As spring gives way to summer and schools break up for the holidays, many people are planning for another a staycation in the UK. If you’ve been looking for a scenic walking route to follow and are wondering just how scenic it is, here’s one that I followed earlier this month, and I thought I’d share it in time for the Bank Holiday Monday.
One Sunday this May, I attempted Christopher Somerville’s circular walk from Rodmell to Harvey’s Cross and back, which had been published in The Times last year on July 4th.
I arrived in Rodmell as the Sunday service was drawing to a close at the parish church, and set out on the stony lane that led to the river Ouse as the clouds gathered, making the rapeseed fields shine ever more brightly in the distance. The grey-green waters in which Virginia Woolf chose to drown looked perilously swollen and I feared that my newspaper cutting – and the way back – would be lost to the rain, yet at Southease a kayaker propped his vessel up on the gate, ready to tempt fate. My attempt to take a break from map reading and follow a hiker soon came to nothing when he headed up a hedge-lined national speed road.
Making my own, or rather Christopher’s, way, I headed down into the chalk valley that ran through a farmer’s territory, the land of giant, scattered machinery, with black and white cows to my left and sheep to my right but no humans to appreciate the red and yellow tulips that the bees had introduced. A little black farm dog padded past, perhaps to check in on the half-finished barn and the newborn lambs in the shelter.
Continuing on, I was excited to see what appeared to be a “real” shepherd’s hut (not for holidaymakers) in a field of saturated green grass. The grass was fed well, no doubt, by the towering pile of what smelled like manure in the next field along. This place is called Cricketing Bottom. The road rises up and out of the valley from here, flanked by cowslips and settled with snails; hundreds, possibly thousands of snails. They filled the gaps in the hillside left exposed by soil erosion, they studded the path, some shattered but most whole. Having made my way to the top with a Buddhist’s concentration, my heart dropped to my stomach when I saw that someone had opened the gate to let their car through. No matter, I thought. The snails, perhaps with the wisdom of their years, perhaps due to the lack of moisture there, had avoided the car tracks. Yet luck was not with them that day, for the driver chose to keep their tyres on the raised grass. I exited the valley and this “Weird Walk” – its signposted name – with the silent screams of snails in my ears.
At Telscombe, the village in which I found myself, I wavered and abandoned Christopher’s route. No walker I spoke to here had heard of Harvey’s Cross (a monument named after a John Harvey who fell from his horse here and died), the sun had retreated to a spot above the offshore wind farm in the distance, and I did not want to risk taking a wrong turn in the shadowlands. I turned eastwards in search of the river.
As if to mock my decision, the sun showed its face again, bringing with it some butterflies, among them a red admiral, and a black bird with a white head. The descent into the river plain bore one final surprise: two common pheasants converging in the privacy of a meadow.
I met the river again as the watch struck four. The sun had won; the riverside, which had seemed gloomy at noon, was brightening and getting livelier by the minute. Though not the sun’s doing, even the lambs here were fading from black to white, an ovine variation on Hans Christen Andersen’s ugly duckling. As we approached the familiar eggshell green of Southease swing bridge, I began to feel the tiredness in my feet, as there was no more undiscovered ground to keep it at bay.
The long-winded loop round to Rodmell from here seemed to never end, but it did, and we returned to our starting point to the orderly scene of a cricket match by the church in the distance, punctuated just once by the panic of a cow in the foreground. It had stumbled into the water while craning to eat the juiciest leaves at the edge of the marsh. And so I found myself back in Rodmell, thinking of what I’d be having for my own dinner.
The River Ouse 
Bottoms, or Chalk Valleys 
Cricketing Bottom 
At the Edge of Telscombe 
Walking to the River Plain 
Southease Swing Bridge
The Pink Pigeon Post 