A Bug's Life

I have been slightly fascinated by long journeys on foot since school, and reading Thomas Hardy, whose poor characters must take arduous trips across country to find work, take livestock to market, or escape their dreadful past. Need to go from London to Bath? Walk. No trains. Nearest church three miles away? Walk. Unless you're posh and have a carriage. It takes a long time, but you get there in the end. If I reread the books I expect I would see that the journeys shadow the characters' development as they go from one place to another literally and figuratively and the events or conversations en route shape them. Nothing gets you talking like a two-week walk. My trip today was not such an intense personal journey, thankfully.

I had planned two options: walk to and/or from Waterbeach, or walk all the way to Ely. Ely is 17-18 miles away, and I've not walked that distance in one day in a great many years. I was delighted to find myself still going strong at Waterbeach (I'm a bit slow but very steady), and decided to keep walking all the way to Ely. My stamina stays with me, like a rock, but my speed rather got away from me some years ago and I can't catch it up :-) 17.5 miles in 7.5 hours, including a couple of stops at pubs, so maybe 6 hours walking. The last mile was hard work. Home by 7pm to give my feet some tlc; Simon made dinner (smoked salmon and veg couscous) which was nice.

They have changed the universe since I last looked at it. Locks on the river are not gates that you push open, they raise straight up on a hoist. Pubs are not marked as PH on the Ordnance Survey maps; this has been replaced by an icon of a pint pot, the old-fashioned sort that you rarely see in actual pubs these days. I can understand why they decided to use a picture rather than letters, but it's a pity they've gone for something already anachronistic.

Walking. Yes - the Fen Rivers Way is a smooth but busy path to Clayhithe, then it empties and is no longer paved. Sometimes it is nice, flat, springy grass to walk on (in one place, so freshly mowed I could see the mower driving away), in others it was deep grass or uneven so I had to be careful not to twist my ankle. Mostly it followed the river, often along the top of the flood defences from which you can see for miles; sometimes it deviated into a bit of field or woodland, which made a nice change. Blackberries, bunny rabbits, a hedgeful of sparrows (not an eighties pop band), rowers and narrowboats and shiny motor launches, and some wonderful scenes of cropped trees against the clear sky when the light was just right (which wasn't often).

Next - 50 miles in a long weekend? 100 miles in a week?