Gone: Mile Oak to Boundary Road

So is that it? Well, not quite. Read the header – I’m walking to Brighton Pier. The final part will be in the future but I did slip in an extra walk in that direction. I try and do some kind of cardio exercise every day, which often consists of energetic stepping on to a raised platform with weights strapped on to me. Sometimes I walk outdoors instead and, with the sun shining on the street I was brought up in, I decided to do one more walk and at the same time get my daily exercise.

Years ago I walked to school every day, a two-valley affair which took about 40 minutes. (Thus I saved my bus fare to buy comics, fuelling the mind you are now seeing evidence of.) I replicated this walk, following the Drove Road route that as the name implies was once used for moving sheep and cattle. Having ‘Walked Home’ ™ I now walked past an Emmaus Community, temporary home for some folks who have nowhere else – and a great secondhand shop.

I walked down through what used to be a golf course and is now a park at the back of a Sainsbury’s, past the newsagents where I got the first Captain Britain comic with the free mask. Over to the windmill that gives Blatchington Mill its name, and which used to feature on my school blazer and the cap that only ever got worn on the first day.

There will probably be a school reunion in 2015 but this was not that year so I walked down Holmes Avenue, just like I did when I used to go to get the bus. From there I turned into Elm Drive and then Rowan Avenue, the first street I remember living in. The prescribed cardio minutes achieved, I stopped to look in the yellow-cellophane window of a Christian bookshop in a small parade of shops hallway up the street. There was a print of a child in a red jumper, bathed in light. When asked recently if I had ever had any spiritual experiences, my equivocal answer referred to a memory of being taken to a small park in my pram, here on this street, looking up at the clouds and feeling a vast sense of meaning. Looking for this park, I found a small twitten right where I remembered it. I walked down it and found myself in the back of the huge Hove cemetery. This was quite a shock – could the cemetery have grown so much that it had absorbed my remembered park? Well, logically it could have done I supposed – many have died in the last 45 years. Somewhat cast down I carried on up Rowan Avenue. Soon I found another twitten, which did actually lead to the park I remembered. I was not transported by numinous light, but I did see a pretty mosaic with a heart motif, and another heart, broken in some sad but homely graffiti.

And walked up past our old house, now the headquarters of a landscape gardening operation called The Grass is Greener. And on, turning down Hangleton Road Road, leaving a hundred stories behind and seeing again the view that is for me worth a thousand Golden Valleys, Boundary Road and the sea.

I walked on down, crossing under the railway and running up the steps which my dad had run up with full pack on return from National Service.

Boundary Road (which also goes by the name of Station Road) seems to be both thriving and run-down, a mixture of decades-old family businesses, ethnic groceries, amusement arcades, pet shops, hairdressers and cafes frequently punctuated with charity shops. A Tesco squats in the middle, like the castle of a benign-seeming overlord. Murder, art, buying and selling, drunken-ness and poetry have happened here. I remember many things in this road – from the long-gone Bistro Edward restaurant to a Corgi toys sticker that stayed in the window of a shop for years after it closed. I could give a tour of the absent and erased. If I had substantial resources for art-like capers and fewer commitments, I would live here for a year and a day, never leaving the boundaries of Boundary Road, documenting every shop and cafe and becoming its Robinson Crusoe – but that’s all for another time, or for never.

I will return here to start the final leg of this walk. For now I went to Sami Swoi and had an espresso while I waited for the bus. It was dark in the little restaurant and that coffee was bitter, hot and strong.

Read Full Post »

Downsman Found: Bramber to Mile Oak

The Old Tollgate is a hearty place to eat, a bit like the house in Chaucer that ‘snows pies’ – but the early breakfast is limited to cold choices with no sign of a boiled beverage. Two of us, strangers to each other, ate in silence. Then I was away in the dawn light, walking a few yards down The Street to pick up the Downs Link.

Seven swans flew across the path. Soon I was crossing the Adur again, with views of Lancing College, the Shoreham flyover and the cement works with its nearby terrace of workers’ houses – all familiar sights.

I picked up the South Downs Way. I had thought I would be on this for a long time but in the end the way I have come involved less than a mile. I hiked uphill on to the Downs, revelling in the fact that I can do this now without breathlessness or pain. The ground was chalky and there was a thin white mist over everything. The seams of my hands were white in the raw weather – it was as if everything was turning to chalk.

I followed the gently curving path, across a valley and up to the line of the hill that would take me home.

Pointed due south I climbed Thundersbarrow Hill. This hill was part of an Iron age settlement, excavated back in the 1930s. ‘Thunder’ could be Thunor, the Saxon Thor. With respect for whatever long-ago person or localised god resided there, I sat on top of the barrow, looking along the coast from Brighton to Worthing – a stretch containing half of my history. I drank some of the Hophead left over from yesterday and poured the rest into the ground as tribute.

Then I walked on down into Southwick Hill. Nearly a year ago, as the implications of my atherosclerosis diagnosis and impending bypass operation sank in, I had looked at the end of this walk from the other side of a big scary thing which, conceivably, would be the death of me. What would then happen? I conceived the idea that I would project myself at least this far, if only in some kind of conceptual form, and wrote a poem based on this idea: ‘I am a Downsman Lost‘. People liked it, which led to much subsequent writing and Bypass Pilgrim. And now here I was in the location I had mythologised – early on a Saturday morning with the voices of dog-walkers drifting through the sea mist.

Walking on past the gorse bushes I picked up the line of the pylons and headed from home with many miles and 25 years of living elsewhere behind me. Down past where the Industrial School used to be, down past the rounders field where we all came out to watch the demolition of Shoreham B Power Station. The last yards, totally familiar, totally new. My parents had said they would leave the back gate open, and they had.

Read Full Post »

Transitive link: Christ’s Hospital to Bramber

I stayed the night in Horsham, a chilly experience – arriving in the dark, walking around wearing every layer I had with me to find the Malt Shovel, which turned out to be as nice a pub as I have ever been to. I had a pint of Surrey Pilgrim, figuring that I had earned it by walking through that county to arrive here in Sussex.

In the morning I took a 3-minute train ride to get back to Christ’s Hospital, where I had left off. I easily found the Downs Link path and started walking along the broad curves of the disused railway line. Through the trees, watery edges of fields gleamed beneath a bright grey sky. (When did this perpetual wetness become normal? In old films as map sometimes burns: these days would we see water soaking in from the margins? )

As I approached Southwater, I glimpsed the line of the South Downs for the first time on this walk. Like crossing the border into Sussex, this was a milestone and, briefly, by some gatepost next to an empty field I stood quietly weeping. Then walked on through the village, virtually deserted on a cold Friday morning.

More miles of Downs Link led to the disused West Grinstead station, complete with railway carriage – like a scene from The Station Agent. I had a second breakfast of tea and toast in a cafe by the A272 (the road that ‘represents England‘).

It became brighter, the Downs more visible now as I walked on. At Partridge Green I decided to walk to the Dark Star Brewery, tucked away in an industrial estate on the edge of the village. I had a vague idea that it was possible to visit, having read the Ormskirk Baron’s account of his trip there last year. There was indeed a nice little shop, where I was well looked after by James and colleagues. I had a taster of their Partridge beer, named for the place where we stood, to absorb as much localness as possible. (This was lovely and I was suddenly nailed to the spot by a sense of summer.) I bought a 2-pint container of draft Hophead, thinking it would be a nice light thirst-quencher during the remainder of the walk.

More miles of the Downs Link. I crossed the Adur. In the middle of the afternoon I found a bench with a view across the Adur valley towards Chanctonbury Ring, a hill-fort topped with a ring of trees, landmark and legend-site. There I sat drinking some of the Hophead, simultaneously enjoying the sensation of relaxing in beautiful surroundings and contemplating an odd sense of estrangement, as if this familiar landscape had a terrible side that I was stumbling into through some fluke of routefinding.

I walked on. It really was sunny now – I could feel myself tanning in the chill. I could now see Truleigh Hill with its radio masts – a clear marker of home, as Truleigh is in a direct line north of my parents’ house.

However I was not attempting to get all the way back home tonight – Bramber was my destination. I clambered around muddy banks to find the castle, holding on to roots and branches to pull myself up the steepness, thinking of those Buddhas who stay active in the world, ‘splattered in mud and soaked in water’.

Then I checked in to the Old Tollgate. This was bizarre, as one rarely stays in hotels a few miles from home. There have been many family meals here, so it was odd eating alone in the early hours of the carvery dinner session. I felt like a ghost haunting my own life – reading the spines of books fixed to their shelves, with a mass of appetisers and a pint of Harveys. After dinner I dowsed the rooms for phone signal, and when it appeared sucked in some email, Facebook and Twitter updates – Transreal Mike quoting lyrics from the Grateful Dead song Dark Star – ‘transitive nightfall of diamonds’.

The hotel room was comfortable. Around 3am the alarm on my iPhone went off – some quiet birdsong that is supposed to lead to gentle awakening. But I had not set the alarm, and nothing I could do would turn it off. Then I realised it was in fact a real bird, a blackbird maybe, singing from the high dust-ivy eaves of the flint-wall house dimly visible from the hotel window. Unable to sleep, I lay in the Best Western dark, cradled in countless subtle networks, wondering how I had actually got there and planning and re-planning the next route.

Read Full Post »

Coming into Sussex: Guildford to Christ’s Hospital

After a couple of meetings in London, I spent the night at the Premier Inn portion of London County Hall, a building which once housed the GLC and is now sharecropped by assorted hotels, shops and Zen-themed food-and-beverage outlets.

I was sleeping as close to the London Eye as I have ever been, which was somewhat disconcerting – like being a tiny visitor to an oversized funfair.

In the morning, having enjoyed the bizarreness of being woken by the actual Big Ben, I transformed from work-mode to walking-mode. Having worn a suit that I judged to be past its best I decided to leave it in the bin rather than carry it on a long walk. I justified this outrage to recycling by conceiving it as a symbolic ritual, a sort of Reggie-Perrin-like shedding of identity.

From Waterloo I took a train to Guildford and resumed the walk. I decided to head up to the Cathedral, last seen on a family trip when I was a child. After a cup of tea I went inside, where I was suitably awestruck at the incredibly high vertical white-stone lines. Over the door as I left I read LET EVERY LIVING THING THAT HAS BREATH PRAISE THE LORD, bringing a flashback to that morning’s meditation practice, noting breaths whilst gazing at a hotel wall.  It promised to be a wet day but I resolved to see the wetness as some kind of good thing (living water) rather than an inconvenience.

I walked down towards the town, straying into the campus of the University of Surrey – the fifth campus to be encountered on this walk. After a while I was back on the River Wey, and a mile or so later I picked up the Pilgrim’s Way.

It has been suggested (eg in Eric Parker’s Surrey in the County Books series) that the Pilgrim’s Way may never have been extensively used by pilgrims. Whatever the case may be, the idea of an ‘ancient trackway between Winchester and Canterbury’ is a compelling one. Having assumed a ‘pilgrim’ role myself it seemed important to walk some of it. After crossing an A-road remembered from childhood pre-M25 drives and climbing a street with a house called Narnia, I ascended the Chantries wooded hill. The North Downs are unknown territory to me. As a citizen of the South Downs they always sounded like a copy, and thus irrelevant to actually visit. In practice I found them enchanting and full of surprises.

From the top of the Chantries I looked back towards Shalford Common, dimly seen through branches and rain, onetime site of an enormous Fair, possibly the model for Vanity Fair itself, as John Bunyan may have lived there. At this distance, I could not see ‘such things sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not’ or for that matter ‘jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind’. Neither will I claim to be walking to the Celestial City – though I did climb the next steep hill to St Martha’s-on-the-Hill.

From there I walked down a path turned into a sluice by the rain. More hills and woods in increasing gloom took me to Peaslake, where I stayed the night in the Hurtwood Inn. (Here I left a jumper in the bin, one that I bought in Florida. Another layer of identity shed. At this rate I will arrive in Brighton naked, like an early Quaker prophet, ‘going naked for a sign’.)

The next day’s walking was undertaken at a rush, as I had a specific train to catch and along way to go, around another 14 miles. I had hoped to climb the Coneyhurst Hill I had read about in S.P.B Mais Hills of the South but instead saw it as a shadowy shape through trees.

After a hike through Ewhurst I joined the Downs Link trail, which consists mostly of disused railway and which will eventually take me the bulk of the way home. On aching legs I ate up the miles. While I crouched hobbit-like by the road to eat a sandwich, riders passed by. Perhaps the London Eye had been that Eye of Sauron and this was Lord of the Rings… or at least a story of a return my own ‘Shire’.

Which came soon enough. After three years and perhaps 300 miles of digression and diversion, I walked through the border into Sussex. Crossed the Arun and saw chalk ground for the first time on the journey.

Took a little piece with which to draw something, one day. Maybe sketch a heart run though with borderlines on to some wall in the suburbs of the City, and leave it to wash away in the rain. Maybe write my name on an exposed chalk cliff stratum, white on white, leave it hidden in plain view.

Read Full Post »

By the margin, willow veil’d (a thread of green fire): Staines to Guildford

The latest leg of the walk, done over two days, has taken me from Staines to Guildford – about 17 miles. Walking mostly beside water, both days have had very changeable weather, with sunshine turning to heavy rain and back several times. Layers and sunglasses have come on and off in a sort of mobile quick-change artistry. The swiftly-passing weather reminded me of the rush of days flickering past the Time Traveller, creation of sometime Woking-resident H.G.Wells.

I have now reached Surrey, just one county away from my Sussex destination. As is often the case with near-neighbours, I know little about the place. Probing beyond the image of Surrey as affluent stockbroker-belt, I have found a literature of regret at the passing of time. Writers through the centuries seem to mourn the destruction of Surrey as it was. In the 1800s ‘the sight of the dear old familiar paths’ brought tears to the eyes of Fanny Kemble, ‘stripped of their trees and robbed of their beauty’ as a result of some project on the Oatlands estate at Brooklands. A century later, Eric Parker found that ‘what was country has vanished’ in a favourite spot, and viewed with alarm the damage and changes wrought under the threat of ‘wings hideous’ during the war. More recently, Iain Sinclair pointed out the irony of St Georges Hill, site of the Levellers’ social experiment in radical agriculture, having become a gated community for the wealthy. So I entered Surrey on the lookout for sad evidence of past times. There were some – occasional objects dropped like erratics by a retreating glacier – a red phone box in a garden, an old shield-logo BP petrol pump used as an entrance-pillar, a DIY stone circle.

Less tangible evidence came in the form of the grieving women with a pop bottle containing flowers by Chertsey Bridge, and the generally unsettling experience of repeatedly crossing and recrossing water with wet willow branches stroking one’s face – like walking in an unmade landscape.

After many miles of detached villas with whimsical names (Lowlands, Shalimar, Upstream) I reached Weybridge. For the second time on the journey, I used a ferry to cross a major river. The first had been the Mersey. Now a small skiff took me across the Thames with two dog walkers. (Looking back 2.5 years, I justified the first ferry trip on the basis that the route to it was more interesting than a long walk to Runcorn, and that I didn’t pay a fare. This time I had to walk further to get to the ferry, but it cost me £2.)

Skirting a private island I headed towards West Byfleet, where the houses were less splendid, with weeds growing on the driveway much as they do on mine. I passed once again under the M25, and ended the day’s walk at West Byfleet station.

We stayed in Guildford’s not-unpleasant Travelodge, which had an advantage of being sited just yards from the Wey Navigation towpath. Early the following morning I walked to Guildford station through an industrial estate. (Barrett Homes would build a home ‘around me’, whilst a printer could give me my photos in assorted sizes.) At the station I fed a £20 note into a machine and got a jackpot of change, warm and slightly moist as if from a human hand. An early train took me back to West Byfleet, from where I walked to Pyrford.

Here, the narrator of The War of the Worlds had seen a Martian cylinder land… ‘I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a thread of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling into the field to my left. It was the third falling star!’.

From here I rejoined the Wey Navigation, for miles of waterside walking. I have done a lot of this, quiet hours accompanied only by the occasional canoeist or heron. This was pleasant day of more of the same. More than pleasant: a black dog can make sporadic appearances in the life of the post-major-operative person, often once everything has calmed down; this has been my experience recently. But over these two days I outwalked it…

…and arrived at Astolat, home of the lily-pure maid, ‘half-sick of shadows’…

***

Here’s a Flickr map with pictures from the first day – battery failed in the GPS device on day two, sadly.

Read Full Post »