The day dad joined – 27 aug, 2018
Day 22 Land’s End to John O’Groats – Ross-On-Wye to Hereford
Distance: 28km
Cumulative distance: 550km
Exciting times…Dad joined me on the trail today! I’d suggested to Mum and Dad before I left that they should come over and do a stretch with me, citing the stretch up the Welsh border as probably the best section. Lisa is due to have a baby in mid October, so that would allow them about a three week window and still be back in plenty of time for the arrival of their first grand baby. I must admit when I threw it out there before I left, I didn’t expect it to become a reality but they told me a couple of weeks ago that they were coming and I almost fell over! Ever since I was bitten by this long-distance walking bug I thought it’d be something Dad would absolutely love, and finally the day had arrived for us to pound some path together. Mum was going to play her part too – she had the hire car and over the course of the next couple of weeks would meet us for lunch and try and figure out places we could stay each night. It was a logistically tricky endeavour given we were embarking on a fairly rural stretch, but we were determined to make it all work.
We bid farewell to Bird and Amy after brekky, and I’m happy to say they were moving slightly more freely than 24 hours ago. Then we headed down to the River Wye where they were holding a very busy regatta. We were on the Wye Valley Walk again today and headed for Hereford. After leaving the hustle and bustle of the regatta behind, we found a peaceful stretch along the river where a bunch of swans were trying to battle the current and head upstream. It was incredible how hard they were working in the water. One in particular caught my eye – it was using its wings as sails and seemed to be less exhausted then his peers. This river seemed to be getting nicer and nicer the further we followed it upstream, and the swans and ducks seemed to love it. We passed fields of potatoes and turnips, an old bridge which only had its pylons still standing and another ruined stone building before walking through the little village of Hole in the Wall.
So far the walking had been pretty steady along the river, and we’d made pretty decent time. We’d estimated a 1pm rendezvous with Mum in a place called Fownhope for lunch but we’d severely underestimated how far away that was. Unfortunately we had no way of contacting her either given I was the only one in our party with a UK sim. I was out of mobile data unfortunately, so we tried sending her a Whatsapp message off Dad’s phone on the off chance she stumbled across some wifi, but that didn’t work either. So we just pressed on. The river steered away from us, and we walked for a while with a forest on our right. That turned into a hill and we skirted around and eventually up it, after taking a couple of unnecessary diversions.
We’d walked uphill on the road, and I’d taken us off on a public footpath to the left a bit too early, which skirted us around three sides of a pretty hefty field before we rejoined the road where we needed to be. I’ve been using 1:50,000 ordinance survey maps on this walk which have been fantastic, but occasionally the minor roads are a little bit difficult to follow. That is they’ll quite often resemble a T intersection on the map, when really it’s more a case of the main road continues on and there’s another road shooting out to one side. It means misreading the map occurs occasionally, and the key is realising you’ve gone wrong before you’ve busted out an extra mile or two and have to reroute. Fortunately it doesn’t happen too often, and this time it just added a bit of a scenic detour which presented us with the odd view back over Herefordshire, and that wasn’t bad at all. At the top of the hill we found a few carved wooden sculptures of different animals, then we descended steeply towards Fownhope. Just as we thought we were coming up on the town we had to stride uphill again, and finally after one more sharp downhill we could see the church in the distance. A few moments later about an hour late, we came to Mum’s Volkswagen and apologised for our tardiness! Down the road we found a lovely country pub and after a spot of much-needed nourishment, set off again.
We crossed the main road, and headed uphill to a sprawling farm. After lapping around a field full of cattle we finally found the way out, and continued on across several large fields full of sheep. They saw us coming and started bleating, and pretty soon it sounded like every sheep in Herefordshire was joining in the Monday afternoon song. They cleared out of our road as we pushed on across at least a mile’s worth of field, before coming upon some farm buildings and jumping over a couple of gates. We’d clearly lost the main path, but a lady on the farm told us where we needed to go to rejoin it. Down the driveway and away from the farm we walked through a couple of villages between the hills, through a mini apple orchard, past an old mill and some old churches, and tudor houses, some topped with thatched roofs. Then we came to the River Lugg, a tributary of the Wye, and walked parallel to it for a little while before crossing a busy road and walking through seemingly endless fields of turnips.
The day was getting long by this point and I was starting to feel for Dad, who was starting to max out given it was his first day and we’d long since passed the 20km mark. You think I’d have learned after dragging Bird and Amy halfway across the country in one day! The outskirts of Hereford came upon us, and we walked for a long, long way down the main road into town, then turned off for something quieter and walked another long stretch past some estate-like housing. A sign told us we had a mile to the Hereford Cathedral near the centre of town. Ten minutes later we came to a little church, and Dad said rather hopefully ‘Is that Hereford Cathedral?’
‘Nope’, I replied.
‘Shit’, he said.
The poor bugger was really starting to feel it, as was I to be fair, and I’d made sure we’d maintained a very solid pace for the past five km or so to get us closer to our end point as quickly as possible. When we did stumble across the cathedral it was absolutely splendid, towering over the town and built back in the Triassic Period or something like that like so many of these English churches seem to be. I just checked, construction started some time during the 11th century. We walked through the grounds and gave it a quick glance before pushing on to our accommodation and calling it a day. We headed back to, Mordiford, a village we’d walked through earlier to a pub called the Moon Inn. Unfortunately Dad ate some dodgy salmon and it looks like that’ll knock him out of action for tomorrow, so I shall tackle the 35ish km to Hay-On-Wye myself.
