This would be the first time I would have been on the Monarch’s Way since September the 18th last year. It was the day before the Queen’s funeral. I can still remember the sense of a nation in mourning: flags at half mast; everyone talking about ‘she’ or ‘her’.
Here I am three weeks after the King’s coronation at the start of the second carolean era following in the footsteps of the man who gave his name to the first carolean era.
For twenty five years Charles II ruled over this land but it so easily might never have happened. He was incredibly lucky to escape with his life in 1651 walking and riding along these ways and often hampered by the ineptitude of his friend Lord Wilmot, charged with aiding Charles’s flight but who was something of a liability. It didn’t much help that Wilmot refused to wear a disguise and was often indiscreet and forgetful, on one occasion leaving a black purse of gold coins (Charles’s emergency cash) in a random house where he’d been staying the night before. As Richard Ollard puts it in his book The Escape of Charles II ‘The King’s choice of Wilmot as his companion and chief agent…was the only mistake he made in the whole affair.’ Charmouth – my last port of call back in September – was supposed to be the original setting off point for Charles’s escape to France but the boat never turned up. Instead he would have to travel to Shoreham in Sussex from where he finally left on October 15th 1651 aboard a coal boat.
It’s eighteen degrees and overcast as I pull into the National Trust car park at Langdon Hill. Campions, buttercups, cow parsley, and bluebells rear out of the roadside verges.
As I turn off the road the sea is below the valley, still and smooth and grey. It might be the bottom edge of the sky but coloured a darker shade of grey.
There is no one about. I feel that familiar warm feeling of me being alone with the world while everyone goes about their daily business: trucks roaring on the A35, a farmer ploughing his field, a jet overhead. Down here there’s just me and the birds and the bees.
I descend into the deep green light of a wood. I feel a sudden coolness like being plunged underwater and then am instantly hit with the overpowering smell of wild garlic. A green corrugated shepherd’s hut is secreted away on the edge of the wood.
Minutes later I appear into a meadow where fluffy bits of down from trees float across like slow moving insects. There is the gurgling of a brook. A buzzing of a bee. The whispering of leaves. No human made sound. And I feel like I’m in a waking dream.
When I get to Broom Cliff to reach the Monarch’s Way the sea has the gentlest of ripples on its surface. No boats. No bathers. I see the familiar sticker on the stile – the oak tree with the crown and the ship that he sailed on – and I know I’m in the right place. How I love those stickers. There must be thousands along the Monarch’s Way. It’s a better marked route than any other that I’ve been on.
After half an hour I start the climb to Golden Cap and stop. As I look back towards Lyme Regis there is a small patch of sea that glitters.I stop and sit. As ever the slowest walker. Other hikers walk past me keenly looking at their phones.
Here I am on the lower flanks of Golden Cap almost exactly five years since I walked over it on the South West Coast Path. And now I’m going the other way on the Monarch’s Way.
It’s funny. I remember that summer of 2018 or parts of it. I was struggling to sleep, and decided to leave my then school after ten years. I remember the sense of liberation and relief. And then I continued teaching at a different school and the insomnia never went away. And here I am five years later leaving school for good. And suddenly I feel like something that’s been bearing down on me for a long time has fallen away, that suddenly I am a little lighter. And incredibly for the first time in years the week before last I started to fall asleep normally, naturally. I’m still flushed with joy on those mornings – not always – that I wake up after a night when I had a relatively normal night’s sleep.
Here on Golden Cap feels like one of those moments when something is about to happen. I wonder if I’ll come back here in five years and see if I was right. Places illustrate my memories. I feel like my life is a series of moments that I always remember through the landscapes that I was surrounded by. Standing here I wonder if in his later years Charles II remembered the lush hills and hidden holloways of Dorset at a time when his life was taking the strangest of turns.
The Slow Walker 