Mile 1
I have a special jaunty whistle, usually reserved for that moment in a DIY job when I’m confident I know what I’m doing (followed, as night follows day, by an unjaunty swear as the whole project unravels with tragic inevitability). I unveil an adapted version of this whistle at 7.45 on Saturday morning. This is my ‘oh-yes-I’m-going-to-walk-twenty-miles-it’s-going-to-be-a-doddle-and-what’s-more-I’ve-just-seen-a-treecreeper’ whistle.
What with the insistent piercing two-tone calls of several great tits, the melodious flutings of a robin and the explosive ‘Britain’s Got Really Loud Tiny Birds’ shoutiness of a trio of competing wrens, it takes a few seconds for the soft trilling of the treecreeper to register. But then recognition trickles into my morning brain and I take a moment to look for it.
I’m bad at seeing treecreepers. Their plumage is convincingly bark-like, and woodland makes all birds expert voice-throwers. But there it is, right in front of me, clinging to a large tree trunk. It creeps, it flies, and I move on, jaunty-whistling as if my life depends on it.
Mile 2
The rooks and jackdaws, wheeling about the top of the canopy, intensify their graws and chacks. I look up. Its shape and flight are unmistakeable.
Peregrine, no sooner seen than gone. But a glimpse is enough to add spring to the step.
Mile 3
Every time I see or hear a bird I get a little hit of pleasure, an injection of energy that makes everything just that little bit better.
Woodland? Nice enough. Woodland full of birds? Now you’re talking.
A blue tit is good for five strides of bounce; the treecreeper gave me a hundred-yard boost; the peregrine was a quarter-miler; now, as I emerge from the woodland and skirt the village before heading out onto the cliffs, the song of a yellowhammer perched on a bush propels me half a mile and more, up the muddy hill and over the stile and into open country.
Mile 4
Mud, mud, inglorious mud. A narrow path, flanked by brambles, more water than path. I can’t go over it, I can’t go round it…
For a while, the squelchiness carries with it a certain comfort.
For a while.
Mile 5
Words are great.
Niche words are excellent.
Niche words that are an anagram of ‘niche’ are the best.
You can imagine how much I love the word ‘chine’.
A chine is a particular kind of ravine created by stream erosion and leading to the sea. It’s a word used, as far as I know, only in the south of England. The Isle of Wight is a hotbed of chines and on this walk I am passing round or through fourteen of them. This part of the world is prone to landslips and general collapse. I duly heed the words of my mother, remembered from childhood: ‘Don’t go near the edge!’
Sometimes, though, near the edge is the only place you can go.
As I skirt Whale Chine I see two looming shapes and take a moment.
Ravens, perched on a signpost warning of coastal erosion. They are huge birds. What with the jays, rooks, magpies, jackdaws and carrion crows, and now these ravens, this is a six-corvid day – always a good thing. But their glowering presence so close to the cliff edge only serves to remind me of their association with death in all kinds of mythology and folklore. The cliff looks particularly unstable up ahead. The ravens send me on my way with a resonant gronk.
Huginn and Muninn, specifically sent by Odin to freak me out.
Don’t go near the edge.
Mile 6
In the distance, below the cliff, a scattering of corvids. Two shapes break rank, chase each other over the sea. They’re fast, nimble, somehow different. The chase takes them at dizzying speed out to sea and back again in what seems like play but what the scientists – spoilsports – would undoubtedly tell us has some other, less trivial significance. For the longest time the best I can do to identify them is the lacklustre ‘not crows’. It’s only when one of them hunches its shoulders and dives for a few seconds that I realise.
I’ve now seen more peregrines in two hours than I saw all last year.
Mile 7
Knowing I’d need it later for rendezvous coordination, I charged my phone and switched it off before I left. Now I switch it on.
7%.
WTF Apple?
It’s a good thing really. Now I won’t be tempted to ignore the majesty of Tennyson Down so I can check how many likes my photo of Tennyson Down has got on Instagram.
Anyway, back in the day we would have said ‘meet you at that cafe at 1.30’ and then we’d just have been in the cafe at 1.30 because there would have been no other way.
I hope I can be in the cafe by 1.30.
Mile 8
Open fields. Meadow pipits. Skylarks. A time machine.
1978 – the field on the corner by the bus stop always has a skylark, pouring – as the poet Shelley has it – from its full heart profuse strains of unpremeditated art while higher still and higher springing from the earth like a cloud of fire.
Once, I walked down the lane, the skylark’s looping song lingering in my head, but replaced as I approached the house by the sound of my father’s violin as he practised The Lark Ascending. A satisfying conjunction of nature and art, but with the deflating caveat that (whisper it soft) Vaughan Williams’ masterpiece leaves me unmoved, and longing to listen to some Stevie Wonder or Divine Comedy or George Gershwin or pretty much anything else as long as it has some oomph.
Mile 9
The humans I’ve met so far on the walk have been fine, but the dogs have been better. Here are two friendly Norwegian Elkhounds. Not ‘friendly’ as in ‘I’m a massive and uncontrolled muddy dog and I’m going to put my paws up on your shoulders, sending you tumbling to the ground, whereupon I’ll cover your face with gallons of drool while my pathetic owner stands by ineffectually chortling ‘oh he likes you’’ – no, ‘friendly’ as in ‘civilised dogs that trot politely towards you with a certain controlled eagerness and allow you to ruffle their neck and so on, but keep all their extremities and bodily fluids to themselves’.
These dogs too act as a time machine, reminding me of our own childhood pet, Poops. Poops was a fine and noble hound, part Border Collie and part Norwegian Elkhound.
Terrific moulter, dumb as a brick, excellent at chasing but not catching things.
Forty years on, I miss him still.
Mile 10
I’m getting blasé about peregrines. This one is briefly very close indeed, so I can see the details of its plumage, its black moustachial stripe manifesting as a wicked smile, the blue-grey of its back perfect and striking in the dull light. It’s gone in an instant, but its bird boost carries me past two chines and a deserted campsite.
Mile 11
I am imbued with Luffness, which, as anyone who has ever read that great and tiny book The Meaning of Liff will know, is the hearty feeling that comes from walking on the moors with gumboots and cold ears.
And muddy feet.
Mile 12
Mile 13
Two wheatears, low over the grass along the cliff edge ahead.
They’ve just flown here from Africa, which, no matter how blithely you say it, remains a bit of a huge fucking deal. AFRICA. That’s, like, miles. And they’re tidgy little things, no bigger than a coffee cup.
And yet, wheatears being wheatears, they remain perky as all get out. I, remembering only now just how stupidly long this part of the walk is, am on the point of collapse.
Mile 14
A pause. A drink. I look down.
There is a perfect water droplet nestling in the leaves of a something-or-other plant. There is no alternative but to get down on my stomach and photograph it.
Mile 15
To stand on a cliff edge listening to the draw of waves on shingle and feeling the salt wind in what’s left of your hair is one of those balms to the soul that make you forget the ache in your thighs and the uncomfortable realisation that you’ve still got five miles to go and you’re going to be about an hour late for your pre-arranged meeting.
If only I had some kind of mobile telephonic device with which to communicate this delay to my nearest and dearest.
Mile 16
I am assailed by a sense of Luffenham, that feeling you get when the pubs aren’t going to be open for another forty-five minutes and the Luffness is beginning to wear a bit thin.
Mile 17
A peregrine overtakes me. It flies on ahead, unhurried, in loping mode, the beat of its wings less than urgent, as if kindly showing the way to a fellow wanderer. The value of this bird boost at this stage in the walk cannot be calculated.
Mile 18
About five miles ago it became clear I had a blister forming on my left big toe. I’ve decided to call it Brexit. It’s unwelcome, painful, and I wish it would fuck off.
Mile 19
Freshwater is the beginning of the end. All that remains is an easy flat stroll along the Yar estuary. But I’m late, and I have no battery, and they’ll be getting worried. I accelerate. No time to stop. I ignore the jay that flies ahead of me into the canopy. I ignore the stupid robin singing its stupid song.
But some things stop you in your tracks, no matter what.
The lichen tree ghosts have risen. Surely it’s only a matter of time before we submit to their ghoulish ministrations?
Mile 20
My jaunty whistle returns as I enter Yarmouth, accompanied by two Mediterranean gulls and a little egret.
The cafe don’t do chips. They don’t do omelettes. They offer me a menu filled from top to toe with things I don’t want.
I simply don’t care.
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Loved this, especially mile 18.
Great stuff – love the way you’ve done this. I hope it was ok to share it on my site as an example of an easy way to make notes of a trip. Love the descriptions of the ‘friendly’ dogs.
I haven’t been to the IoW since I was a kid growing up in Gosport – an annual trip to the big sandy beach at Ryde – our side of the Solent just had pebbles.
Thank you! And of course thanks for sharing too. If you could just add a second ‘i’ to my surname after the ‘k’ my joy would be unconfined 🙂 (We love the beach at Ryde – at low tide it feels as if you could walk across to Portsmouth.
Correction done – apologies for the omission.