At the moment I’m reading Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck’s account of travelling ‘in search of America’ in 1960 when he was 58 (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962). Charley is the writer’s French poodle who is his travel companion and mentioned frequently.

Steinbeck has introduced me to a Spanish word that immediately struck a chord. ‘It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando’, he says. ‘If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.’

Yes, I like this word. As I’ve said before it is the process of walking: the seeing, hearing and breathing in the moment that wins me over every time. It is the means and not the end. And it makes me – like the great Nobel laureate – a vacilador.

I’m outside the Winyard’s Gap Inn in the empty beer garden looking over the green and brown hills between Crewkerne and Beaminster while a buzzard makes passing loops in the sky and the sun lights its white undercarriage.

It’s been a week of freezing temperatures and sunny days with the near world covered in a layer of ice that sparkles richly in the sun. This morning it was -5 C in Dorset.

God, I love this weather: the air is so fresh it makes the skin tingle and a deep breath seems to clear the head and lungs and make my eyes water. It reminds me of exciting days and nights in the Alps or The Carpathians of Eastern Europe.

Water filled, ice covered tractor tyre tracks have strange swirls under them like contours on a map and crack and groan underfoot when I pass over them to get through the gate.

Through the gate I’m in Chedington Woods. It is a wood of old oaks, ivy clinging to the trunks and their bare branches twisting upwards. When I come out the other side there is the lonely, haunting mewing of the same buzzard echoing as it loops around again. It is only the two of us here. Why does it call out? Above all is a hard blue sky – clearer, brighter somehow in the cold air – and a half moon clear and strangely surreal in its incompleteness in the middle of the sky, its craters the same blue as the sky around it. What were those great lines by Shelley?

‘Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth

Wandering companionless’

In the foreground the grass is white, stems and leaves frosted with hundreds of little white shards. They crunch underfoot as I make my way down the hill, my fingers starting to sting.

The last time I was doing The Monarch’s Way was in July when I passed through Broadwindsor a few miles south west of here. It is where Charles II stopped the night at the George Inn in October 1651 after his failed attempt to escape by boat from Charmouth to France. While they were at the pub forty soldiers arrived en route to Jersey (where there had been a long and intense conflict as part of the English Civil War). That evening a woman that was travelling with the soldiers went into labour, another bit of luck that allowed the King and Lord Wilmot to avoid detection and escape back to Trent House near Yeovil.

By returning to Trent, the King had made a huge loop, as the path does and as have I.

I think of lovely Trent and it makes me travel back in time. It makes me think of those strange dream days during and between lockdowns. It’s where I swam amongst the lily pads in the River Yeo while doing the Monarch’s Way that hot day in June 2021 (recorded here). It’s where in the same month I met C for the first time in the beer garden at The Rose and Crown only a few hundred metres from Trent House.

She wore a silk skirt that caught the light of the sun as she walked over to me in the garden. She smiled. I smiled. And we paused.

These moments. Seemingly insignificant at the time and imbued with meaning in retrospect. Little did I know it in that moment but my life would never be the same again.

The icy air shocks me out of my reverie. I’m past Wyke Farm. I’m onto a track. Then past lots of felled trees and churned up ground. Then I notice that the light is fading and it’s only 4.30.

On my way back I’m stopped by something. The shape of the land, meadow, hedgerow and tree here have created a wonderful symmetry. The gap and horizon are a frame that pulls my eye towards the form of the tree. A perfect tree. I think it is a sycamore, not dissimilar to the Sycamore Gap tree that for many years stood next to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland and was inexplicably felled by someone on September 28th last year. That also had a perfect symmetry to it. As does the sycamore on Burrow Hill near the cottage in Somerset. This in many ways has a contrasting symmetry to the Sycamore Gap. Whereas this was most often viewed in the middle of a perfect U made by the land, Burrow Hill sits in top of and in the middle of a near perfect shaped mound to compliment the shape of the tree.

My breath is loud and great plumes come out of my mouth but I am as motionless as the tree. And the ice lingers in the hedgerows while the sun fades to a smudge. I shake myself, rub my hands together and head for home.

Strictly speaking, I’m not on The Monarch’s Way but have come off it to return to my car and to spend some time in the company of a gem of a place hidden off a lane in south Dorset.

In my mind I still have images of giant wild boar, hidden cathedrals and coffin bearers walking down long paths in the Forest Dean described to me by the cheerful man with tattoos and his wife who were walking from West Bay to Golden Cap and had got lost en route. Brief encounters. Like all meetings, some are just infinitely better than others.

I pause and let the sounds of the near world return to my quietening mind. The gentle breathing of the trees, a male blackbird’s song and somewhere the gentle splashing of water.

Through an iron foot gate a path leads through overhanging ash trees down to a church. The dip in the land and the framing of the trees and the coolness of the air create a sense of transition, a crossing over into a seemingly ‘other’ space, like entering a deep green pool. Grass borders the path and a wooden bench sits looking at the church porch. The path bends around to the left of the church front and stops at an arch with a red door with ‘Lavabo’ painted in red letters on a white wooden sign. Next to this a black metal gate built into the wall is a side entrance to the garden of Chideock Manor. From behind it I can hear the splashing of a fountain landing on stone and the excited shrieks of children jumping into a swimming pool.

Built in the grounds of Chideock Manor, The Church of our Lady, Queen of Martyrs, and St Ignatius is one of the most beautiful and unusual churches I have ever visited. It is not typical of an English church but more like something you might find in the back streets of Florence.

According to a leaflet inside the porch the church was built by Charles Weld whose family lived at the manor for two hundred years and was finished in 1872. “Weld designed the church in the Italian Romanesque style and did much of the work himself…The front of the church recalls the early churches of Tuscany.”

Above the entrance is a roundel made from painted terracotta which “features a statue of Our Lady, Queen of Martyrs, encircled by her Seven Sorrows.”

The leaflet goes on to reveal the poignant story behind the building of the church as this is a shrine to seven Chideock men who “were cruelly put to death for their Catholic faith between 1587 and 1642” after England officially adopted Anglicanism in 1559 and Catholicism in England was outlawed.

Originally this was the site of Chideock Castle built in 1380. In the late Middle Ages the castle was bought by the Arundell family. When Catholicism was banned they remained loyal to their faith and the castle was somewhere where Catholics could come and worship although it was illegal. The castle was captured and destroyed in the Civil War by the Roundheads on July 29th 1645 (six years before Charles II went on the run). It was then that the Arundells left. Locals continued to worship the old faith in a barn and the loft where masses were held in secret. The loft can still be accessed from the sacristy in the present day church by appointment.

It was in 1802 that Thomas Weld who owned Lulworth Castle bought the estate for his son Humphrey. It was he who according to the leaflet “built the present Manor House and turned the barn into a modest chapel.” It was Humphrey’s son, Charles, who converted the chapel into the wonderful church that I am in now.

Inside my first impressions are of a well maintained church that one might see in a wealthy part of London. The nave is lined with beautifully carved arches above which are portraits of the martyrs. Beyond this lies the chancel wherein a Baroque statue of Our Lady is lit up by the sun streaming through the windows in the dome. One can’t help but imagine her rising up to heaven, on the day of her assumption being welcomed by the light of God.

It seems like every feature has been thought of and designed with great attention the details. A wonderful altar sits in the south aisle of the church with a gold arch in which there are twelve portraits of men. Is this another tribute to the martyrs and if so why are there twelve men here?

On the north side a room that flanks the whole side of the nave with tables and chairs like a reading room and lots of literature related to the history of the church. It feels like a reading room. There are also all sorts of unusual souvenirs such as cannonballs from the civil war, huge mantraps on the wall and evidence of relics that apparently are kept here including a fragment of Thomas More’s hair shirt and a piece of the True Cross.

Not for the first time I wonder at the multiple treasures that are hidden across England but also these markers of our often violent past. Without realising it all the time I wander through places where blood was spilled, people were once persecuted for their beliefs and where many had to continue their God-given daily routines and rituals in fear of being discovered and executed. I think of Charles II and royalists loyal to him also on the run, in hiding and in fear of their lives at the end of the same civil war that destroyed the castle here and forced local Catholics to worship in the barn nine years after the last of the martyrs was executed. I think of those people in far flung places from here who today have to live their lives in fear just because of their beliefs or race or nationality.

For all this I am in awe of the incredible, delicate beauty of The Church of Our Lady. This little place has bestowed a sense of peace on me after my long walk. For once my mind is silent as I float through the light that is thrown down from the dome. I have a heightened awareness of the coolness of the nave, the great silence of the space and the smell of old wood as the martyrs look down on me, knowingly.

I’ve climbed the hill the other side of Bilshay Farm. I can just about see the place where I got lost in the sound of the beech leaves, the place with the figure floating through the field. I am walking west in a big loop as Charles II did after his attempt to get on a boat from Charmouth failed and he had to make a run for it back to the safety of the manor at Trent (I walked through there two years ago).

Here on the track to Axen Farm there is a seat made out of a tree trunk sawn in half lengthways to create a wide flat bench. I am looking over a bank of wildflowers towards the little copse on top of Colmer’s Hill and to the left – the south east – the sea and a ship a speck on the horizon. The flowers must have been planted deliberately, their impossibly bright blues, reds and yellows jaunty against the backdrop of the green of the Dorset hills. As I look towards the horizon something rises up indistinctly from the murky depths of my memory, something beyond description, which takes me back to being very young and driving and someone saying ‘Can you see the sea?’ Anticipation. Excitement. And something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Yes I can.

At Axen Farm, there are big barns surrounded by a concrete hard standing. There is CCTV with a sign saying that I am being watched. And there is an outside tap. I haven’t been able to fill my water bottle since last night. The beauty and magic of running water. It reminds me of that poem we used to teach by Imtiaz Dharker: ‘The sudden rush of fortune..the silver crashes to the ground’. I fill my bottle and wash my face and neck and when I’m done I nod briefly to the camera imagining how I look on a screen.

I turn at a right angle north up Henwood Hill. I slow down. There are almost 360 degree views of the curves of the hills below. I stand chest out and breathe in the wind the way dogs do when they face into and sniff wind. Chideock is towards the south west nestled into the hill surrounded by trees. All the buildings face north away from the sea.

Suddenly there are people. The first time I’ve come across anyone since I was harassed by the dogs at Bridport. First a man closely following a paper map. He seems quite tense with his little wire haired terrier beside him. He’s from Newton Abbott and is here looking for holloways, the many tracks in these parts that have sunk deep into the land after hundreds of years of use by pedestrians, carts and animals. He’s been inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘The Wild Places’ which he shows me in his trouser side pocket.

I was thinking of that book while I was under the beech earlier. Why? There was something in it that I remembered. Was it that he was walking around here? I had also been thinking about Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household’s brilliant spy thriller about being on the run from foreign agents in your own country and how Roger Deakin loved that book. In that book the protagonist hides in a hollow somewhere near Chideock, in other words somewhere around here. Deakin and Macfarlane came here once to seek out the place it was set.

The man from Devon was negative about the paths. ‘I’m glad I put my trousers on. The paths aren’t very well looked after. You get the impression you’re not very welcome here.’

I had that feeling briefly at Bridport but it’s all in the mind surely.

Charles II apparently also felt harassed in Bridport. After his opportunity to escape from Charmouth aboard a long boat never materialised (the captain of the boat’s wife had an inkling her husband was helping royalists and locked him in his room!), he and two others fled to Bridport only to find it full of soldiers. Instead of shying away as was advised the king decided on the opposite tactic. Charles wrote his own account of his stay there (he stayed at the George Inn, supposedly the best pub in Bridport at the time). He wrote how “we found the yard very full of soldiers. I alighted, and taking the horses thought it the best way to go blundering in amongst them, and lead them through the middle of the soldiers into the stable; which I did, and they were very angry with me for my rudeness.”

It transpires that Bridport had actually been a mainly Royalist supporting town during the civil war. Some years later when Charles’s eldest (illegitimate) son, James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth tried to start a rebellion against the then king James II in 1685 he met great resistance at Bridport where apparently “they encountered 1200 men from the local Royalist Dorset militia” (Wikipedia).

I leave the path at Venn Farm in North Chideock and meet a couple in their sixties from the Forest of Dean who had walked from a holiday park in West Bay and were asking for directions to Golden Cap. They are both full of energy and carefree chat. I take to them instantly. They both have West Country accents. They tell me about the problem wild boars cause in their village. ‘They’ll tear up your garden. Imagine something the size of a cow with little legs. If you hit one with your car it’d write it off.’

When they have babies they call them humbugs his wife tells me “because they have stripes.”

They tell me about Newland in the Forest of Dean called ‘The Cathedral of the Forest’ and the pub next door called The Ostrich. He tells me: “People would get buried there from Culford and they call the path the coffin trail because the people carrying the coffin would have to walk 3 or 4 miles to carry the coffin. Along the route are big stones where they would put the coffin down so that they could rest.” I promise to visit.

I say goodbye to them outside the Catholic Church in the grounds of Chideock Manor. His final line is ‘Are you looking for divine inspiration?’ With a laugh and a wave they walk on towards Golden Cap.

I’m two hours outside Bridport making my way around Dottery. It’s hard going. It’s overcast and there’s been a cold northerly blowing since I started yesterday. I did well to shelter from it last night although sometimes it found me out and felt its way into my sleeping bag and around my neck.

I woke up a few times in the night as is normally the way when I sleep out. I’ve walked seven kilometres since six o’clock and I’m starting to flag. On Bilshay Lane I stop by the gate next to a farm track and opposite a barn. It’s halfway down the dead end road to Bilshay Farm (see map). There is a corner gate which rises up into some long grass. The ground is flat and soft enough and I am under a big beech which shooshes me, its branches swinging in the wind lulling me into semi sleep and rest.

The Japanese have a name for the sound of the wind in pine trees. ‘Kigi ni fukukaze’ apparently ‘expresses a feeling of exquisite melancholy and solitude.’ It’s true that there is something more haunting about the sound of the wind through pines. Perhaps it’s the lack of leaves.

The English name for the wind in trees is Psithurism, from the Greek ‘psithyros’, to whisper meaning ‘a rustling or whispering sound such as leaves in a wind’. A brief journey around the internet takes me to a tree consultant’s website which has high praise for psithurism and refers to how ‘The naturalist author and founding member of the RSPB, W.H. Hudson, suggests in Birds and Man (1901), that psithurism is salubrious. He describes the sound of wind in the trees as “very restorative”’.

At this moment in time – perhaps more than ever before – I couldn’t agree more.

I am here almost an hour resting and looking up into the branches and the heart shaped leaves dance while the grass stems around me nod and bees pass overhead and a tiny spider crawls over my sleeve. At moments like these sometimes I feel like I could be in the grip of a strong hallucinogenic. I drift. I lose track of time. And I stay where I am while the whoosh of the leaves washes over me.

A well built man walks past wearing heavy boots and comes back half an hour later going back down the farm track. He has a Mediterranean appearance like the campesinos I used to see in the south of Spain. He wears an olive coloured jacket and heavy boots like a modern day Heathcliff. Ten minutes later I see him crossing through the green sea of a barley field. Only the top half of his body is visible as he floats through the greenness like a ghost, his hands held up as if gesturing to someone far away.

The walk from Bilshay Farm down to the river and up the winding chalk track the other side makes all the waiting worthwhile. The clouds start to break up. Patches of sunlight come and go on the green of the barley and pale brown of the earthy squares.

On the top I look back to the chalk track, the farm beyond. I am just able to see the side of the barn and the beech where I rested and came across the strange figure, the only person I’ve seen since Bridport. Now part of me wonders if it was a dream or vision. Then I think about these brief moments that come and go never to be repeated. And then I’m over the hill and into another valley.





I wake up thinking I’m in bed but feel a dull ache in my shoulder which can only be from lying on the ground. Then I hear the cacophony of birdsong: jackdaws, pigeons, blue tits and blackbirds. A great enthusiastic greeting to the morning.

And then the roar of a lorry.

I’m next to a dry stone wall in a meadow. From under my eye mask I can see buttercups and elderflower, nettles and dried cow pats. Cows stroll past impossibly slowly. It’s like they’re floating in some strange meadow dreamworld.

In the middle of this otherwise bucolic scene a low bridge carries the A35 just as it arrives at (or leaves) Bridport. A lorry with ‘Yang Ming Solent’ emblazoned on the side goes by and then a bus with its electric sign displaying ‘OUT OF SERVICE’. It’s about 5.30, always the time I wake up when sleeping out, normally woken by the dawn chorus. It’s the same today but the feathered choir has been joined by the altos and baritones of HGVs and public buses.

I met a couple last night having dinner next to me at Rise in West Bay who were celebrating what they called their ‘mini moon’. I had never heard of it. ‘A mini honeymoon’ they explained. People always seem interested and surprised at me sleeping outside in a field. Sarah was South African. ‘Oh, it’s like Jim Broadbent in that film where he walks to see a friend who is dying. He sleeps rough’, she tells me. Later I realise she’s talking about The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The other story people often refer to when I tell them about my walks is The Salt Path. Again a story about old people, terminal illness and sleeping out. I have to admit I listened to the audiobook when Dad was dying and found it too self indulgent in its self sympathy. He survived. Dad didn’t. Do I sound angry? Maybe I was at the time.

Not long ago it would be quite common to see people sleeping on the side of the road or in fields in the countryside in England. A hundred years ago it wouldn’t have been unusual to see a man lying prostrate under a hedge: a travelling salesman, an itinerant farm worker or a tramp. Or someone who’d had a skinful at the local pub and passed out on the way home. Although the comparison isn’t wholly accurate – I am in a sleeping bag and bivvy bag and do it out of choice. As it is today, for some people it is because they have no alternative.

Apparently sleeping out in a sleeping bag and no tent now has a name: bivvying. It’s another bit of language that is new to me.

When I turn my back on the road, I could be looking at a scene from an oil painting. If John Constable were here I think he might check his step and think about reproducing it. A little whitewashed house with cottage garden roses looks across a buttercup meadow while a chalk path bends gently to join it at its side. And behind me the A35 traffic carries on regardless.

Yesterday I started from where I left off just east of Golden Cap. I left the car at Chideock and crossed fields in blazing sunshine to get to the wooden sign where I was two weeks ago. It was a beautiful day. I went for a swim at Seatown. I climbed Thorncombe Beacon. I admired views of Portland Bill while the wind blew through me. But I wasn’t feeling it. I trudged on and took no notes. Funny how that happens sometimes.

Today, although I haven’t had much sleep and my legs are stinging from an accidental encounter with some nettles when I went for a pee in the night, I feel brand new.

I brush my teeth, spitting out bright white splashes onto the offending nettles from the night before. And 5 minutes later I’m hoicking my rucksack on and crunching along the white path towards the cottage smiling at the self sufficiency of just being alone with my bed in a bag and and the continued rhythm of walking for miles and miles and miles with only the path and my footsteps to think about.