Tick tock, let’s all walk....

We thought we heard a cuckoo this morning but when we stopped and waited for the traffic to subside we could not hear anything. That’s the way with things as you walk. You pass by things, catch glimpses and so on, but generally speaking, you have to keep on walking.

The limitations of our maps was apparent before we started from Honfleur (well, before we left the UK really, but we could not see what we could do. French maps are even more expensive than UK ones and cover less area per map, so we were going to have to spend quite a lot on them.... so we checked out the routes on Google maps, printed off detailed routes in text and had a cut up road map as our basic guide. We also go a local area map from the Tourist information Office as additional help to navigate out of Honfgleur.

All were pretty useless. We walked on pretty major roads to begin with and benefitted from the Sunday lack of traffic. We also came off the roads when possible and took some respite in small towns. But Monday’s traffic was a major jump in scale so we navigated off the main road and blagged our way across the network of minor roads guestimating where to take the next turning and generally doing a pretty good job of it.

In Bernay, we sought out a shop with maps and bought a couple of maps suitable for cyclists – they cover bigger areas than the walkers’ maps and are just so much better than anything we have seen while not being OS level detail. We will be changing the route for tomorrow as the night stop we were planning looks too quiet and empty to be worth risking given our small but growing knowledge of what is suitable and what is not. So, Conches en Ouche – here we come! Despite being a few miles further along the way and, if we use the minor roads we plan to use, even more miles away again... It might be a 25 mile or so day tomorrow, so it’s an early night and an early start.

Today, as we reflected on the beauty of the places we pass through and remarked on the very attractive timbered housing so prevalent in the area (and, where the buildings don’t have thatch, how elaborate the slate tiling is) we also noted how the buildings seem to be in quite randomly placed positions within quite large plots making up the farm yard. It is as if the original pattern of these places has become obscured over time, leaving them informally dotted across the area close to the main farmhouse. It emphasised the way that the landscapes we pass through tend to obscure their history behind a veneer of modern farming images or quaint dilapidated/restored houses/farms/villages/etc... The quaintness hiding the squalor of the homes families had to live in even in the very recent past, the neatness hiding the chaos of harsh farm working practices, the rolling landscapes obscuring the industrial uses that originally scarred and blighted them.

Sorry if this seems a bit negative in terms of images, but they are there to illustrate a point. I could also say the wide, open fields of corn and rape that stretch for miles across the landscape hide the many centuries of human scale farming which employed and fed many hundreds of local workers and their families who now have to live in crowded cities chasing the Euro and a newer, better life.

But, along with these images and thoughts we also considered the fact that when we first started walking the fields had been only recently ploughed and prepared, some had been sewn and were beginning to show rows of seedlings which gave the fields a thin haze of green when looked at from a shallow angle as you walked along looking at the rising fields from a sunken path. The hedgerows were still dark apart from the black thorn blossoms and the late spring flowers.

By the time we were nearing London, the rape was beginning to show the first signs of yellow flowers rising above the thick green foliage hugging the heavy clay soils. Other plants were no longer seedlings and were colouring the patchwork of fields with different shades of green. Trees were beginning to show early leaves adding another tinge of green to the landscape.

In the byways of Surrey and Sussex we saw whole hillsides covered in the early yellows of rape as the flowers began to form a layer above the blanket of green. Different trees were starting to add to the range of greens and more blossoms were coming into their own with wild splashes of white, cream and yellow set off occasionally by pale pinks and the remnants of blankets of wild spring flowers. The heathlands had the gorse, too, with their cocoanut scent and spikes and the horse chestnuts had their leaves almost out, each one looking like green clenched fists ready and waiting to punch the cold spring out of the way.

But, now that we are in France and continue moving steadily southwards, everything is becoming more advanced in growth, with fewer trees without leaves and more plants beginning to take on their spring and early summer clothes. Each day we get further south and further along the line of natural growth.

And, by the time we begin to reach the final stages of our journey, there will be fields empty of their produce and farmers working hard to harvest crops before the summer storms ruin them. Our path will have taken us from one end of the cycle to the other.

Tick tock, tick tock, nature’s clock is ticking along and we are all just pilgrims plodding along, keeping in time......