'Camping in an abandoned quarry on the second night, the bats flew overhead and the sound bounced off the rock walls of our bedroom quarters', writes JOHN BUTLER
DRIVING ACROSS THE Severn Bridge the sun was shining, but my expectations were modest enough. We were only going walking, after all, and I never wanted to go to Wales in the first place. I know people who have been to Asia, scaled Macchu Pichu and Everest Base Camp. That’s living. Those are real notches on the bedpost. Wales, however . . . There was something conservative and old-before-its-time about our trip. We passed the exit sign for Bristol, and I wished we were sourcing yaks in Nepal, haggling with locals over the price of alpaca fur. Wasn’t Wales just hills and rain, mediocre food and unremarkable pubs; wasn’t it Ireland-with-coal? We had been talking up this trip for months, batting around all sorts of possibilities throughout our Monday planning meetings that would descend into chaos over the second bottle of red. For reasons of budget (and because two-thirds of us knew nothing about this country called England which apparently surrounded the town of London in which we lived) the walk was definitely to be within the UK. Still, the desire to trick out our itinerary just wouldn’t quit, at least not for me.
The more wine we threw at the problem, the more I wanted to involve sleeper trains and St Bernard dogs with miniature kegs of brandy swinging from their jowly necks. Couldn’t we at least go to the Highlands, the Fens or the Moors – some terrain with a cool name you couldn’t get at home? Wales. Apart from peering out of a plane window after the seatbelt sign had gone off, I had got a look at that place before. Our clutch had burnt out en route from Holyhead to Anfield many years before, and we had been towed all the way to Liverpool by the Jones Brothers of Rhyl, each of whom combined casual sexism with truthiness about cars.
“Never let a woman drive your car. She’ll sit on the clutch while she’s waiting for the lights to turn green, and before you know it you’ll be packed into the cab of a pick-up truck in the middle of Wales listening to us blather on . . . ho-ho.” The sleet whipped the windscreen, and I glimpsed caravan parks and shopping centres on roundabouts.
Morning one of the walk, the musical output of The Alarm, and a degree of trepidation hung in the gloaming as we tried to fry bacon with a portion of olive oil brought along in a tiny film canister – not that we wouldn’t be able for the three-day ramble and two-night camp-out, but more that it would be . . . I don’t know, crap? We were feeling a little dusty, as the Australians say, and sleep the night before had been intermittent and punctuated by frequent visits to outdoor toilets dominated by muscular Welsh spiders (damn those ill-advised cans of Grolsch down by the sea, damn that flat ale in the pub). After we packed up, everything was on our backs and we began walking.
Let’s be clear. The first few hours were an utter grind, as we tramped up and down a coastline that had yet to reveal anything we hadn’t seen many times before. I am far too mature for sulking, but there was a pungent silence as I fell in behind the other walkers. At every turn I was reminded of Larry David’s response to the offer of a tour of a friend’s house. “There’s going to be bedrooms and more bathrooms. I get it.” I got the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path. It was Howth Head, the Burren, Donegal.
But as with art and people, once you "get" the surface of a place, more is revealed deeper within it. The walking acquired an internal rhythm as we listened to iPods, and moments became beautiful and unique. Watching a catch come in to the pier of a tiny village and a sheepdog barking at terrified lobsters, I found myself listening to Stoned Out of My Mindby the Chi-Lites. Cooling off after four hours in the searing heat with a swim on a huge abandoned beach, I heard Hebden Bridge by Kíla.
Sunbathing seals on the rocks hundreds of feet below and Return to Senderby Elvis. I guess that's why they call it random. Camping in an abandoned quarry on the second night, the bats flew overhead and the sound bounced off the rock walls of our bedroom quarters. None of these animals are gazelles or eagles and each small thing is fairly unremarkable on its own, but they did add up to something a little greater.
The coastal path becomes more dramatic the farther along it you go. On the last afternoon we stopped at a cliff-top bothy, with fields of gorse behind us and kayakers in the bay down below. The view was devastating, and it was so good to release tired feet from their boots and rest them on soft mossy grass. We pitched our tents on the grass verge bank between the bothy and the cliff-face, and after a decadent golden sunset, which hung briefly over the east coast of Ireland before plunging us into darkness, we cooked by candlelight, then fixed hot whiskeys before turning in.
It’s not where you go but how you feel once you get there. Lying on soft ground on a night that was warm enough for the tent flap to be pinned back, and watching the lighthouse play a beam across the sheer cliff-face, it all started to make sense. You could hear nothing but the odd bark of a seal, and the stars were bright, an occasional plane banking across them, and hundreds of seat-belt signs within, presumably lighting up for Dublin. And then the mind began to wander, because it is only human. That plane is not landing in Dublin – it’s too high and too large. Maybe it’s going to Mexico. Or Brazil. Wouldn’t it be great to go walking in South America?