Walking home into the sunset. Cambridge to Warwickshire.

Day 1 28/6/24

Melancholy meanders

I cried a lot today. I cried for feeling lonely, I cried for sending the email to quit my PhD, I cried packing, and I cried at everything that was ending. College didn’t let me park so I had to park on the street for a mad price and wrestle with an app and I got a parking ticket because the app didn’t work which made me cry  more (Hoping to successfully challenge it). No grand fairwell, just a huffing drag of my stuff to the car, and a rush to get away before the parking man came.

I had a lovely tea and chat with Ruairidh, who’s kindly let me leave stuff in his house (after I had sat in my car crying and wondering if I should just drive off).  I felt so much more human after talking. Though, I cried some more parking at enniskillen, but I had to do a double drive after leaving my stuff and Buck turned up which was lovely and heart-raising  to see him, get water and heat up some food (the easy solution to a lot of emotional problems!).

I said a proper fair well then put on my bag and set off walking west. I waved at Russel though he didn’t see me. I walked past Pembroke boat club.  I got bubble tea in town (discovered it is very nice yesterday) and said farewell to Kings parade while sipping it. Setting off from my compass, pointing due west (the direction of home). I ambled past the UL, West hub (through the new landscaping that speaks to a university flourishing as I depart), and made it to the M11- reality checkpoint?

I had promised Ben and others that I’d ’get as far as Coton’. I sat on a sunny bench in the village and rested my legs and left a note in the pretty church. I wandered west on the firing range track I had once explored in first year, when I was so fresh and so alone. This time, I am so rich and full of love for far more people than I could have ever imagined.

As the light deepened to gold at half eight I sat at the peak of a rise,  took out some dinner (half defrosted veg slop pulled from the freezer) and looked back. The four spires of Kings College spiked the horizon in an ancient sight, sat beside, and equally tall as the blocky UL tower. Four churches, Parker’s Piece ferris wheel and the chimneys of the science park. Pembroke is buried from view. The field beside me has turned gold, but the sights in the distance are all bathed in a blue film, as if -looking through that depth of air- I am looking through a veil to an unknowable place.

The sun is warm on my back, and the clouds are frozen in the sky. Not even a breeze disturbs the perfectness of this moment. The birds twit here and then, and the bugs are few. The last four years have been so perfect, I would have thought too perfect, for I would never have imagined such delights and wonders could be granted to me. It seems inevitable that nothing could live up to what has passed, and I steel myself for the return of the feeling of lack, and doubt, that will surly come. But some of those discovered feeling of happinesses -delight- will surely persist (more so I think if I had committed to New Zealand but Ambition is a fickle desire I have not cut out, and I’ll follow her whispers for a bit). How wonderful it will be to carry the friends I have made here into our futures, if they will have me (and it seems, I dare to believe, that they might!) and help them in what is to come, and maybe be helped. Pembroke will remain, and I will return. It won’t be mine in the way it has, but now and again, I may be welcome. How wonderful it is to be welcomed.

Day 2. 29/6/24

High sun and drifting thoughts

I found a perfect spot in woods a bit further from my dinner site to camp, surrounded from view by bushes. Foxes and birds call through the night.

The morning was a delight, walking west between bramble headgrows full of blossom and twittering. The blue sky overhead streaked with contrails and gently rolling hills spread out views of field and woods.

I followed my shadow, slowly shortening as the day warmed.

Day 3. 30/6/24

Time to stop and stare

Yesterday’s walk was far from joyful, I was foot sore by mid morning, which only wore worse through the day. It has been so long since I did any exercise longer than a twenty minute run. Hot and sticky and whirring brain. The path refused to run straight west requiring many meanders north and south, with a few successful trespasses on route to join paths. I stopped in St Neots after five, sore and weary,  the cafes were closed so I visited a pub terrace for lemonade. I listened in on gossip of lives I would never lead, and watching the swans on the river. Then plodding on concrete westward.

My camping site was less pleasant but completely satisfactory. A dark and bushy wood, camping on a patch that would be bog outside of summer, but pleasant enough with a mossy bed at this time of year. I lay, sticky, listening to the fox bark, and letting the pulsing ache of my uncalloused feet slowly fade through as the night darkened.

This morning I slept till 7:30 then rushed to pack, heading off on empty agricultural tracks feeling lonesome.

But at breakfast stop, hiding under a maple beside the converted ruins of a priory, I found myself merging reflections on the medieval nuns with the speeches of  Lord Chris Smith the master. ‘You are not here to learn to be smart, you’re already smart, you are here to learn to be kind.’ May someone’s god bless that lovely man, and his touching speeches (I suppose he has been blessed being a Lord and master and all). I’m sad I never properly talked with the master during my time. So many things I wish I had done. But what I did manage in that time was beyond my dreams, and though still immensely selfish, I think, by discovering beautiful friendships, I have learnt to share a bit more, learnt to forgive a bit more, learnt to be kind a bit more - I have been so blessed, so, though there are many things besides I wish I did,  I am content.

From when I was young I have been impatient. Cycling the Mawdach trail I would stare ahead willing the distant trees closer. I would lie wriggling in bed begging the night to pass quicker. At work I would go mad as the minutes failed to pass on my shift. (Really until uni- See Covid poem *).

(* 2020 vision

The gutters fill with rain.

The pebbles roll unheard on

unwatched beaches

last walked on by an idle man.

Who thought the world would come to this?

The cashiers, bleary eyed, serve

late night customers,

eye on the digital clock.

It moves one number on.

The sky is low.

Everything waits

Time will not move past this night.

Unless I switch off the bedside light

Yet lying, in the near dark,

unsleep, I fear my wandering mind

Listing - demands and plans

Urgently and unrelenting

Too tired to read under the light

Too tied up to let my body sleep

It is quiet, in a shaking silence

I have on rage

And I am tired and I am sad

As if I have lost some part of me

And am not whole.

Wishing for something to BE

Or for empty sleep

To bring the grey dawn)

But these years have helped learn patience. It wasn’t exams that were hard for me, but the revising for them. During exam term I would sit at my nest in the library staring and staring. Each task crawling by and find myself staring out the iron window with minutes gone by. I watched so many people relaxing and gossiping and crying on the Arch & Anth lawn, unknown that a quiet companion felt for them from far above. It took will to force myself to work, over and over and over writing and referencing writing and referencing. Exam terms took me passed caring for a lot of things. 8am to 10pm at my desk -my nest- in the Earth library for a month and a half. I was the first in each day and most often the last out too. After that, mindlessness feels like a treat. It is easier to see that the moments to stare and let the mind go blank are a luxury, not a waste of life.

I recite to the rhythm of the walk.

‘What is life if full of cares

We have no time to stop and stare

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows

No time to see when woods we pass

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass…’

Walking needs a similar sort of will as revising - every step feels uselessly inconsequential and yet you travel. It was a driven will that I saw in so many, perhaps in all, of the students in Cambridge that makes it so special. At home I felt (wrongly of course, and yet) that so many drift through life and I was disillusioned with dull hopelessness. But in Cambridge I was surrounded by people, loud and quiet, charismatic and dull, but all with an internal drive that I fall in love with. The density of young people like that- it was magnificent. They are people who will push themself through step after step because the destination is worth reaching.

Today is cooler. Clouds coat the sky and a wind brings up the hairs of my arms. The light brings out a rich green in the young wheat and I think on May week. It was an incomparable delight. What a silly frivolous wander it is to celebrate with nothing to care for but joy and your friends. Working the night at Trinity, I felt I had more than a party myself. It was delightful to work with the cheese people dredging up memories of my Saturday job in Stratford. The music in that tent was spectacular, beautiful accapela and jazz. The fireworks took my breath away. Working Peterhouse was more exhausting but so precious to me for completely different reasons, reasons that have twisted up my brain in a happy confused mess.

Pembroke May Ball was fantastic too. I had decided to pay to go just for my friends, but had a lovely time to. I finished sewing my dress that afternoon and was still stitching up the hem in the queue. It was a wonderfully simple dress, the idea copied from a photo of a dress on Pinterest, and made with glimmering sheer fabric I had bought last year in Penrith. The fibres were red in the warp and blue in the weft, so the colour changed as the fabric shifted. I wore it over my skin coloured slippery shift, so it was slightly daring perhaps but modest enough for me. I succeeded in my project to eat every type of food, and laughed  on the swings and bumper carts with friends, though my laugh became an uncertain quiet when I lost my words to a brave comment in the evening. I had such a delight filled week with many other wanders besides - not least celebrating Flamingo party on Sheep’s Green (rebranded as Toucan or 2can or 2flamin2go).

Ah praise be to picnics on the banks of the Cam, to night walks, to frolliicking with flowers in your hair and to wakening in the afternoon. To plain joy and laughter and hugs. To goodbyes. And the uncertain stillness after.

The rest of the day was tough. My feet started to hurt severely - turned pathetically soft by sitting. And by late afternoon I was taking breaks every km to rest my feet. I turned up at a village (Bozeat) I’d been aiming for hunting for a pub to fill up water, sat down for some tea -  a fantastically friendly rowdy place - just in time to see two consecutive England goals against Slovakia with ten minutes left of extra time (presumably they were waiting for my arrival to bring back the win).

Day 5 1/7/24

Across County bounds

I struggled to find a campspot last night but eventually found an excellent site, my favourite yet, on a heath between bushes after marching at sunset - feeling like an empowered harvest god - through wheat fields where the footpath had overgrown and beating down the brambles and needles that clogged the paths. It was lovely camping open to the sky - the light brighter and crisper than the shade of the woods. More foxes through the night- lovely country foxes have been this journeys mascot. I saw a fantastically cute young one while trying to find a spot last night.

The morning was bird filled and bright, and I headed off. A faerie path led me into the woods - not the sort that is pretty, the sort you strongly suspect is not taking you where you mean to go, but follow anyway as there seems no other way.

A slow long painful plod, with a tea break, finally took me into Northampton by mid afternoon. The town  was nicer than I’d expected but worse than I’d hoped.

Then -shock and horror - (if anyone who happens to be reading this, feel free to be disgraced at me) I took a bus from Northampton to Daventry.  I personally  havnt  the slightest  qualms about

‘cheating’ the journey (skipping half and a bit of a days walk), and frankly I’m a bit bored. If this journey is symbolic it’s the start and the end that matter. The rest is, well, filler. Besides, I love buses - in unfamiliar rural places. Trains get so much love and buses are so unreliable (as the Northampton ones proved), but I’ve made friends in ten minutes with so many wonderful old ladies on buses when armed with hiking kit across my walks. All interested in what I’m up to, but all with far more interesting stories to tell themselves. The queen of all being the fantastic conspiracy theory lady at the start of Scotnatrail. People are formal on trains and normal on buses. There is safety and comfort in formality, but there is wonder and obsurdity in normality.

On the bus onto Charwelton I met a lovely old lady with purple dyed hair and eye shadow. I think back to the poem I learnt by heart in Year 5 speech classes

‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter…’

I began my walk again at 18:00. Somewhere between Northampton and here the landscape became my own- Warwickshire’s landscapes (though I’m technically in Northamptonshire still). A the slow rise  in  Cambridgeshire had developed into a gentle roll and become a true rolling landscape where each field curved and fell. The landscape that my soul seems to know. I left behind the music of Cambridge - it’s white towers and wonderful people, but I return to the music of the land: small fields and singing birds and crying sheep, folded up into packages of meadow and hedge. I sing the words in my mind aloud as I walk. Lovely and poetic and all but you do have to walk up the bloody hills not just to think about them.

I keep checking the map in anticipation of the county bound. The sky is grey and the air damp and filled with pollen as I walk along a hills brough. Happy skip as I enter Warwickshire and not long after a fantastic view roles out before me as I head down through flower filled meadow to Priors Marston - the names on the map are quite suddenly all names I know. The rumoured places at the outer edge of my world. And the horizon of long flat topped hills familiar.

Evening highlights include a lovely garden with standing stones and a giant chair in a sheep field.

This walk has been particularly unique, not just for its symbolic nature, but also for the fact it is my most unplanned walk. I only solidily decided to do it at 1am the night before I set off,  without a plan except a destination that may or may not be reached - ‘I’ll get to Coton’. I have enjoyed walking in unpopular areas on unpopular paths, not following a waymarked trail. I have enjoyed the freedom this gives for wild camping, the first time I have felt so fearless wild camping in England. When I started long distance walking I read the guide book twice in advance, copied the route in two different ways, planned every stop, phoned every campsite. It is a great progress to me to be able to go nearly unplanned these days - a growth in confidence and boldness.

Day 6. 2/7/24

Pathmaking , hellscapes, and hope

After dinner in a pleasant but uncomfortably human spot in a newly developing woodland I searched in the older woodland nearby for a camp spot but was discontented by the well trodden paths in silent crunchy woods. More deeply disturbing was happening across a full blown (metaphorically) shining missile, set up like a statue in a clearing in the woods, larger than two men and as wide as an arm span.  I was too unsettled to pause to look closer but decided it was this woods or non, so set up camp and tried to keep my mind on inconsequential thoughts. (Listening to a podcast that day about a bird man monster in Cornish woods at dusk had not helped this disquiet).

Leaving the murderous woods, today’s dawn is cool breezy and grey - a less happy grey and threatening rain.

The morning required a lot of pathmaking in long meadows. In a field where no one has walked you stomp determinedly through the wheat or grass - as a Harvest Spirit  (or as Theresa May?). But more delightful is a field where only one has walked. Following the shadow of someone in the silver of downturned grass - it is easier to follow their wake than set out anew-and deepening the trail for those who come behind. Is that not what I do in this life, try and stick to the path of those before me, try and make it easier to those behind.

I was walking through fields and the thick gloom of an overgrown public access track when all of a sudden I came out on a hellscape. Hundreds of yellow trucks crawled along on massive wheels, and the land had been thrown up into high mountains of brown and clawed out into deep pits. All the way to the left and the right as far as I could see the turmoil stretched. Nothing of this was marked on the map - or even google satellite- I checked from one to the other to the sight before me as  if what I was seeing with my eyes was a lie that would disappear in the face of the Ordinance Survey’s facts. It did not. The yellow carapaced trucks trundled on, their lights blinking slowly, out of synch.

But not one to let a hellscape stop me, or my right of way,  I decided to head straight for it - feeling like an ant as I wandered up the giant tracks up mountains of raw earth. When I reached the top of a massive rise a bunch of bright orange workers jumped out their vehicles to wave me down shocked to find a tiny woman with a massive bag on their construction site. Soon I was being driven in a jeep by a man with a Welsh accent who was persuadable to kindly drop me at the other side of the construction site where my path ought to be. I think i left behind a lot of confused men and a lot of paperwork. sadly I recon they’ll close the path proper now. Turns out it’s HS2. I’d no idea they were still building it and no wonder people protested at such a hideous scar.

On the other side someone had indeed thought to block of the way requiring an amount of crawling though hedges to bypass the fences.

Plodding along I eventually see the hill fort of burton dasset -   I have a very significant memory of a beautiful  post-A-level day there- I came alone, doing nothing inparticular except feeling extraordinarily independent and free.

After an age I reach the edge of Wellesbourne with feet burning in pain and plop down yet again. At that time the sun breaks out and the clouds clear from the sky leaving a bright blue over the dry fields.

(* be warned, if it hasn’t already, it’s about to get deeply self reflective in a self pitying sort of way, I promised this was my mostly unfiltered thoughts after all*)

I hobble through to Charlecotte Park and flop in its long grass, deeply moved by memory. I think most in particular of the picnic I had with mum here, the afternoon after my final further maths A Level- the day at which all the onerous decade - school years, school tears- was finally over and the future became possible. What a beautiful future it has been, how forever greatful I am to the girl who pushed through. Those mental strifes have faded over these years, and the pushing on has become so rewarding these days. When I think back I think perhaps that these days it’s worth taking some breaks from the pushing, the young Lucy did that, it’s worth pausing to appreciate. (My sore feet are influencing this train of thought, crying dearly for prolonging the break- tough love painful feet, we need to get up agoing)

I survive the road of death from Charlecotte (I don’t know how the council gets away with no footpaths anywhere near this area - so many cars and buses passeing within less than half a meter at incredible speeds - I fear they will wait till someone is actually killed before doing anything). And then I’m at the river walk. I wrote down a song here, when I walked at the start of October 2020, two weeks before I was twenty, a few days before I left for university. an ungrateful and self pitying song trying to answer the question, what is a parting when you know you will return? The Haikus I wrote in Lent term of first year (that terrible time of COVID’s resurgence) are filled with the same

empty melancholy.

‘The grey evening asks

Is it enough to be kind?

When they are alone. ‘

‘Today I made six

Cups of tea, with milk powder.

I wish I could hug you.’

‘Melancholy fens

I left all I knew, for this

At least your stars are bright’

‘I cannot focus

More leaves fall from the plane trees

There is too much loss’

‘Alone on the hills,

I sing with the birds, but here

The walls are too thin.’

‘How many hours I spend

Watching the leaves fall from these trees

And yet, I am alive.’

‘Friend, why do you ask

How the weather is down here?

The storms inside me’

In those years, and persisting through the quiet and odd start of university, I tied my love to my home, because I knew no other thing to love. I always like Neil Gaimans poem

‘I don’t think that I’ve been in love as such,Although I liked a few folk pretty well.Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch.For brave men died and empires rose and fellFor love, girls follow boys to foreign lands.And men have followed women into hell.

In plays and poems someone understands,There’s something makes us more than blood and bone,And more than biological demands.For me love’s like the wind unseen, unknown.I see the trees are bending where it’s been.I know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blown.I really don’t know what I love you means.I think it means don’t leave me here alone.’

The word remains strange and abstract to me, but now, I know what joy is, and I know delight, and the stars are not just pretty for their remoteness, but for the knowledge that others can see them with me. and I know how it feels to see a friend smile because of something you did, and there are some people in the world that I know I would be there for, if they ever need me to be,  and that is love I think. It is fun to write about, but these days I think that it all seems less important - these deep and profound things - when you can sit with a friend and cook dinner and annoy each other and laugh at it, go home and sleep and know there may well be another day like that.

It is the end of this little journey and I am walking Swiften Bank again. The way is different to the one I left back then, and to the one I have seen since.

After all,

You can never tread in the same river twice.

I made it. I think, as I sit on the shower floor sipping my tea. In these four years  I have achieved all the dreams I longed for. Two degree certificates in my suitcase, discovered the science I care for and wish to pursue. Found a purpose to my hope to work on something important. I have made true deep friendships with groups of fabulous and diverse people. Had discussions that have touched and emptied the secrets of my soul. In caving I  have found the answer to my longing for  adventure and a culture of wholesome wild and grounded people. In Pembroke I had four years of beauty, humanity, and peace. I do not know what I’ll do next. Beyond the knowledge that climate science or hydrology is the right path the rest of the future is unknown and unplanned.

Like this walk, I hope that my attempt to be brave enough to face my future without every pace planned brings the reward that can only be found in the unexpected.

I suspect, in the end, it won’t be that deep. Life rarely is!