You can walk along the roads in the small French village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, as you can in other French villages.  But the roads here are marked out only by white posts and a smaller number of posts identifying the occupiers of some of the houses.

The village itself was so badly damaged in the First World War battle of Verdun in 1916, that it was one of a handful of villages which the authorities decided not to restore.

Fleury before the War had 422 inhabitants, and information is quite good about what they did for a living: several farmers, a grocer who also ran the cafe, three pubs, and the “marechal” – not the boss, or a policeman, but the blacksmith.  But in 1916 it found itself at the epicentre of the struggle for a stretch of northern France.  The inhabitants fled.  The land occupied by the village changed hands 16 times, as the success of assaults by either side shifted the front line just a few tens of metres, sometimes. By the end of the War in 1918, the combination of artillery shelling and ground combat had left little of the village standing.

I’d like to say it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like.  But the sad truth is that we see on our TV screens each night pictures of the destruction in Mosul, Aleppo, and other war-torn places, which are suffering the same fate at the moment.

Let’s hope they can be rebuilt.  For Fleury and a few other places, the decision was taken not to try to rebuild the village.  It’s a few hundred metres from the Verdun Memorial which provides a history of the whole battle and an extensive exhibition.  So plenty of people visit Fleury, walk along the one-time roads, and see where the different tradesmen lived.  The area is now forested, so being honest, the markers didn’t really work for me: I could have done with a ground plan to help imagine how it was in 1914, though one photo of the Rue de l’Eglise (Church St) helped.  But it certainly serves as a vivid memorial to the senseless destruction of a battle where the number of dead, at 300,000 is hard to get your head round.

On Saturday 23 September, David Elis-Williams kindly invited me to join him for the final stretch of his walk along the A5.  He began at Marble Arch on 30 April, walked to Wroxeter in Shropshire, then had a break and walked the rest of the way in mid-September.  Congratulations to him on a big achievement, both the physical effort and the interesting things he wrote up in his blog (http://a5walk.blogspot.co.uk) each night.  It was a privilege to be there as he walked through the arch at Holyhead, and to meet again Alan Williams, John Cave, and Richard Burrell who showed us round two or three years ago, and to get to know David’s former colleague Bob Daimond, who’s a career expert on the roads of north west Wales.

It was also a chance for me to reflect, a day or so after publishing my own book on the London to Holyhead road, “This Ancient Road”.  Previously, I’d gone to Holyhead by car, with at least one overnight stay on the way up, so moving gradually from London to North Wales.  This time I went by train, stepping on at Euston in the heart of London, and stepping off at Holyhead three and a half hours later.  The more abrupt change brings out more sharply the contrasts in our country – or I should say countries, since one of the first things to strike me was that the signs are written first in Welsh.  Holyhead’s above all a port, a place that looks outwards over the water to Ireland, and the town centre is mostly small and local shops.  It feels every one of the 250 miles from London.

So what are my reflections on the whole business of producing the book, now that it’s done?  It’s been consistently very enjoyable, getting out, looking round different areas, trying to find out more by looking at the roadscape, and also reading in the British Library to understand the history of roads themselves, of pilgrimage, of industry, and of the people who journeyed along the road.  There have certainly been some difficult moments, both on the road when I couldn’t track something down and in the writing of particularly tricky bits – I never really understood the Anglo-Saxons at university, and it hasn’t got much easier.

So here goes with the quick quiz answers.

 

Best moment?  Handing a copy of the finished book to my mum.

 

Worst moment?  None really.  I was annoyed to be locked into a park-and-ride car park due to a failure of the timetable, but it was opened fairly quickly, and the fine was refunded when I made my case.

Favourite bit of the road?  So many … Kilburn brings back happy memories of my early days in London, Snowdonia is the most classically beautiful though I’ve always liked the Shropshire countryside too, and the Holyhead Road through Soho in Birmingham is a really vibrant stretch of multi-cultural modern Britain.

Least favourite?  None.  As my Dad used to quote from Richard II, “All places that the eye of heaven visits are to a wise man ports and happy havens”.

Are you going to write another book?  I’d like to.  I’ve got a few ideas, based on the “journey writer” concept.  Watch this space.