Wolds Way Day 2

South Cave - Goodmanham

Thankfully the Fox and Coney were happy to upgrade our breakfast to a cooked one, for a small extra fee.  Apparently we had only booked for cold continental breakfasts.  With this fuel inside us, Jill dropped me at the top of the village and I set off into the warming day.  A climb up to a Woodland Trust forest led to classic Wold countryside of steeply curving valleys and rolling hilltops.  One hillside provided the site of an unexpected vineyard, Little Wold.  I wonder what Yorkshire wine tastes like?  Beyond here Drewton Estate signs warned passing walkers to behave themselves.  As if we wouldn’t.  A bloke walking the other way said hello and just as I was replying a hen pheasant burst squawking out of the undergrowth, surprising us both.  ‘We’ve just missed lunch,’ he said.  Over the fields of oilseed rape, skylarks were singing incessantly, and in the valleys butterflies, including a common blue or two, flitted about in the sun.  Along one field I passed a couple from Kirkby Stephen who had also been staying in the Fox and Coney.  They were walking the Way and were staying in many of the same places as us.  We expected to see each other quite often.

Hessleskew farm has a particularly unattractive farmhouse, like a sprayed-concrete, plastic-windowed version of a traditional farmhouse.  The grim industrial sheds were at least livened up by the swallows that flew in and out but they couldn’t quite bring me out of the mood that was settling on me.  My foot, sore from the day before, wasn’t feeling too good.  All I could comfort myself with was the fact that this was going to be the shortest day of the week and therefore I would have the most time to recover.

Beyond Arras farm was a rather long, dull stretch of walking alongside a cornfield, rising up to the horizon on the left, and a high hedgerow to the right, leaving no view but the monotony of the path in front.  The next field was also huge, this time full of oilseed rape that hung over the path, whipping my arms with seedpods and smudging my trousers with pollen from the flowers.  At the bottom of the valley I popped into Rifle Butts Quarry.  An exposed section of hillside shows an interesting arrangement of rock strata.  Interesting if you’re a geologist, I suppose.  I passed on.  It wasn’t far from Goodmanham, but it was all road walking, meaning my foot was giving me a certain amount of trouble.  I almost limped into the village, with its pretty church, and up the road to the welcome sight of the Goodmanham Arms.  Jill had just arrived and was sitting at a sunny table in the yard.  Brewery equipment was strewn over a number of the tables – they had just returned from a beer festival – and the air was heavy with malt from the next batch.  Inside, the pub was contrastingly dark after the brightness outside.  The walls were wood panelled, the floors were russet and black tiles, and the place was split into little snugs by wooden partitions.  It looked a wonderful place to spend some time.  The Goodmanham Ales dark mild was offered at £2 a pint and, though it perhaps wasn’t the appropriate drink for a warm day, I couldn’t resist.  Sadly the Gooders Gold pale ale had just gone off.

Our accommodation for the night was in Shiptonthorpe, a village which didn’t offer much in the way of pubs or restaurants, so we called into Market Weighton to see what there was there.  Not a lot, it turned out, but one pub, the Bay Horse, was doing food that evening.  First we went to check in at the Shiptonthorpe Arms (not a pub, just a B&B).  There was no one around so we called the advertised number and a bloke turned up almost immediately.  The rooms were all freshly decorated and very nicely done, with every facility you might need.  There was also a kitchen and lounge area for use by the guests.  With everything being so neat and nice, the price was a certain fussiness.  ‘The cardinal sin is locking your key in your room.’  ‘Don’t eat takeaways in your room: they are smelly, greasy and stain the upholstery.’

We had no intention of doing that.  The Bay Horse served a good pint of Great Newsome brewery beer, Frothingham Best, and a decent, pub-grubby meal.  An oldish couple complained about their meal – the pigeon inedible, the baked potato uncuttable – and made a bit of a fuss about it, insisting on paying despite the landlady’s offer not to charge.  She seemed a little upset so we reassured her we were happy with our food.

Wolds Way Day 1

Hessle to South Cave

Hessle Haven used to be a busy boat-building area.  Jill’s old guidebook to the Wolds Way describes the noise of the hammers and the rivets ringing across the small inlet from the Humber.  These days it is rather seedy.  The Ferryboat Inn, which marks the start of the walk, is an abandoned Italian restaurant, though it still bears a moulded, if painted over, sign above the door.  It’s hardly a glamorous launchpad for the forthcoming journey.

A cool breeze was blowing and taking the edge off the temperature until we – Jill, my driver and sometime companion for the week, and I – walked along the leafy edge of the river towards the Humber Bridge.  The water was flat and muddy with light playing on its surface as clouds scudded by overhead.  The estuary was made of patterns in different shades of brown.  Above all this rose the magnificence of the bridge itself.  It might look a bit stumpy and have a somewhat dated brutalist style about it, but the scale of it is still impressive, soaring over the water to distance Lincolnshire.  Below, at the car park, is a carved stone which makes a rather more decorous kicking off point for the walk.  We took pictures and said our goodbyes until South Cave.

Pavements took me under the bridge as far as the old Hessle Whitings (i.e. chalk) mill, now the entrance to the country park, after which the Trans-Pennine Trail whizzed me along the foreshore towards North Ferriby.  The turgid river was my beige companion on this stretch.  Unused to walking by water, I found myself looking at the wildflowers and shrubs around me, trying to guess what they were, rather than looking at the riverine scenery.  Lincolnshire skulked on the far side when I looked, showing factories or mines or other unlovely sights.

At North Ferriby I had a choice between low tide or high tide routes.  It was bang on high tide but I chose the low tide route.  This was a mistake.  After a very short section on the water’s margin, the tide was too high up and the onward route meant clambering across the boulders that made up the sea defence.  Not being one to go back, I carried on anyway, turning the walk into something like the top of a Lakeland or Scottish fell.  At one point I found myself tippy-toey along the boulders past a car park full of people sitting in their cars, staring out at the estuary and waiting for me to fall on my face.  I didn’t, thankfully.  The small bonus of taking this option was that I had a lovely walk through the woods at the far end, with dappled sunlight lighting up the forest floor.

Out of the woods, I took a wrong turn in attempting to cross the A63.  The guidebook said turn left, so I did.  When I found myself in a tunnel decorated with children’s murals of the bridge, I decided I had probably gone wrong and turned back.  What the guidebook should have said is turn right, then left (the road you want to cross is higher up than the footpath you’re on, so you have to go right to get up onto it).  The road was busy and noisy and, on the far side, it was good to hurry away into the peace of some more woodland.

I had a stop for lunch in the pretty village of Welton, sitting by the mill stream in front of the church.  The ducks paddled over to see if I was going to share any of my sandwiches.  They were out of luck.  After lunch, when I stood up, I found that the pain I had felt earlier in my left foot was worse.  With my boot off I discovered that my sock was twisted round and had been rubbing against the sole of my foot.  I righted the sock and hoped for the best.  It still didn’t feel good.

The path climbed higher and the landscape opened out into fields of crops.  Wildflowers crowded the edges of the paths, mostly cow parsley, campions and buttercups but also speedwells, forget-me-nots and many others I couldn’t name.  The fields were a stony mix of chalk and sand, and were sown with wheat and barley, still unripe.  Oilseed rape was already in bloom, colouring the hillsides, and bright red poppies dotted the edges of the yellow.

Near Wauldby a bloke and his dog caught up with me as I photographed poppies.  He asked the way to Nut Wood – he was wandering randomly without a map after visiting his mother in Hull – and, as it was in my direction for a little while, asked if it was ok to walk with me.  Naturally I didn’t decline although he set off at rather a faster pace than I would have gone on my own.  Every now and then he would call the dog to heel and I wasn’t quite sure if it was called Mungo or Mongo.  The latter I hope, though the possibility of the former had me singing, ‘In the Summertime’.

At Brantingham church I saw another person – I didn’t see many – and waved from a distance.  The final stretch was in sight and I was feeling quite good, bar the slight pain in my left foot.  It felt very hot dropping into South Cave and I was looking forward to my pint in the Fox and Coney.  The room there was decent – good size, clean, facilities in working order – and I was glad of a shower before coming down for dinner.  Jill’s friend Judy, who lives nearby, joined us for an excellent meal, washed down with some excellent beer (Crystal Jade, brewed for the pub and only £3 a pint).  We popped over the road for one at the Bear Inn but it wasn’t quite as salubrious a place and quickly returned.

At some point in the night, I think it was 4am, I woke from my sleep to close the bedroom window to shut out the sound of the chiming of the clock tower a few metres away from my room.  The tower was lit up pink by the rising sun and a half-moon hung palely in the blue sky.

Into the Wild

Into the Wild

Chris McCandless had just graduated from college when he disposed of pretty much everything he owned and walked away from his family, never contacting them again.  He spent two years tramping round America, sleeping rough, performing manual labour and occasionally travelling just for the sake of it.  His dream throughout that time was to visit Alaska – an Alaska created in his mind by reading Jack London books – and live in the wilds, living off the land.  After almost three months of this, in a malnutritioned and weakened state, he was poisoned by some of the berries he had collected and he died in the abandoned bus where he had been living.  When his remains were found, and his identity sort after and discovered, his story found some notoriety, which was bolstered further when Jon Krakauer expanded a magazine article he had written about McCandless into a book, Into the Wild.  Sean Penn subsequently turned the book into a film.

The story caused some controversy.  Was McCandless a naïve fool to head out into the wilderness with few skills and a romantic notion about casting off the chains of modern society?  Or was his romantic dream a noble ambition, serving as an inspiration for all those disaffected with the turns Western culture has taken?  Krakauer’s superbly readable, moving and intelligent book paints a more complicated picture of the young man at its heart.  In the end I was left feeling that this was the unhappy result of that youthful excess of passion, the belief in an absolutism that detests compromise.  Western society, he felt, with its hypocrisy and greed should be rejected in favour of a life more in tune with and respectful of nature.  To him it was either black or it was white.  Hence the rejection of his family, a callous and hurtful thing to do, as we can see.  But I find it hard to condemn him, as many people did at the time, because he was young and young people do feel that passion.  To condemn is to judge a young person’s actions with an old person’s attitude to life, experience condemning innocence.

McCandless wasn’t a loner, he was a talker and made friends easily.  On his long journey to his lonely death he touched many lives and affected them for ever.  One in particular was a solitary old man called Ron Franz (in the book).  Krakauer writes this about the end of their friendship:

On March 14, Franz left McCandless on the shoulder of Interstate 70 outside Grand Junction and returned to Southern California.  McCandless was thrilled to be on his way north, and he was relieved as well – relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it.  He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family.  He had successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him.  And now he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well.

Painlessly, that is, from McCandless’s perspective – although not from the old man’s.  One can only speculate about why Franz became so attached to McCandless so quickly, but affection he felt was genuine, intense, unalloyed.  Franz had been living a solitary existence for many years.  He had no family and few friends.  A disciplined, self-reliant man, he had got on remarkably well despite his age and solitude.  When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the man’s meticulously constructed defenses.  Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he’d been.  The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz’s life even as he helped fill it.  When McCandless departed as suddenly as he’d arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.*

These couple of paragraphs hit me hard, ‘in the heart, where it hurt’, to use Simon Armitage’s phrase, and I think gets to the core of the book as a story of loneliness.  After McCandless left, Franz bought an RV and went travelling to, trying to find that companionship he had found with the boy.

In the bus, by the body, were many annotated books, including a number by Tolstoy.  In one McCandless had highlighted a passage: ‘life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and an unshared happiness is not happiness’.  He had added, his crucial insight of his time in the wilderness, ‘HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.’  It’s a heart-breaking story, a heart-breaking film and a heart-breaking book.

* Excerpt from ‘Into the Wild’, © Jon Krakauer, Pan-Macmillan 1998.