Something…Borrowed

Inspirations

It is probably a good moment to explain why this blog is here and what it will – in several months’ time – be recording. I’ve already mentioned my planned “Big Walk”, although it won’t be too big, and it won’t be a rough trek, without any further comment.

Inspirations for this exercise come from many sources. I blame my grandmother for one: when I was just 15 she passed on to me her battered copy of George Borrow’s “Wild Wales”. I started reading and then couldn’t put it down. It’s Borrow’s chronicle of a series of pedestrian tours in Wales undertaken in 1854, landscape description coloured with social and cultural insights. Borrow displays a snobbish pedantry at times, but if you can see around that it is a fascinating book. Ten or so years on from the grandmotherly gift I picked it up again, and went on to read Borrow’s other works.

More recent influences include John Hillaby’s “Journey Through Britain”, one of a clutch of “journey Through” books by another great British pedestrian. Published in 1968 it describes a walking journey from Lands End to John O’ Groats, almost entirely on footpaths and bridleways, once again with some deeper insights into the country as it was.

There are more, but you can see where this is heading. If they can do it, why not me? And not for me – or them – the predefined trek or National Trail, let’s find our own way. The idea has been with me for some time, held back for many years by the constraints of earning a living…

A44

It has been an important part of the idea that this journey should start from my front door, almost as if I were off to the shops – and didn’t come back for a couple of weeks. You have seen in earlier posts that I only need to walk for ten minutes to escape the urban sprawl, which is a privilege in London, and once I have left it behind, any destination could be my guide.

Then there is a nerdish fascination with one of Britain’s main roads. Yep – you read that right! It’s hard to feel any romance for the M25 or the M1, big sections of the evocative roads to Scotland have been turned into boring four- and six-lane highways. Then comes the A44. With only a minor tweak to its classification at the start it survives pretty much as it was first conceived in the 1920s. It runs from Oxford over the Cotswolds, through Worcestershire and the more hidden parts of Herefordshire, and across mid-Wales, through nowhere in particular, to reach the coast at Aberystwyth. Add on a traverse of the Chilterns to reach its start and you have quite a scenic and varied – and challenging – route. Take away the road and trace the general direction, Hillaby-style, on footpaths, and you have a route which no National Trail follows, and which so far I have not found documented anywhere.

Now – plan a trip which eschews rough camping (never my favourite activity) and adds enough budget to stay overnight in small hotels and guesthouses, and there is suddenly the chance to meet people and to make the journey more than just a long stepcount.

And so far – that is how it looks.