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Backpacking the Ridgeway (3) – the Eastern Half Day 2

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The feeling of life being good wore off a little as I discovered just how uneven my chosen bivi site actually was and I had to wedge myself into all sorts of strange, contorted positions in order to stay in my position on what had turned out to be the side of a hill, or so it felt.

Nothing seems to last as long as a bad night in a sleeping bag but eventually the sky lightened and Day 2 dawned – and a very misty dawn it was too.

Morning day 2

Morning, Day 2

As it was 6am, it was time to get up and, rather than have breakfast where I was, I decided to continue to the top of Bacombe Hill – except there isn’t such a place: for some reason not explained on the map or in the guidebook it becomes Coombe Hill near the top – and have breakfast there, taking in the magnificent views, which the mist would reveal to me by helpfully lifting at the appropriate moment.

It would not be quite accurate to say that I sprinted up the first hill of the day but that morning probably saw the fastest start to any day of the walk: I was going to get a lot slower over the course of the next five days. I arrived at the top of Coombe Hill in short order and almost tripped over a monument…

Coombe monument

Wikipedia says “Coombe Hill Monument is one of the first and largest examples of a war memorial erected to honour the names of individual men who fell whilst fighting for their country. The monument is an iconic Buckinghamshire landmark and a Grade II Listed monument.” It is certainly impressively large and quite imposing when it suddenly appears out of the mist.

When packing for the walk I had allocated a pot of instant porridge for breakfast each morning apart from the first day, which would be marked by Spam, likewise the last day, for which purpose I would carry a second tin for another 70 miles or so.

Spam served cold is unappealing stuff but, when sliced and fried, it is truly the breakfast of champions. I tucked in, after explaining to two curious Buckinghamshire Labradors who appeared at that moment, accessorised with Puffa-jacketed Buckinghamshire yummy mummies, that any attempt to share this ambrosia of the gods would be met with strenuous resistance at the point of a lightweight camping fork.

The mist having failed to part on schedule, I set off down the hill without the benefit of the promised magnificent views. At the bottom of Coombe Hill lies Chequers, the grace and favour country estate of the UK Prime Minister. Casual visitors are not encouraged to pop in.

Chequers sign

There was something about the row of “Trespass on this site is a criminal offence” signs and cameras either side of the point where the Ridgeway crosses the front drive of Chequers that made me quicken my pace. Once at the top of the shallow slope leading away from the gates, I struck a blow for the revolution by stopping for a pee up against one of the Prime Minister’s trees.

Having left Chequers behind, the Ridgeway proceeds to breach the Trade Descriptions Act by insisting on proceeding up and down every available hill in this part of the Chilterns before descending from the high ground to skirt around the outer parts of Princes Risborough.

By early afternoon, I felt I had broken the back of the day’s walking and, seeing as the September sunshine had led me to work up quite a thirst, an off-trail detour for a pub stop was called for. A quick map appreciation (as the Army calls it) revealed that the best place for this would be the village of Chinnor and a quick Google appreciation (as the Army might possibly call it now but certainly didn’t in my day) flagged up The Crown Inn as the target pub.

Chinnor pub stop

When I ran the tourism team at the Brecon Beacons National Park, we used to despair of the thousands of walkers who flocked to the area each year to erode the peaks but contribute nothing to the local economy, and so ever since then I have felt that I have a moral duty to right this wrong by stopping at pubs when out for a walk.

Moral duty done, I strapped the pack back on for a few miles of boring road walking before rejoining the Ridgeway, which by now was following a disused railway line that I am pretty sure wasn’t part of the original Neolithic route. After a couple of miles, the trail took an underpass under the M40 motorway where this slices through the Aston Rownant National Nature Reserve adding, may I say, not a great deal to the natural beauty of the area as it does so. At this point it became clear that my slightly over-optimistic estimate of how leisurely the aforementioned pub stop could be meant that it would be a race against time to get to that night’s campsite at Watlington before darkness fell.

It was a race that I was not to win and I arrived at White Mark Farm  and its campsite, situated no more than 200 metres from the trail, by the light of my head-torch. The decision to stay on a formal campsite rather than to wild camp was one that was again based on wanting to contribute something to the local economy in exchange for my use of their scenery. There are not many campsites within easy striking distance of the Ridgeway, so it seemed churlish not to put some business the way of the most convenient one. A hot shower, another boil-in-the bag dinner and it was time to settle down for what would hopefully be a better night’s sleep; at least this time there was no questioning the flatness of the pitch.

 

Backpacking the Ridgeway September 2017 (1)

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The Ridgeway is an 85-mile long trail that follows the chalk ridge from Ivinghoe Beacon in Hertfordshire, through parts of Berkshire and South Oxfordshire before finishing at Avebury in Wiltshire. It follows ancient trade and drove routes and is reputedly the oldest road in England, if not the whole of Europe. As befits this status, it passes through landscapes that are punctuated by relics of our Neolithic and Bronze Age past including many barrows and hill forts. The Ridgeway is designated as a National Trail and I first came up with the idea of backpacking it several years ago, encouraged by a half-day spent walking the Oxfordshire section once when Nicola was visiting a friend in Didcot. This year, following a particularly trying period at work, I booked two weeks off at the end of September with the idea that I would spend the first week doing the walk and then we would spend the second week touring the West Country via two of our children in Salisbury and Plymouth.Guide book

Planning and Preparation

Having decided that I would aim to wild camp on at least some of the five nights I would be on the trail, I turned to Google to see what advice the internet had to offer as regards the feasibility of this approach. As the general gist of the accumulated wisdom of the worldwide web was “go for it”, the next step was to assemble some suitable kit.

Previous experience of labouring up and down hills carrying heavy weights had taught me that, in view of my advancing years and lack of training, less would definitely be more when it came to putting together a kit list. I reasoned that, as this would be a lowland walk in autumn as opposed to a mountain walk in winter, I could cut a few corners in the interests of keeping the pack weight down, the first of which would be to manage without a tent and instead bivvy using a tarp shelter pitched on the walking poles to which, after years of mocking other walkers who used them, I had become a committed convert. I borrowed a 3m x 3m DD tarp from Son #2 who uses it with a hammock, so it came complete with generous lengths of para cord attached to each corner. This, together an unmatching pair of cheap walking poles and a handful of tent pegs, would do for accommodation. The beauty of this approach is that, instead of having to be carried all day, the “tent poles” are in productive use 24 hours a day and the rest of the “tent” weighs less than 1kg.

Having decided that my 35-litre daysack would enforce a bit too much frugality for a 5-6 day trip and that my 85-litre Army bergan would be overkill, my rucksack of choice was a 60-litre budget Eurohike number left over from the kids’ DofE days. Continuing the low-budget theme, cooking equipment was a basic screw-on gas burner purchased from an army surplus store 15 years ago, a couple of gas canisters, a pair of cheap mess tins from Go Outdoors, plastic KFS set, plastic bowl and trusty old British Army plastic mug.

Sleeping bag was a Vango 2-season lightweight down number teamed with a full-length Thermarest mat and lightweight groundsheet.

In terms of food, I decided to allow for a couple of pub or chip shop stops when passing through civilisation and to carry sufficient food for the rest of the trip. I discovered I still had a couple of meals’ worth of MOD-issue “boil-in-the-bag” rations left over from previous expeditions and a trip to Go Outdoors for more “boil-in-the-bag” meals and to the local Co-op for instant porridge sachets, cereal bars, tea bags and hot chocolate powder completed the catering procurement, apart from a couple of tins of Spam to be fried when needed to provide the ultimate morale-boosting breakfast indulgence when on the trail.

Water is an issue on the Ridgeway which, as the name suggests, follows the chalk ridge and is therefore above the springline: naturally occurring water sources are therefore all but non-existent. Fortunately the good people at the Countryside Commission (as was) National Trails Office foresaw this problem and have arranged with farmers to provide occasional water points along the route. These are marked on the excellent Ridgeway National Trail Map produced by Harvey Maps and I had no trouble in locating any of the ones that I looked for and all were in working order. Based on an estimated water consumption of 2 litres per day, I decided that carrying 1.5 days’ worth i.e. 3 litres, would be sufficient. In the event, I could have managed with less but I prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes to water, even if it means carrying a bit more weight. Obviously, doing the walk in hot weather or using dehydrated rations will increase water requirements.

Total all-up weight of the pack, including food and water, was a little under 40lbs.

 

Welcome Break – doing better at Corley

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welcome break bins

 

Credit where credit’s due: after I took Welcome Break to task about their skip at Peartree Services, last weekend I was back on the road again and called into Corley Services on the M6. All the various bins in the main building were clearly marked with some good information about recycling provided for the public. On the way back to the car, I couldn’t resist a sneaky peek in the bin area! This was neat and tidy with recyclables, cardboard and reusable pallets being separate from the general waste destined for landfill.

That’s more like it Welcome Break!