An update

Well maybe I could get the hang of this not going to work lark. On Wednesday I went for another of my training walks for the long distance path. Again I walked alone and today I offer you pictures rather than so many words.


In the higher fields most of the ewes have now lambed. Only those sheep who live on the very highest hills still lumber up and away when you approach, heavy with the unborn.

Elsewhere tiny lambs stagger about. You can tell when you are looking at a very new lamb because, along with its wobble and uncertainty, it has yet to be numbered or marked in some way by the farmer. The red on the back of the ewe is of longstanding, left on her by the ram when she was covered. Good job we don't have such a system for people.

I walked out along the Clwydian way, along the side of the hills looking out over the vale. It was sunny and warm but hazy looking out across to Snowdonia. Looking south the hills were invisible and looking north the vale disappears into grey haze, no glimpse of the sea.

The oak trees are in bud, swelling by the day. I meet two riders and for a moment wonder how it would be to be riding not walking, a different sort of lovely perhaps, but walking by yourself is so silent as to be addictive. I stop so that even the sound of my trouser legs rubbing together ceases. Clearly I hear the drumming of a woodpecker deeper into the oak wood.

I grow warm, the path is taking me gently downwards and I have lost the wind. A broken rowan shows what the wind can do up here although today it is hard to imagine such force.

I come to a conifer plantation and the path takes me into the forest and up towards the hilltops again. Here it is a different kind of quiet, cut through from time to time by birdsong, invisibly high in the trees.

When I reach the top I turn back towards home, on the Offa's Dyke path now, climbing the ridge steadily to the peak of Penycloddiau. Walking up here you walk on springy, cropped grass, perfect underfoot. A skylark pours its liquid song out above my head, a speck against the blue sky.

Three hours out and, steadily descending to my own piece of hillside, I am home again at just about the time I would normally be getting in a taxi to Euston station. No contest.