Day One
- Baseball cap – check
- Wash bag – check
- Waterproof coat – check
- Unfeasibly heavy walking boots – check
- Age- appropriate hoody – check
- Towel – check
- Appropriate number of books – check.
What can the above mean? Well, clearly that this years’ set of journeys is about to begin. The above was a harder list than it would appear to sort out – the age-appropriate hoody had disappeared during my move and the task of finding it was akin to Schliemann finding Troy. Also, what is an appropriate number of books? Hmm – two train journeys, two overnight stays. Normally three would be sufficient (two is actually sufficient, and the third is an emergency book). However, as I’m already halfway through one book, four is the final figure scientifically arrive at. There’s also a bag of cables, plugs and chargers to go along with my iPhone and iPad.
But the preparations are ready, and I’m off to the Quantocks. When I’ve spoken to people about these journeys the second questions to be asked is always “What are you going to do about xx?” “xx” varies between Q, V, J and Z. (The first question is always something checking my sanity or asking me to repeat myself). I always knew Q was going to be challenging. Various cheats were suggested to me:
a) The Queen’s House
A possibility – but a bit sad only travelling 2 miles.
b) Kew
Tempting – I liked the idea of the pun. But as I used to live about half a mile from Kew Gardens I wasn’t hugely keen on it.
Which did leave me with a problem as there aren’t many places in England that start with Q. Of course I did consider approaching the problem from a completely different angle and just visiting Q.
There are a couple of problems with this:
- Q is n omniscient, near-omnipotent, pan-dimensional being who could be anywhere in the universe. So he’s unlikely to be within reach of the UK train network;
- Q is remarkably irascible and his response to my usual level of sarcasm will probably result in me being turned into a Mellanoid Slime-worm;
- Q ISN’T REAL (probably).
All of which is the preamble to saying that I decided to go to The Quantocks.
The day starts sunny and with me sat impatiently at home. My ticket is a Super Off Peak Ticket (again) which means I can’t start my travels until 10:30. Unless, of course, I sit around at home with my bag packed and my increasing level of impatience leads me to head out far too early. I think you know by now which option I selected. And so, I head off to Slough Railway Station. The sunny day tricks me into wearing a T-shirt and leaving the hoody in my pack. As I walk down the road I see an excellent example of parenting – a young woman pushing a child in a pushchair, one hand holding onto a toddler’s hand while she is totally engrossed in something earth-shattering on her phone. Marveling at her advance social skills, I get to the station without incident, get my ticket and head out to the platform.
I feel strangely euphoric and stop at Pumpkin for a cappuccino and a blueberry muffin, my euphoria stopping me from remembering my previous disappointment at the flavourless coffee they serve. One sip and my taste-buds forcefully remind me and the cappuccino ends up in the bin. The blue berry muffin is pretty good and loaded with so much fruit that it has compromised the structural integrity of the muffin. By the time the train arrives I look like a blueberry serial killer.
My book, by the way, is Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham. Put the smutty minds away please, it’s not about that sort of bondage. Not a bad book though – if a tad overlong.
The train arrives and a woman steps in front of me to get on carrying a clear plastic sack half full of rubbish. For a moment I think this is someone making an avant-garde statement about capitalism, but it turns out just to be the cleaner. Disappointed, I manage to snare my first table of this years tour – which I manage to keep to myself for the whole journey. Across the aisle two young women are having an animated conversation, despite the fact that they are both texting as they speak – proof that women really can multi-task. I would like to be able to ignore their conversation but cannot and soon know more about eye-liner and moisturiser than I would ever wish to know. That and the fact that one of them just broke up with Piers after they had an argument over text. I avoid eye contact with the Cliche Twins and return to my book, hoping that the tickets aren’t checked between here and Reading.
I start to wonder which platform my train will be leaving from at Reading Station. Will it be 7B? Virtually every other journey west of Reading has gone via there and I’m starting to think that the rest of the platforms are just there for camouflage. I get there and, yes it’s 7B. Once again vying for its’ title as the Coldest Place in the Universe, I sit shivering on the platform. I have 20 minutes to wait, though someone is messing with me as every time I look up, the train is delayed by another minute. After a while, it’s like watching a car crash – I want to stop myself looking at it, but I just have to check! Eventually the train turns up and I snag a seat in the warm.
Once we’re underway, I head for the toilets and discover that it’s an automated one. Getting in I turn around to look for the button that closes the door – to find there isn’t one. While I’m searching for it a voice repeatedly tells me to “Please lock the door.” Well, yes I will as soon as I can close the damned thing. Eventually I look behind me and find the controls – nowhere near the door. I close and lock it and am then faced with the dilemma faced by all men when urinating on a train – stand or sit? Sitting to urinate always seems odd, but standing on a moving train does run the risk of…spillage. I naturally take the only route I can and stand. Successfully navigating this hurdle, I then turn to wash my hands and find there are no taps, only sensors that you pass your hands under to get soap, water and hot air. What a shame the water sensor seems to be non-functional. Grabbing some toilet paper, I try to wipe my hands clean and return to my seat, wishing I had some hand gel in the rucksack. I continue reading while trying not to touch anything — not easy.
I get distracted by the woman sitting slightly ahead of me across the aisle. She clearly takes a relaxed view to traveling on the train as she is slumped in her chair with her laptop on the flap in front of her. She has taken her shoes off – I can tell as she has her left leg raised with her foot braced against the seat in front of her at the level of her laptop – giving me an excellent view of her animal-print socks. Her relaxed posture is offset by the fact she has one hand on her forehead and she keeps muttering “Jesus” to herself — not totally to herself obviously, or I wouldn’t have heard her. I am a bit concerned that the son of God has been emailing her, until I realise she has a headset on and she is talking to someone on it. I also then realise just how intrusive I’m being, so I plough on with my book.
Taunton station arrives without further incident. Some of my friends have been posting pictures of stations recently but I decide not to include Taunton as it is a particularly unattractive edifice. As I head into town, I walk through a really shabby area and to my joy see that this is where my hotel is (The Royal Ashton). I can’t check in until later, so head on into the Town Centre and discover what seems to be the hotel’s main selling point – it’s only 100 yds from the police station.
A friend on mine had warned me that Taunton was a bit of a hole. I ignored his comment as he lives in Bristol, and therefore his judgement is questionable. However, As I walk to the Town Centre, I find myself agreeing. There’s little here to impress – unless the sheer volume of undertakers is something that impresses you. I walk past four in a very short space of time. One even has a linked hospice and a remarkable good deal on cremations (£1150 for basic – book now to avoid disappointment). This makes me think there is a largely elderly population, but I then spot 6 tattoo parlours (3 on the same corner). An elderly rocker population?
As I get into the centre of town proper, things look slightly better. Taunton seems to have suffered a lot less than other town centres around the country and has markedly less closed shops and pound shops. It’s also got some nice architecture – a lot of which are around the paved road in the centre.
My main aim this afternoon is to get some maps of the Quantocks so I can plan my walk into the hills tomorrow. I head into the Tourist Information Office, grab a map and a bus timetable before continuing my exploration. As I walk around, I have to agree with my friend – there isn’t much here to recommend it, although there are some places of interest.
I also find this place:
I have to wonder just how much competition there is for the Taunton Deane Borugh Council & Somerset County Gazette Curry Restaurant of the Year. But they seem very proud of winning it four times.
I look for somewhere decent to have lunch and give up and head for Nando’s. As I sit down, it occurs to me that I haven’t heard any regional accents at all. As I mull over that, I do some checking to find out where the cinema is. I have tickets for this evening and want to make sure I get there in good time. To my surprise, I find that it’s right out on the edge of town and will be quite a hike to get there.
Chicken finished, I head back over the river towards the hotel. I’m very disappointed that it’s not the River Taunt -instead it’s the river Tone, Taunton meaning “town on the Tone”. Whatever it’s called, it’s not hugely scenic. As I head back, I find myself getting increasingly frustrated with the pedestrian crossings, all of which seem to end up with stationary queues of traffic and the pedestrian signal still telling you that you cannot cross.
I head back to the Royal Ashton Hotel and check in. The hotel is alright – that is to say, there’s nothing essentially wrong with it. On the other side, there’s nothing that makes me excited or want to stay here again. It’s also the only hotel Ive come across that provides this:
In case it’s not clear, that’s a sink, electric hob, microwave and fridge. Like I said, odd.
I still have 3 hours to go before the screening at the cinema is due to start. But the Map function on my iPhone reckons it’ll take me over an hour to walk there and I rationalise that as it’s outside town, there must be a load of other things there that I can do while waiting. So I head off, first dumping the walking boots I’ve been clumping around in for a much lighter pair of trainers.
My route goes through some extremely depressed areas – I’m not looking forward to walking back through them after dark – as well as some much nicer areas which have some interesting buildings scattered amongst them.
I later learn this used to be where the lepers were made to live. As I progress, the route takes me through some more modern estates and then sends me along the verge of a dual carriageway — and then across is. Which is exciting. Eventually I get to the cinema over 2 hours before the film starts – and then discover that there is nothing here except a Hollywood Bowl and a McDonalds. It looks like I’m going to be sat in the foyer eating junk food for 2 hours. But I give it a go, show my ticket to the guy behind the counter and ask if he can swap it for an earlier screening. Luckily for me, he has no problems doing that and I find myself blindly groping my way to my seat just in time for the previews.
And then I sit there for over 3 hours. The film – Avengers; Endgame. Wow – what a great film.
At the end of the film, I leave completely satisfied and glad I made the effort to see this at the cinema. I then start the long hike back to the hotel – shorter as this time I look at the map myself and come up with a route that is 20 minutes shorter and doesn’t mean I have to walk along the verge anywhere. It also takes me alongside a quite attractive part of the Tone.
As I get closer to the hotel, the skyline is dominated by the floodlights from the Somerset County Cricket Ground. Though as I look at it, I am reminded of HG Wells’ martians and expect them to use their heat rays on the church.
But there is no cry of “UuuLaa” and I get back to my hotel without incident. On the whole, this has been a good start and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
Day Two
The next day dawns early for me – I wake up at around 3am and I doze fitfully from then onwards. Nothing to do with the room, that’s just the way my sleep pattern seems to work. Today I’m off to the Quantocks proper and my plan is to get a bus to Crowcombe and then walk the hills to Bishop’s Lydeard. It looks like about 10 miles. I don’t know how long it will take me and although I’d like to get to a pub for lunch, it might not be possible. So I head off to Morrisons to grab some provisions – and to fortify myself with their Big Breakfast (no tomato, please).
Which is simply splendid. Great start to the day and I head up to the Train Station to catch my bus. It’s a fine, sunny morning and as I sit waiting for it it strikes me how quiet it is here. Although there is a minor hum of traffic, it’s far less than I’m used to and the main noises here are birds singing. It’s almost like being on holiday.
The bus driver is incredibly friendly and agrees to give me a call when we get to the Crowcombe stop. As we drive along, I can see the line of hills to the east, which look distressingly high. I fervently hope they’re a bit lower at Crowcombe — they’re not. I have finally managed to find some people with local accents, though far milder than I expected.
Crowcombe itself is a little village nestling at the foot of the Quantocks. I get off and start to walk towards the hills. I have put together a route on the map and as I progress I’m glad to see that I haven’t lost my map-reading skills. Just as I think this, I realise I’ve missed the first path I could have taken so I decide that I didn’t want that one anyway and trudge onwards.
As I head out of Crowcombe, the road heads up a 1 in 4 incline. All I can hear as I head up it is me – boots clumping and creaking, rucksack creaking and my heavy breathing. I stop for a breather and notice another noise – my heart thumping in my chest. I realise I’ve been approaching the hill as though I was 25 years old, so I head on at a much slower and more measured pace. I pass a few people working the fields and a cheerful man driving a tractor. As I toil up the hill, I encounter someone jogging down it. He grins and says “I’ll be like that on the way back up.” I grin and choke back my response of “Yeah, if you add 10 stone and 20 years, mate.”
Forty five minutes later, I get to the top of the ridge-line just south of Crowcombe Park and look back to get an excellent view across the valley. My Fitbit has my heart-rate at 140 and I’m feeling every one of my 55 years. I get a bottle of water out of the rucksack and take the opportunity to rehydrate. I check the map and I am where I wanted to be – on the MacMillan Way West. I plan to follow this to Cathelstone Hill.
While I’m recovering enjoying the view, a lady comes along with her two dogs and I’m clearly a threatening looking fellow as she puts them on their leads. Of course, she could be worried about them attacking me but I fancy my chances against 2 overweight spaniels. She walks past clad in her windbreaker and green wellies while I face one of the most disgusting things known to man – putting a wet rucksack on over a sweaty shirt. With a shudder I complete this task and head on.
The path runs along the ridgeline and gives some lovely views to both east and west. It’s largely sheltered by trees, which often make it feel more enclosed than it actually is.
It is possible to take a lower route that heads down towards West Bagborough but I decided to maintain my elevation (a lesson well learned when playing Tomb Raider.) As I get down to my first waypoint, I stop for a discussion with someone heading in the other direction and we compare maps. As I walk on it strikes me that hiking/walking is one of those pastimes that creates a community that encourages people to talk to each other. I know that I strike up conversations much easier than I ever would when I’m in town.
As I approach Wills Neck, I’m faced with a decision – the slow hard way or the short extremely hard way.
The right hand route is clearly going to be tougher – but I’ll be over it much faster. So that’s the route I choose. I then find it’s steeper than I thought and delightfully unstable underfoot, so I’m very hot and sweaty when I manage to scramble to the top. The top is more like moorland and with Exmoor ponies everywhere.
Actually, I though they were horses but I’m reliably informed they’re ponies.
I carry on and get to the point where I could head down to West Bagborough and a much shorter walk. Despite my legs and feet aching, I’m enjoying this and so I decide to head on. The Macmillan Way West now heads along a bridle path at the edge of a wooded area. And so I get to deal with a route that should be straightforward and simple, but has been churned up into a glutinous morass by the horse-riders that have been using it. So instead, I get to take a more indirect route which involves clambering over ankle-turning roots and along narrow paths. I mutter darkly to myself as I imagine people called Jacinta and Harnsworth as they ride to and fro deliberately making walking a living hell.
By the time I’m two thirds of the way I’m definitely flagging. The MWW now heads along roads for a short while and skirts some attractive woods where the bluebells are out in force.
While the road is harder, it’s easy to walk on. Then I have to cut up through the woods to the summit of Cothelstone Hill. The path is small and twisting and gets progressively steeper until I come out of the woods and onto the bare top of Cothelstone Hill. This is one of those hills with about 3 false summits but, gasping, I get to the top where I am rewarded with an excellent view in all directions. My job is dulled when a woman walks by carrying a Starbucks cup and I have visions of a service station just over the brow of the hill. This turns out not to be the case and after some more water, I head down towards Bishop’s Lydeard.
The descent is worse than the ascent in many ways. My boots are increasingly uncomfortable and the steep descent is putting a lot of strain on my knees. I have a bit of a navigational mishap on the way down through the bluebell woods and end up going down what is obviously a mountain biking track. Eventually I come out at Cothelstone and head down some minor roads to Bishop’s Lydeard.
Bishop’s Lydeard is a village with an impressive church at its’ heart.
It also contains the Lethbridge Arms, where I stagger inside and order some suitable refreshment and their Chip Shop Platter.
My legs tell me that I deserve this. My feet tell me that they’re going to kill me in my sleep. A group sits close by and I smile as I finally listen to the thick Somerset accents I had been expecting – so thick I almost need subtitles to understand the conversation I’m eavesdropping on. I’m not the only one to have trouble with it – the landlord has to get them to repeat their order twice before he gets it right.
The food is great, but when I go to stand my knees have locked up and I hobble down the road to the bus stop. Luckily it’s only 200 yards. All I want to do now is get back to the hotel and get these boots off – I really wish the hotel room had a bath in it.
I stagger back to the hotel and collapse. I’d planned to go out this evening, but fall asleep and wake up just in time to watch Bake Off: The Professionals and then asleep again.
Day Three
I have a terrible nights sleep. The fridge (or something in that bizarre kitchen unit) is making a loud humming noise, so I wake up at about 1am and get broken sleep from then on. I eventually give up at around 8:30am.
The plan for today is to do some geocaching while I wait for my Super Off Peak ticket to be valid. I’ve checked it on the Trainline app and found the first valid train to be at 10:30.
I head out to find that it’s lightly drizzling – like the diffident touch of a vicar when you stand on his foot. My knees are suffering today so I’m wearing my trainers and as my boots won’t fit in the rucksack, I have them lashed to the back of it. I head to Morrison’s where I’m tempted to have the Big Breakfast again – but as I’m not walking much today, I go for scrambled eggs on toast instead. They are pretty good – and that’s pretty much the last good thing that happens this morning.
The geocaching does not go well:
#1 – Did Not Find (DNF) – behind a locked gate;
#2 – DNF micro hidden in an ivy covered tree. (A “micro” is a cache that is less than 1cm square);
#3 – DNF – hidden at the end of a fence which either requires scaling said fence (which is at the top of a steep embankment into a river) or fighting through a hawthorn bush;
#4 – DNF – micro hidden in a huge multi-trunk tree;
#5 – DNF – another micro hidden in an ivy covered tree. But which one? There are 6 here.
What makes it worse is that the last 4 are part of a series. A series is usually constructed so that you can easily get from one to another. This one continually crosses the Tone – at places where there is no bridge. By this stage, I have wet feet due to walking across fields and am rapidly losing my patience. My comments on the caches get less and less complimentary. I do, however, find a “living sculpture” – the Willow Cathedral.
The Willow Cathedral is apparently home to birds and spiders – but all I find is three-quarters of a bicycle and a pile of beer cans. I give the geocaching one more try – and succeed!
The last cache for the day is at the train station. It looks easy but requires a lot of highly suspicious lurking around peoples cars. As I’m doing this I look across the station to see a train stationary at one of the platforms – and , yes, it’s the one I want to catch. I start to head for it just as it pulls out, leaving me with a one hour weight for my next train.
So I settle down in Starbucks and wonder if I can nurse my cappuccino for that long. I have started a new book – Nerilka’s Story by Anne McCaffrey. It’s a novella set in her “dragon” world of Pern and as I read it I smile to myself as I imagine George R Martin’s horror at a story that contains less than 100 characters and takes less than 4000 pages to tell. It also doesn’t need an ego the size of Jupiter to write it.
Chuckling to myself, I nearly miss the next train – I had assumed all London trains would use the same platform (after all, that’s what happens virtually everywhere else!). Luckily I spot my mistake with 5 minutes to spare and get to the platform just as the train pulls in. I then manage to snare one side of a table – it’s flagged as reserved from Plymouth but the man sat opposite says no-one has been there so they clearly aren’t on the train. I and my rucksack take possession.
At Reading, they try to fool me with another platform charge, but I’m onto them now and I find my connecting train patiently waiting for me. I have a brief conversation with a woman who seems to have recently been through a particularly powerful wind tunnel. She is complaining about the Departures Board – specifically the “Next Train to..” board which fails to take into account the time that it takes someone to get to the appropriate platform. I run through a whole range of sarcastic responses but instead I shrug and grin and return to book. I then get to listen to her having a good moan to the man with the refreshments trolley. I consider telling her about the Trainline app – but decide not to get involved. I’m also feeling smug as the train is crowded and I’ve managed to keep a double seat for the final leg of the journey.
Once back a Slough, it’s a blessedly short stagger home where I can get ready for R.
Artificial Constructs 