“Oh, I was just driving through France.” So said Arthur Eperon, travel writer and enthusiast from the 1970s and 1980s, in answer to a question about where he had been when something he noted had taken place. It summed up the attraction of France which he felt, and communicated vividly to me and thousands of other readers wanting to get about on our own and enjoy the country.

You could explore because the roads were fairly clear and pretty straight, at least in the north of the country. Most villages had at least a baker and a general store, where you could buy bread and cheese for lunch. A big village or small town would have a restaurant serving the Menu du Jour, where there might not always be a lot of choice but you would get good French food for apparently less than the cost of the ingredients. The baguettes tasted much better than what I still called a French stick, and the cakes were wonderful. Either Eperon’s own books or the Green Michelin Guide would point you to the major attractions – pity to miss Chartres Cathedral, for instance – but you could also dive off and find a nice spot for yourself. The Logis de France network of hotels ensured you could find somewhere respectable to stay.
Before getting into the then and now, let’s take the rose-tinted specs off. The sun didn’t always shine, you could sometimes spend a long time looking for a general food store, and if you had to go through a town, the traffic could be busy, and add a lot to your time to get to the next destination. The meals sometimes bore out the cheapness of the ingredients and there wasn’t always a lot of variety for pudding. Nonetheless, I still remember the sense of excitement of driving off the ferry, getting out of the port area, and heading off into this wonderful country.
We still love coming to France, and getting off the beaten track. Most of the attractions are still there, and the fact that you have to look a bit harder for them is because – funnily enough – France isn’t a theme park preserved for people like me to relive their younger days, but a living, breathing country facing the same pressures as we do in the UK, and responding in many of the same ways.
So what feels different and what feels the same compared to 40 years ago?
The sense of space is still there. There’s a basic reason for that: France has the same population as us, but is several times the size. The flip side, of course, is that the places you want to visit may look close on the map, but can be hundreds of kilometres away. If you are willing to pay the motorway tolls, you can make fast progress in lots of regions, and then enjoy the quiet local roads, often tree-lined, to finish the journey. Progress on the side roads is slower because of frequent 30 kph speed limits, but given some of the driving in the old days, that’s understandable! Signs saying “Consider our Children” clearly weren’t cutting it.
The food can still be very good. Earlier in the week, here in Normandy, we went to a local brasserie and had salad from the buffet, steak and chips (for me), and a choice of puddings for about 15 euros. We’ve managed to find at least one such place in our last few trips, but you have to hunt more carefully. By contrast, pizzas are very popular: apparently traditional French restaurants offer a takeaway service, a pizza van is in the village square this evening, and occasionally you see machines that supply them heated up. Not a theme park: that’s what busy people sometimes want, like we do.
The cakes can still be good too, but globalisation has taken away some of the distinctiveness. Once, you had to cross the Channel to have a Millefeuille or Tarte aux Fraises, whereas now you can certainly get them at Paul or similar shops, and sometimes at the supermarket. Good – more people can enjoy them. And whisper it softly, but the croissants at our local cafe in Highbury are better than the local baker in France either this year or last.
It’s much harder to find shops and restaurants on the road. Again, this is consistent with experience in the UK: pubs and village shops are shutting, as shopping habits change. We’ve had some luck this year shopping in small towns, but in other years have had to go to the supermarket on the outskirts (usually pretty good.)
One feature we still used to see in the 1980s was older men – and it was men – meeting up in the early evening to drink a pastis (eg Ricard) or two, either quietly alone or in groups putting the world to rights. That’s largely gone, though I can’t speak for the bar near our gite, which is closed for holidays. Last year, in the Loire Valley, it’s true that the bar – which didn’t open in the evenings – was largely taken up during the day by men – and it was men – gathering to watch the racing on TV and place their bets.
Modern life helps the travelling tourist in one way, that many museums and other places to visit are open continuously, without a break for lunch. In the 1980s, you used to have to plan carefully as to whether you could get somewhere in time to visit before the 12 noon cut-off, or whether your best bet was to be outside the door at 2pm waiting for it to reopen. With that, perhaps there’s also a bit more readiness to help the customer? Some French people could be quite brisk, shall we say, if you didn’t know exactly what you wanted.
Overall, this is still a fantastic country to visit. It would be a separate blog, of a different sort, to reflect on whether there is still the “joie de vivre” that added to the attraction in the 1980s. Briefly, to the extent that there isn’t, it’s again something that applies to lots of western European countries and not just France. We’ll be back.

Evidence of the growing popularity of the Camino de Santiago is widespread, and comes up in surprising places.  We are in Hinterzarten, a resort in the Black Forest, where the lakes and forest walks have attracted visitors for centuries.  We weren’t expecting to find a map of a pilgrim route on the side of a small meadow in the centre of the village, but there it was. 

Maybe it’s because we in the UK tend to focus on the pilgrim routes through France and then the different options through Spain, but we don’t hear much about routes in Germany or beyond.  But in recent years, more towns have the familiar scallop shell sign, now in blue and yellow, on a walking sign somewhere – that’s true in Switzerland too.  In a sense it doesn’t matter whether they are following traditional medieval routes in detail or not – each generation makes their own pilgrimage.  Some argue that each pilgrim creates their own pilgrimage, and while that’s true by definition, there’s something about being part of a wider collective and following an established route that differentiates pilgrimage from just a long walk.

Having seen the map last night we found ourselves on the route today, heading to and from the Titisee.  The pilgrims, medieval and modern, have some beautiful paths through the Black Forest, and while there is some climbing involved, there are many sterner tests ahead on the way to Santiago.  Here is an example of the path with the Jakobusweg sign on the right.

440,000 pilgrims completed their Camino last year, twice as many as in 2013.  They are coming from a wider range of countries.  And the opportunities to become part of the Santiago community nearer home are also multiplying.

Buen Camino. 

It doesn’t seem long since we were planning our walk along the Mortimer Trail.  Now it’s done, and it’s time to reflect, in a way that I hope is helpful to future walkers.

It’s great walking.  OK, we were very lucky with the weather – dry, pretty clear, and not too hot.  But even in poor weather, it would have a lot to offer keen walkers.  The paths are mostly good, though getting overgrown in some places, particularly at the Kington end, in spite of the efforts of volunteers to keep them clear.  There’s plenty of variety: open land, forest (evergreen and broadleaf), an attractive stretch along the River Lugg, and enough up and down to make it interesting without becoming a slog.  You don’t get views like these without doing some climbing: they really are terrific, to all four points of the compass, sometimes at once.  There aren’t many sections along roads, and none of these had much traffic on.  Nor were there many other walkers. 

The flowers were lovely, at the very start of June: the bluebells were more or less finished, but there were whole fields of buttercups and plenty of red campion in the hedgerow.  We saw a kite and a mistle thrush (thanks to my friend Joanna for identifying that for us), (roe?) deer and muntjac deer, hares and rabbits.

I’ve just finished The Lost Paths, by Jack Cornish of the Ramblers, and he might have something critical to say about the number of stiles, especially nearer Kington.  Some footpaths through fields of crops had been left, but others – again more as you get towards Kington – had been sown, not always with even much of a border to walk round the outside.

There aren’t many facilities along the route.  A big shout out to St Peter’s church at Titley, which opens its doors to all-comers offering its toilet, and facilities for tea and coffee: very welcome, thank you.  The Riverside at Aymestrey is more or less on the route, and looks nice: you can still just have a drink there, which we did, but it’s geared up to providing full meals rather than snacks, and they are strict about you not eating your own food when sitting outside and having a drink there.  We didn’t go to the Stagg Inn at Titley, also near the route. Nor did we investigate options for accommodation or taxis, but used two cars to get to and fro.  One of the attractions of the Trail is that it is quite remote, but that does make access a challenge at times – you just have to allow enough time for whatever approach you take.

The other point to note is that much of the history needs side trips off the Trail, for example to Richards Castle or Wigmore Castle, the seat of the eponymous Mortimers for centuries.  It would be a 5 mile round trip to include Wigmore Castle, so one to plan in quite carefully.  Looking at the geography, I doubt that the Mortimers used this route to get to Ludlow, or as their first step towards other parts of the Marches.

So if you enjoy being right out in really lovely English countryside, and can get organised for transport and food, this is a good trail to choose: we took three days; really fast walkers might do it in two; people wanting side trips to the castles could easily take four.  Even if the weather isn’t as good as ours, you will get plenty of exercise and – I found – the real sense of refreshment that comes from putting one foot in front of the other in glorious surroundings.

We had lovely weather for the first day of the Mortimer Trail, from Ludlow through as far as Bircher Common. This gave us fantastic views from the high points such as the one in this picture not far from Ludlow.

At different points, you can see through 360 degrees, east over Ludlow and to the distinctive shape of Titterstone Clee (above), south and east to the Malverns, west into Wales, and north to the Shropshire hills. 

I hadn’t planned on blogging about A E Housman’s “blue remembered hills” – it’s a much-quoted line, and even gave its name to a whole TV play by Dennis Potter in 1979.  But I was drawn back to it by the combination of the slight bluish haze over the far distance, even on a clear day, and the memories that came back to me.  It’s easy enough to quote the whole poem, which is untitled:

Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows

What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Housman called the full book of poems “A Shropshire Lad”, though he was not actually from the county.  He was born in Worcestershire, and commented that “I had a sentimental feeling for Shropshire because its hills were on our Western horizon,” even though he acknowledged he had never spent much time in Shropshire itself. 

It’s a nostalgic poem, looking back, in Housman’s case, to happier times in the past.  The views made me think back too.  I grew up in the Birmingham area, and went on day trips to Shropshire as a teenager.  Judith and I have walked in the hills around Church Stretton, and I explored the A5 corridor for my book on the London to Holyhead road, including one enjoyable trip with my mum, drawing on her knowledge of the county from visits to National Trust homes among other things.  More recently we’ve walked with David and Marion, our current companions, a couple of times in the Ludlow area.

So I’m glad to say that I was prompted to remember happy times in Shropshire while looking forward to more to come, starting of course with the remaining days of the Mortimer Trail. 

PS  I’m not going to attempt literary criticism, but here is an analysis if desired, https://interestingliterature.com/2016/10/a-short-analysis-of-a-e-housmans-into-my-heart-an-air-that-kills/.

“Marion and I are thinking of walking the Mortimer Trail, and wondered if you and Judith might like to join with us?”  The email from my friend David had me searching for maps – call me old-fashioned, but I’d still rather see a walking route on paper than on screen, at any rate to start with.  The Trail runs for 30 miles or so from Ludlow in Shropshre across the northern part of Herefordshire  to Kington, just a couple of miles from the Welsh border.

There are plenty of reasons for walking this trail.  The scenery is lovely.  Here is the River Lugg at Aymestrey, and the picture also shows the hills which offer great views.  There are also forests rich with native trees, along with open commons.  We’ll certainly get some exercise – I didn’t have to look at the map for long to spot the contours, but you can’t have that mix of hilltop views and river banks without doing the up and down.

Then there’s the history.  The Trail is named after the Mortimer family, who came over with William the Conqueror, and established the family seat at Wigmore Castle, about half way along the Trail, in about 1075.  That remained their stronghold until the early 14^th century, when the most celebrated Mortimer of them all, Roger (IV, ie the 4^th of that name), acquired Ludlow Castle by marriage. 

The Mortimers were leading figures in the area known as the March of Wales, which we now tend to call the Marches, and became steadily more involved in national life culminating in Roger IV becoming first a key lieutenant of Edward II, then turning against him, forming a relationship (yes, that sort) with his wife, Isabella, and becoming de facto ruler of England between 1326 and 1330 when the young Edward III asserted himself and had Mortimer executed for treason.  All this deserves a blog of its own, as we come across the now ruined sites.  And the history goes well beyond the Mortimers, with two Iron Age hillforts along the Trail, interesting churches, and examples of old quarry workings.

The reference to “workings” is a reminder that the area isn’t and never was a theme park – something that visitors need to remember.  One of the main points of interest for me will be to think about who used to walk these paths, and for what reasons.  Some will have gone to battle, and some to church, not least to the abbeys along the route.  Some will have been trading, others perhaps driving cattle – there’s still some finding out and exploration to do. 

Walking through the towns and villages will also offer a brief but close-up view of a little visited part of England.  And a part that is a borderland.  That was certainly true for the centuries when the Mortimers held sway: they were (on the whole) defending the Marches and the rest of England against periodic predations from Welsh attackers.  The border is more important again now: as I write, it’s 25 years almost to the day since the National Assembly of Wales, now Senedd Cymru, first met.  Has that had any impact on the immediately neighbouring part of England?  Does Kington – with Offa’s Dyke running through the middle (albeit still a couple of miles from the administrative border) – feel any different from Ludlow 30 miles back?  These are real issues for the people who live there, irrespective of how many walkers are tramping past their front door.  I’ll try hard to keep my interest respectful.

So there’s history, scenery, and a borderland to get to know.  All we need now’s the weather.

The Ridgeway famously changes gear as you cross the Thames, and for us it meant a move from an area we had walked two or three times to one with which we were very familiar.  As well as Goring, we’ve done lots of day walks in the Chilterns, including some training walks mostly on the Ridgeway from Princes Risborough to Goring, and also the climb up Ivinghoe Beacon.

Walking the whole of the Way over the last three days was delightful much of the time.  The weather was very good apart from 30 minutes of rain one afternoon.  The bluebells were at their best, complimented by the bright green of freshly emerging beech leaves, all in the dappled sunlight of the woods.  Many of the paths through the woods were just right under foot: soft enough not to jar, but not muddy.  By contrast, the lack of rain meant that paths in the open were baked as hard as concrete.

There are some ancient earthworks, but not the standout monuments of the western half.  One exception – though we need to go back to explore it properly – is the church at North Stoke, which has 14^th century wall paintings as well as a number of medieval features in what is the only church where the path goes through the grounds.  A big shout-out to them and the church at Nuffield, also in Oxfordshire, for providing some open hospitality: not only could you shelter there, but North Stoke offered bottled water, and Nuffield tea and coffee, cake and biscuits, and a toilet.  Yes, we did make a donation in gratitude.  Otherwise, you have to fend for yourself on the Ridgeway.

After several long days, carrying all our stuff for 6 days (no, not camping), we were tired on the last day, but the site of Ivinghoe Beacon put a spring in the step.  We sat down on the step of the monument and looked east.  Although our walk was done, the ridge, and the ancient ridgeway, heads on to the North Sea.  For our ancestors, Ivinghoe Beacon might well only have been a brief stopover in the middle of a different trip for trade, for battle, or for a new life.

In 1954, Tony and Eleanor Simpson and their young daughter Judith took a holiday in Goring on Thames.  They liked the place, and wanting to move out of the London area to somewhere more rural, they decided to buy a house there.

I have visited Goring many times since Judith and I got together in 1984, and each time I’m struck that my in-laws chose well.

Goring is about halfway along the Ridgeway, and marks a clear break between the western half on the Berkshire Downs, and the eastern half across the Chilterns.  The Goring Gap is the generic term for this divide, where the Thames makes its way between the two sets of hills, on its way south from Oxford.  The Ridgeway goes through Streatley on the old Berkshire side of the river, comes over the bridge, into the village centre at Goring, and then along the river for a few miles before climbing into the Chilterns.

Goring is a fine place.  It’s a big village, with village identity, but plenty going on: 3 pubs, 2 cafes, a range of shops, and quite a lot going on in terms of cultural life.  There’s the river and the nearby hills to enjoy.  The train connects easily to Oxford or London.  The traffic ought to be awful in a place with narrow streets, but somehow isn’t.

We’re benefiting from the facilities staying here on the walk: buying a postcard at the stationers, overnight stay at the John Barleycorn but dinner at the Catherine Wheel because the other pub kitchen is closed, and shopping for lunch at the deli tomorrow morning.  Goring will welcome lots of Ridgeway walkers.  For us, it’s particularly special to do this in a place that Judith called home for so long and where I feel at home now. 

Tony and Eleanor lived here for 50 years, becoming pillars of the local History Society and other community activities.  They died within a few months of each other 15 years ago.  I’ve got more reason than anyone to be grateful to them – including the place they chose to settle.

The high spots, literally and metaphorically, of our first couple of days on the Ridgeway have been the ancient sites: Barbery Castle yesterday, and then today, in quick succession, Waylands Smithy and Uffington Castle.  

Waylands Smithy is the oldest, a Neolithic long barrow started around 3590 BC – modern techniques can apparently date burials that happened there to intervals of a few decades.  The remains on view today date from a slightly later structure.  Uffington Castle, only a few hundred yards further on, was probably built in the 7th or 8th century BC.  Barbury Castle, nearer the start of the Ridgeway, was first occupied about 2500 BC, but the Iron Age hillfort also dates from about 700 BC.  Barbury may have had the longest lifespan, occupied until Roman times, and possibly as late as the 6th century when a nearby battle took it into the kingdom of Wessex.  

All three are impressive sites – here is a picture of Barbury, looking forbidding under grey skies.  

The two castles have commanding positions: Uffington in particular has extensive views through 360 degrees, which is appealing for today’s visitors, and must have presented a formidable challenge to attackers.  The earth ramparts are well preserved, so you can see how the defensive system worked if anyone did get up the hill and attack from close range.  

But it’s Waylands that really piques the imagination.  In spite of the research, and the legends about Wayland shoeing your horse if you left cash outside, we still have a lot to learn about why our ancient ancestors buried their dead there, how far afield they came, and what rituals would have accompanied this.  Did they come up one of today’s tracks from the valley, and transport the body along the Ridgeway?  What sort of ceremonies took place?

We don’t know and may never know with any confidence.  That can be frustrating to someone like me, who studied 17th and 18th century before Anglo-Saxon history, let along pre-history, and is used to documents and records to anchor interpretation.  But it does free us up to let our imagination roam in places like Waylands Smithy, and to conjure up our own interpretation of how our ancestors used this atmospheric spot.

Tomorrow we start walking the Ridgeway, 87 miles from Wiltshire to Hertfordshire, six days walking for us.  It’s sometimes called Britain’s oldest road – experts aren’t sure about this but reckon that some stretches may be 8,000 years old.  Some of the earthworks we’ll pass – Waylands Smithy, Uffington Castle, Silbury Hill – are certainly several thousand years old.

Ivinghoe Beacon – the end of the walk

As its name implies, the way is defined by geography: it’s part of a longer ridge running all the way from the English Channel to the North Sea, characterised by a chalk escarpment.  Some other long-distance trails are also set by geography, such as the Pennine Way or the various coastal paths.  But all paths are in practice partly shaped by the landscape and partly shaped by human activity.  For much of its history, the Ridgeway was much less well defined: this was pragmatic in that if one track became too rutted and muddy, people would walk a bit to the side, gradually wearing down a new path, and at times the path was a mile wide.  Even then, there is evidence that it respected ancient field boundaries where these existed, and the position changed in the 18th century with the passing of Enclosure Acts which carved out private land and narrowed the path in the process.  So in one sense, we’ll be following in the footsteps of some of our oldest ancestors, but in other ways using a route that was properly worked out two or three centuries ago, and benefiting from a lot of modern maintenance work.

This combination of human influence and nature will apply to the landscape we will be looking out over too.  In the sixth form at school, when we were preparing for “general papers” of some sort, I saw a previous question that ran “The beauty of the English countryside is man-made: discuss.”  My immediate reaction was an angry dismissal of that: the trees, the colour of the grass, the rolling hills were entirely natural!  But some trees have been felled and others planted.  The mix of colours depends on which crops are planted alongside the green meadows – I suspect we will have my bugbear of oilseed rape to look forward to this week.  Our idea of the beauty of England has much to do with dry stone walls, and the sight of cottages and church spires in the distance, to break up what would otherwise be a monolithic outlook.  And all this has changed over time, as hedges have been replaced by fences, fields enlarged, and so on.  The line sometimes used that “the view will be much as it was in Wordsworth’s day” is appealing but probably not right.

As well as our oldest ancestors, we’ll be following in the footsteps of thousands if not millions of other travellers down the centuries.  Our reason for doing the walk – seeing the countryside and getting some exercise – is a comparatively recent luxury, only applying for a small fraction of the life of the Ridgeway.  Roads, ways, and tracks are above all a means for getting from A to B, so what journeys were our predecessors taking?  Trading goods between hill forts?  Heading for battle?  Driving cattle to market?  Using the ridge-way, literally interpreted, as an easier route between villages down below the escarpment where the ground was boggier?  Hopefully we will get more of a sense of this over the coming days.