a tea and then stroll down to Sporl for a pint and a lamb.
It was Mum who’d told me of the Blood Moon. Then Paul had mentioned it when he’d popped round the other morning.
‘You know there’s this Blood Moon,’ he’d said.
I hadn’t until Mum had mentioned it the night before. The conjunction of a full lunar eclipse and what is called a Super Moon had somehow passed me by.
Now, we both sat back on tired haunches, sipping tea and staring at the vast white celestial object that sat in the dusk of the southern sky.
‘So what’s a Super Moon?’ I asked.
I’d meant to look it up but hadn’t got round to it.
‘Something to do with being a full moon and a Harvest Moon, isn’t it?’
It hardly seemed to matter at the time. Food and beer were more pressing. We zipped up tents and nipped back through the hedge, not needing head torches to find our way. The moon was huge already.
We walked with a new-found lightness to our step along the Sporle road, dropping down the incline of Bunker’s Hill where the trees shrouded the moonlight. Our chat was light too. The darkness of Bronze Age weaponry was replaced with thoughts of the supper menu.
‘Lamb for me,’ I said.
Paul laughed. He was thinking beer.
‘Of course a local beer should be available …’
‘Wherry?’ I asked.
‘Don’t see why not,’ said Paul.
We reached a T-junction and turned north. I didn’t need the map. I’d memorised the way to the pub. Sporle was lit by the odd streetlight. A stream ran by the side of the road, channelled in parts into a stone culvert and covered by pavement. It was eerily picturesque in the moonlight. A solitary car passed.
‘Seems a little quiet,’ I said, more to myself than anyone else.
There was absolutely no one about. I checked the time. It was only just gone seven in the evening yet it seemed as though it was just past midnight.
The pub appeared suddenly before us. It was bathed in darkness. We both stood stock still and stared. The Peddars Inn was shut. There really was no getting away from it. A chalk board left outside declared that the pub had shut at six but it had only been serving food until three anyway.
For a little while, we both just stood and stared.
‘Mmm,’ I think I said, though it might have been a little stronger.
Once the reality had nailed itself down, there was the small matter of water to source. We were entirely out.
‘Check round the back,’ suggested Paul. ‘They might have a tap.’
They did at least have that. So instead of beer we drank water at the pub. Then we filled the empty bottles we’d brought along.
In some strange way, it seemed that on that walk undertaken on one of the ancient highways of Britain to touch a sense of life in prehistoric times, we were being shown some of the more basic aspects to living that really were so easy to forget in twenty-first-century Britain. To survive, all humans needed food and water. There were other things, of course, such as shelter and warmth and love and perhaps even the respect of others. But first there came food and water. If it was a lesson, it was one I certainly didn’t want to be having at that time. A lamb shank and a pint would have been far preferable.
Instead, we traipsed back through the ghostly high street of Sporle followed by the echo of our footsteps before turning into the dark inclines of Bunker’s Hill, and then up and out from the houses and the trees into the ashen moonlight. In some other strange way, the fact we did now have water made things so much better. Without, we’d have had to go on until we found some. I’d pictured having to knock at some isolated farmhouse’s front door to be greeted by the violent barking of dogs.
We had water. We could get a tea when we got back. We’d already started to laugh at the situation.
‘At least we saw Sporle by night,’ joked Paul.
Back by the tents, the stove was soon alight. Paul produced four small pots of porridge he’d earmarked for breakfast. I had a bag of nuts and two more bananas. But it was the porridge we turned to for supper. September was nearly done and a stream of autumn cold seemed to seep across the field. In the south, the moon was round and proud and had risen to forty-five degrees. It was only later I discovered that a Super Moon was when a full moon took place as the moon came near to its perigee, the point in the moon’s orbit when it was physically closest to earth. The moon we were witnessing in a field in Norfolk was a Super Moon because it would become a full moon only one hour after reaching that lunar perigee in its orbit. The combination effect accounted for its vast round presence.
Moonlight lit the field. I sat on the sandy soil feeling the cold seeping in. I couldn’t move. We’d walked two more miles on the Sporle adventure, making our day’s total at least twenty-five miles – four of which had been utterly unnecessary. My feet were feeling it.
‘I forgot,’ said Paul. ‘I’ve got a present for you.’
He produced a plastic instrument that looked just like a spoon in the moonlight. Torchlight revealed a fork.
‘It’s a spork,’ he declared.
‘Brilliant.’
It really was.
For supper we ate hot porridge from plastic pots with our plastic sporks and joked about the parallels between the revelatory technology of Bronze-casting three thousand years back and our civilisation’s delight in plastic. The moon grew ever greater. At some time after two in the morning, partial eclipse would commence as the darkest form of earth shadow – the umbra – began to cross the moon. Soon after three, full eclipse would begin as that dark earth shadow entirely enveloped the moon. Earth’s atmosphere extended fifty miles into space and played with the sunlight beyond the shadow to cause the colouration that turned the moon to blood red.
We talked for a while in whispered tones under that pale globe of the effect that eclipses must have had in prehistory.
‘That’s why you needed to predict them,’ I said.
I told Paul the tale of how, many years ago, in a room in a small museum in the town of Antigua in Guatemala, I had gazed from beyond a glass wall at the folded sheets of a Mayan codex and how I had returned to that room day after day until I had copied out a single page of those archaic symbols that recounted the predicted dates and times when Venus would appear. Ancient societies invested heavily in seeking knowledge of the celestial world. We knew from such monuments as Stonehenge how much the late Neolithic people of Britain had valued and recognised the summer and winter solstices. Only a month or so ago, on my way back from South Uist, I had pulled off the motorway and taken lunch at the standing stone of Long Meg who stood by her stone circle of daughters. Long Meg had been raised specifically to mark the shortest day of the year – the exact moment that the sun sank into the Cumbrian hillside on the winter solstice.
We turned in to our tents. It had been one hell of a day. I tucked down into my sleeping bag and lay cocooned and gently warming. My feet ached. I closed my eyes. I thought how I was lying on a north-to-south axis with the moon rising steadily above my feet in the south and how in a few short hours that snowy white orb would turn to blood. I thought too of the poet John Clare. He had made an eighty-odd-mile walk from Epping Forest to his home village of Helpston in the Fens in the summer of 1841. Clare had kept a brief journal of that journey. He wrote of sleeping such that his head, like mine, lay to the north, while his body acted as ‘the steering point’ that told him which direction to walk the following morning as he made his way along the Great North road.7 Tomorrow, we too would walk north.
Though dog tired, I could not sleep. I turned and drew up plans for the future in my notebook then dozed and wondered if I shouldn’t try to stay awake to witness the celestial spectacle due to unfurl in some four hours’ time. Three a.m. was a forbidding hour. It was the witching hour. I thought about the walk tomorrow and sought sleep.
At 2.20 a.m. I was awoken by the need to wee. Outside the tent, the night was cold. The moon still lay to the south, blushed with grey shadow that was creeping into its north-western corner. It was the start of the eclipse. I could hear voices from what seemed a hundred yards or so away, back down the track of the Peddars Way that I thought must be those of farmers from nearby also out to witness the lunar eclipse. I returned for a glimpse of that blood-red moon at 3 a.m. The voices were still there. The lunar eclipse had turned much of the moon to liquid brown. A single band of light still poured from its southern edge. I shivered in the cold and stayed a moment more.
In the morning, Paul told how he had got up a few moments before me, and how he too had heard the voices.
‘Sort of over there?’ I said and gestured back across the hedge-line south.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed.
‘Hard to tell, but a hundred yards or so away?’
‘Yeah. Something like that.’
Who they were, we never knew. But in the broken, misty sunlight of morning as we supped hot tea and gazed over the map I realised Grange Farm was far further than I had imagined, a good half a mile away south. It was peculiar now I thought of it but even though I had distinctly heard those voices from over the field, I hadn’t been able to make out anything at all that they were saying, hadn’t actually caught a single word they had said. Neither had Paul.
We packed up and walked on. My rucksack seemed to have put on weight overnight. There would be no marching today. There were twenty-two more miles to Holme. My feet were a mess. A mass of blisters had arisen in the night. Both heels ached like hell. The lack of sleep wouldn’t help with the walk, nor would the lack of food. Breakfast was a bruised banana.
But the day was dry. For a hideous few hundred yards we both hobbled along until the pain in our feet had dulled down. The map had revealed we had camped at eighty-two metres – one of the high points of the Peddars Way. It was all downhill from here to the sea at Holme, we told ourselves. We passed the deserted medieval village of Great Palgrave with hardly a glance. Our path wove us off the arrow-line of the Roman Peddars Way that ran east over Hungry Hill but we eventually reached Castle Acre, stepping round the ford through the River Nar, and uphill to find coffee at The Ostrich.
‘Need this,’ Paul said.
Paul seemed to be doing better than me, though I could tell even he was finding the going hard. We drank our coffees and ordered more. I checked the book. We had twenty miles to go.
‘Mmm,’ I said.
Broken down into a pace of four miles per hour meant we would be there in time for tea on the beach. But there was absolutely no way we were going to manage four miles per hour today.
‘Say we go at three …’ I said, slowly working it out in my head. ‘Erm … then we would still be there before sunset.’
It was a straw to clutch at. We sat there on a bench sipping coffee with sunlight now breaking through. The physical effort of those thousands of footsteps really wasn’t appealing. I felt sick.
At a local shop, we loaded up on supplies and once more found our feet. The ancient road ran dead straight from here for the next seventeen miles or so. All we had to do was manage to walk it. I’d hatched a plan to dump the tents in a secluded hedge.
‘We can pick them up tomorrow on the way to Thetford.’
It made a difference. Something shifted from the seemingly impossible to the just feasible. We walked and we walked.
For much of that journey we walked in silence. I tucked back inside myself and started counting steps as I often did when walking alone. It was a form of ritualised practice that seemed to arise involuntarily. If a form of meditative process on better days, then today it was one of necessity that took me away from the present and the pain in my feet to a place just adjacent where I could cope and could walk the next step and the next and the next in a monotonous plod that would get me from here to Holme.
‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.’
I counted each footstep I took. Then I repeated the sequence and marked each count of eight on my fingers. When I had reached thirty sequences of eight, I began again.
It seemed the only way.
I thought of that oft-quoted Latin epigraph: solvitur ambulando.
It is solved by walking.
So on we walked – proceeding along that section of the Peddars Way marked on the map as a Processional Way.
There was a fresh breeze and clear, warm sunshine pouring from Magritte-clouded blue skies. The wonders and delights of that Norfolk countryside of rich, brown, ploughed or sheep-strewn fields passed us by on that glorious day so perfect for walking. Though the day was ideal for a stroll to the sea, I can only look back on those hours as a nightmare. Though I had planned and prepared for that walk of the Peddars Way for weeks and begun the walk with glee, much of it really wasn’t enjoyable. Some weeks on, I sat and talked it through with Paul in The King’s Head.
‘There was … like a siege mentality,’ he said. ‘It was a route march.’
‘I mean, I really thought we’d be fine with the mileage,’ I said.
‘I know,’ agreed Paul. ‘I did too. It wasn’t the distance. It was the route. It became a slog; an endless, straight march.’
They were my thoughts precisely.
The very nature of the Peddars Way was surely to blame – that arrow line that sliced through the soil; not meandering with the contours of the chalk hills and rises, the streams and rivers but tearing against the grain of the landscape. There was a brutality in imposing a route through the countryside that seemed to have somehow reverberated through time until we too felt the harshness of that unearthly imposition. In so many ways the Peddars Way symbolised and exemplified the division of two ways of living on the land. That pure clarity of constructing the shortest way from A to B that formed the rationale for the Roman road network contrasted so clearly with the ancient roads of Britain that already existed and that wove their way in sympathy with the landscape. Those green tracks were ‘winding ways’ and something in that motion made them far more congenial to walk. I returned to Edward Thomas’s The Icknield Way:
Probably these twists, besides being unconsciously adapted to the lie of the land, were, as they are still, easeful and pleasant to the rover who had some natural love of journeying. Why go straight? There is nothing at the end of any road better than may be found beside it, though there would be no travel did men believe it. The straight road, except over level and open country, can only be made by those in whom extreme haste and forethought have destroyed the power of joy …8
While the pathways of the pagan folk of Britain – villagers, people of the earth, of nature – flowed through the land, the roads of the Romans – urban, city-dwellers, people of commerce – tore through the land, especially if those lands were foreign, merely wild wildernesses at the edge of empire. In the very roads they travelled, so the ancient British mindset could be told apart from that of the Roman.
It was only weeks later, too, that I realised how our imaginary game of being two sons of the Amesbury Archer – British-born Early Bronze Agers – would only ever have worked on the gently meandering ancient path of the chalk ridgeways. On the Peddars Way, we were not Bronze Age master archers, born to the bright, new Beaker people and bringing our wondrous bronze-cast wares to the folk of Seahenge who ran the boats across the Wash. Not at all. If we had been anyone from the ancient past, we had to have been Roman soldiers – milites extracted from some distant home, some distant realm of the empire to march through these Iceni heartlands in order to maim and murder all before us. We would have been Roman soldiers sent to put right the apparent wrong that Boudicca and her Iron Age warriors had done to the Roman cities of southern Britain. Solvitor ambulando took on new meaning. The re-organised military might of Roman Britain would have walked north along the Peddars Way to solve the problem of the Iceni and their allies for ever more. And so if we were to have been any ancient figures walking that roadway in some imaginary game, we would be Romans on a march of bloody revenge for Boudicca’s Revolt. It was rather a shocking realisation when it finally came and yet in some strange way it explained much.
We walked on. At some point on that seemingly endless straight drive we rested beside a copse of trees and I lay and stared up through the bare branches of a stag head oak to the blue sky. Before us, pock-marking the fields of grazing sheep, were the tumuli of Bronze Age burial mounds. From the map, I saw we were at Harpley Common. The tumuli lay all about us – round circles lifted from the land to hold the bones of some ancient beloved souls lost to death.
‘That’s a wayfaring tree,’ said Paul.
I looked over. Paul was looking to a shrub behind us.
‘Viburnum lantana.’
‘Nice.’
I smiled and we laughed.
‘Odd that it’s here,’ said Paul. ‘They come from southern Europe. Imports.’
So we mused a moment if some Roman hadn’t brought a seed upon his boot two thousand years before and that here before us was the sole surviving shrub from generation after generation of wayfaring trees that had grown up here beside the Peddars Way. We laughed again, a little deliriously. We were both killing time before we had to rise and take the pain of stepping forward once more. It felt so good to stop walking but that delicious sense of ease was tainted with the knowledge that we must soon walk on again.
I had already checked the book. There were still thirteen miles to go.
We turned in to ourselves for the next few miles once more. I counted steps obsessively and mindlessly, tallying the hundreds on my fingers and tossing them to the wind and starting again; footstep after footstep along that brutal pathway as on we went through the monotonous fieldscapes on our ever-fixed mark. We stepped past ancient villages: Anmer to the west, then Fring to the east. Then we inched up a vicious incline to Dovehill Wood. Close to Sedgeford, I thought of the hundreds of prehistoric torcs that had been found in the nearby fields – each forged of twisted cables of gold and silver to be worn about the neck. Many, many moons ago, I had spent a week on an archaeological dig there in Sedgeford, passing my days in a Saxon burial pit, scraping mud from the bones of the long dead, before carefully prising each bone from the soil for reasons I could not fathom. One day, I had stepped up and out from the pit and had been stopped stone dead by the sight of an amber Saxon bead sat upon the surface of a trampled patch of earth.
I turned my neck west towards Sedgeford but walked on north. There was no time for treasure hunting today.
‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,’ I counted steadily in my head.
At Ringstead, we stepped from the soil track to the tarmacked streets. My feet screamed. Yet there was now a sense of so nearly being there. Through the village, a fingerpost pointed us round a field and declared a single mile to Holme. We walked west a while. The low sun flickered in my face, scattering through autumn leaves. It was done. Even if I fell here, it was downhill. I could roll.
We laughed again and emerged through a thicket on to the coast road. The beach and the sea were straight ahead. So was the site where Seahenge had stood four thousand years before.
‘Do you want to go on?’ asked Paul.
He knew my answer.
‘It’s not there, is it?’ I said.
So we wove off east instead, along a lane that led us past wild, unkempt hedges and flint-walled houses until we reached a red sign on a white-washed wall that said The White Horse. And the front door tinkled as it opened before us and we stumbled in with our rucksacks still upon our backs and, though heads turned, we smiled and laughed. And there was fresh beer on tap and lamb shank on the menu.
And on the wall above the fireplace was a large picture frame that held a black and white photograph of Seahenge whose shrunken oak pillars were still being washed by the waters of the North Sea.