A Tale of Two Cities (Abridged)

Hereford and Worcester will always be linked in my brain.  The ancient counties of Herefordshire and Worcestershire were abolished in 1974 as part of the massive Local Government reforms that also created the Metropolitan Counties and the likes of Cumbria and Avon.  At first, the proposed county was called Malvernshire; that was widely disliked, so they had a try at Wyvernshire (from the river Wye in Hereford and the river Severn in Worcester), but everyone hated that as well, so the county ended up being called Hereford & Worcester.

That was the county name I learned at school, colouring it in on the map in my exercise book, and that's what still sounds right to me.  It was colossally unpopular though.  Herefordshire was big, but it only had about a third of the population of Worcestershire, so the residents thought they were being taken over.  Nobody was ever very keen and finally in 1998 it was abolished and the two old counties made their way back into existence.  Hereford & Worcester clings on in the name of the BBC radio station and the fire service and the minds of Gen Xers like me who think Herefordshire sounds weird.

I'd been staying in a Travelodge in Hereford for three nights but I'd held off exploring the city until Sunday, planning on doing it as a double bill with Worcester.  Unfortunately my body had different ideas.  I had a bit of a sore throat on Saturday night, which made me cough during the night, which gave me a headache, which were joined by a runny nose, which meant by Sunday morning I was feeling rough.  Really rough.  I had a cold.

I know there are women reading this (I assume there are a couple of you) and rolling your eyes.  "We BLEED every month!  We force human beings out of bits of us that are clearly too small for the job!  You men don't know suffering!"  And you're absolutely right: I don't know what that level of regular, persistent unpleasantness is like.  I can only compare it with how I usually feel, and I usually feel fairly chipper and upbeat, and this cold made me feel awful.  I wanted to stay in bed where it was warm and not do anything.

But I had already paid for the ticket, and I knew that if I didn't get out to Worcester and have a bit of a look round Hereford, I'd regret it.  So instead of a full, long day of considered exploration of the two cities, I had to do the quick version.  Walk round them, go to the stations, walk back.  Sorry but be glad you got anything.

It was barely past eight on a Sunday morning when I emerged from the underpass under the ring road into the pedestrianised centre of Hereford.  There was a strip of Polish shops here, their windows promising unusual food in laser printed full colour, and then a church with a coffee shop where you were encouraged to "do good with your coffee".  Everything was silent.  Sunday morning is quiet for any town but it seemed even more so in Hereford.

Broad Street offered grand buildings interspersed with churches and more modern mistakes and then I was in the Cathedral close.  It was too early for worshippers so I had the building to myself.  I stood for a moment, looking up at the tower in the sun, then I let out a big ugly sneeze.  I moved on.

I'll be honest: Hereford hadn't impressed me in my few days here.  I could see it had its charms.  There had been a well-attended market the day before, and there were certainly some very pretty buildings.  But something about the place was tired and lost.  I felt like it was the kind of city people couldn't wait to leave.  I'd seen a lot of teenagers about over the past few days, hanging outside the McDonalds, bored, and I imagined that was a way of life for a lot of them.  Just waiting.

There was a plaque on the wall of one of the buildings commemorating the birthplace of Richard Kemble, theatre manager and his children John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons.  Interestingly, while the professions of the men were left a mystery, Sarah Siddons had (The Actress) after her name, in case you got her confused with Sarah Siddons (The Waitress) or Sarah Siddons (The Dental Hygienist).  It was even more jarring given that Sarah Siddons is easily the most famous of the three, and probably the only one an average person could name.  (Although I just asked the BF if he'd heard of any of them, and the only one he knew was Richard Kemble, until he realised he was thinking of the bloke out of The Fugitive, so maybe none of them are that big a deal any more).

I ended up back on the main street, with a huge statue of a Hereford bull at its centre.  The shops were suffering the same problem all cities have now; fewer and fewer people were visiting.  There were a lot of empty spaces, and building work to convert vacant upstairs floors into flats.

I had a sausage and egg McMuffin in McDonalds, the only place open at this time of day, and watched a volunteer with a lanyard bring in a couple of homeless men and buy them breakfast.  I sucked down the ridiculously awful coffee - McDonalds coffee is concentrated caffeine with no regard to taste - and then used the buzz from it to propel me onto the next stage of my walk.

I'd reached the other side of the ring road, where the Franklin Barnes building offered a nice bit of 1960s modernism.  That great font, and the iron artwork!  Sadly, the building seemed to be barely used these days - it was built as a garden centre but they're long gone - and I suspect it won't be around for much longer.

I had good reason to fear Hereford doing the wrong thing by the Franklin Barnes building, because for the last few days I'd got to see what they'd done to the station.

It's a fine Victorian pile that's sadly underused today.  The ticket office is small and cramped, while most of the building is inaccessible to the public.  The real problem is just outside it.  In the sixties and seventies, well-meaning civic planners drove ring roads through swathes of British towns and cities as the car was the future.  In a lot of cases, these ring roads tended to follow the railway at least in part - it was often a bit of town that was run down, or filled with cheap industrial units, while the tracks formed a natural border the road could ape.  It also saved on expensive bridges over the tracks for the new road.  What tended to happen, though, was the station ended up on the wrong side of the bypass.

This didn't matter to the planners in those days because hey, railways were the old way, and this was the groovy twentieth century where everyone would have a car and possibly a jet pack.  It put the station outside the city.  Obviously, this turned out to be a mistake, as trains continued to be successful and popular and weirdly getting new visitors to your city to drag their suitcases through underpasses or over footbridges was colossally unpopular.  Town planners have spent the last few decades unpicking this mistake, calming the roads outside stations, and making it an open, welcoming gateway.  Coventry, for example, has removed a junction of its ring road by its transport hub and turned the reclaimed space into parkland. 

Hereford's ring road is tight to the medieval centre; you have another half a mile to walk to get to the station.  None the less, the present day planners have learned absolutely nothing from the past, and have sent a brand new road right in front of the station.  Named the "Hereford City Link Road", because they couldn't even be bothered trying to make it interesting, a dual carriageway smashing its way past the railway station and connecting two main roads out of the city was opened in 2017.

The railway station is just off camera there, to the right.  In front of it is a forecourt of parking, then four lanes of traffic.  It's bare, blasted land.  The flythroughs before it opened showed an avenue flanked with trees; none of them seem to have showed up.  Signs offering "prime development sites" sit on the corner of rubble and concrete.  And pedestrians are left hanging at a crossing that doesn't seem to prioritise them in the slightest.  I passed through this junction half a dozen times over the course of my stay and every single time one or two people gave up waiting for the green man and hurled themselves across the road.  If people are wondering if the puffin crossing is working because they've seen nothing but a stream of traffic in every direction, you've done it wrong.

Maybe in a few years time it'll all look a lot better.  Those development sites will be filled; the kinks will be worked out.  I'm not holding my breath.  Every time I stepped out of the station I was struck again by how awful and unwelcoming it all was.

Look at me manfully persisting even though I'm suffering.  What a hero.

I boarded the West Midlands Railway train to Worcester.  The Ashes were on at Edgbaston, so the train was filled with people in straw hats carrying picnic baskets.  (A couple of days before the guard had warned: "This train is going to get really busy after Worcester, so if you need to use the toilets, do it now.")  I was able to get a seat and I sat down for the surprisingly long journey to Worcester, hoping nobody would sit next to me and have to suffer my spluttering.

Worcester immediately marked itself out as - well, if not a party town, certainly one that was a lot more fun.  I went down the steps from the platform behind a gang of twentysomethings, good looking and well dressed, clearly about to have a ball of a day in the city.  I trudged behind them into the ticket hall, tucked under the railway arches, then out onto the street for the sign pic.

Foregate Street is wedged beneath the bridge carrying the railway through the city, with the beautifully decorated ironwork immediately something of a landmark.  There's something so much more vibrant and exciting about a station that's right at the heart of the city, spilling its passengers out onto a main thoroughfare.  Take note Hereford.

I walked through the city centre, a long strip of chain stores interspersed with restaurants and bars.  By now it was nearly eleven am and the shoppers were out, thronging the pathways, and enjoying the sun.  Outside the Carphone Warehouse, a man was trying to train his Golden Retriever to run in and out of the bollards.  I thought at first he was doing it to busk, but there was no hat out, and the dog was so daffily useless it seemed to be a work in progress.  The owner was good-natured and happy though, laughing as he called the dog back when it wandered off somewhere more interesting, and passers-by stopped to smile.

I passed the gleaming gilt of the Guildhall and headed towards Cathedral Square, a new development at the foot of the hill.  Galleries of chain restaurants - All Bar One, Starbucks, Ask, a "coming soon" Five Guys had been wedged in around an open plaza backing onto an older precinct.  There were already people sat at the outdoor tables.  It felt light and pleasant.

Also here was a statue of composer and local lad Edward Elgar.  I'd seen his handprints throughout my travels, with his name popping up in businesses and streets and footpaths.  He was born outside Worcester, in Broadheath, and his father ran a music shop close by.  He lived in the county on and off throughout his life, returning here to retire and finally being buried alongside his wife in Little Malvern.  (I was surprised to read of the wife, to be honest, but then I realised I had Edward Elgar mixed up with notorious homosexual Benjamin Britten.  I almost outed Elgar without any just cause).

I headed past the cathedral, in mid-service, and down a side street where a blue plaque commemorated Elgar's former home (now a hotel).  It was a narrow cobbled street that lead to the rear of the cathedral grounds.  Under an archway and found myself on a quiet college green.  There was scaffolding over the back of the cathedral, and it struck me how much work is always needed for a building of that vintage.  Unless it's just a big scam by the Church of England and they pay builders to do nothing on religious buildings all the time to raise funds.

A set of steps beneath a building so comically picturesque it could easily have been shipped in from Disneyland...

...emptied me out onto the riverside.  The path was busy with strollers and joggers, families and couples, people taking in the gentle breeze of the water that cooled the hot August air.

Swans were scatttered across the Severn, and here and there I heard the chink of glasses from pub terraces.  I followed the path south, away from the city centre, towards the old port area.  The prow of the King's School boathouse jutted out over my head.  The quality of architecture made me think the King's School probably wasn't the local comp.

At the end of the path, a lock emptied the Worcester and Birmingham Canal into the river Severn.  If I'd followed that towpath I could've walked all the way to the Gas Street Basin, right at the heart of Birmingham; as it was, I wandered into a small canal basin made upmarket with apartments and bars.

There were pretty houseboats moored by the path, covered in flowers and plants, though a sign warned me that these were Private moorings - for your own safety keep off, which seemed to hint the boat owners were waiting in the dark with a shotgun ready to blow away trespassers.  There was another sign, warning me about Operation Leviathan, a task force stopping illegal fishing, and I wondered why the policemen responsible for coming up with operation names didn't just write the hard-hitting thriller their ridiculously over the top titles hinted they were dying to put together.

There was a sponsored walk going down the towpath that day, with signs everywhere, and when a phalanx of fast-paced pensioners appeared wearing tracksuits behind me, I decided to leave them to it and clambered back up to street level.  I was in a less-pretty area of town, where the ring road was being dug up even on a weekend, and a Nandos and cinema had been built in fake brickwork, but soon after that I'd stumbled into another pretty street.

It was all so relentlessly charming and lovely I had to take a breather.  Fortunately, at a crossroads, the brown-tiled Eagle Vaults pub called out to me.  I got a pint of Wainwright and settled into a quiet banquette.

It was barely twelve, so maybe a little early for booze, but I deserved it.  I was aching all over from the walking and my head was throbbing.  And where better to stop and pause than a proper old boozer with a silent telly and a tired old dog who gracefully took any affectionate pat you pointed his way.

A little light-headed - turns out bitter and Lemsip aren't equally valid treatments for a cold; who knew? - I tottered out of the pub, across the ring road, and onto George Street to head for Shrub Hill station.  There was a brief moment of drama where I was almost killed by a cyclist; he was in the wrong lane, travelling against the direction of traffic, through a red light, while I crossed on a green man.  I almost wish I'd been mortally wounded because he'd have got the book thrown at him.  Beyond it was a long strip of retail park.  In all the fuss about the death of the British High Street, it's interesting that the retail park is dying too and nobody cares.  They used to be a strip of big names in big stores but so many of them have gone bust or downhill that they end up being a row of B&M, Home and Bargains and the vacant shell of a Staples.  Given the body blow out of town developments gave to city centres it's poetic justice of sorts.  At this one, a Majestic Wine Warehouse hinted at better times, but they're a brand on its knees as well so it'll probably be a Matalan by Christmas.

Over the canal, round the corner, and I spotted the sign for Shrub Hill in the distance.  There was an ugly block of offices, bland and brutal, its roof crowned with mobile phone masts.  Someone had given it the name Elgar House, presumably in a fit of irony.  Across the way, the Great Western pub hinted at an old world of railway hotels.  I paused, took the sign picture, then got a shock.

Shrub Hill station opened in 1865 and it still retains its original building, with a loop of road heading up to the porte-cochère entrance.  But the city has chosen to cover it up with bad developments and grime.

Leaving aside Elgar House muscling in on the right and destroying the view of the building, that is a deeply unimpressive vista.  A car park.  Industrial units.  The building deserves so much more.  Imagine if that loop of road was instead filled with a public open space, fountains, benches.  A grand staircase leading down from the station entrance.  It could be so much more, a much greater welcome to Worcester.

Admittedly, Foregate Street is better located for the town, but it's also hemmed in on all sides.  This could be a great gateway to the city with taxi ranks, buses, and it could drive the regeneration of what's a grimy quarter.

Shrub Hill's on a triangle, heading towards Paddington, so the Hereford-Birmingham services often skip it altogether.  As I arrived on the platform though, a West Midlands Railway train was just pulling in, so I hastily leapt aboard.  It meant I had to skip the listed waiting room but I needed to get that train.

What I didn't realise was that it was going to reverse, so I was sat on there for a good few minutes before the train took off again.  Still, it was good to have a sit down before my final walk through Hereford.

When it opened, Hereford station was known as Hereford Barrs Court.  This was because there was already a much smaller station to the west of the city centre called Hereford Barton.  Barrs Court was much better placed for railway services so it quickly outpaced its rival.  Barton was demolished before the century was out, though the line was retained for goods and avoiding services for another eighty years before finally closing in 1979.  That route is now preserved as a walking and cycle path, while the goods yard was turned into a Sainsbury's supermarket and a Travelodge.  My Travelodge.  I thought it'd be an interesting way to finish the day by following at least a little of the old railway line.

I walked south, through the back roads, until I reached the long sweep of grass that was the Castle Green and a footbridge across the Wye, the Victoria Bridge.  Another cyclist tried to run me over, even though there were clear signs instructing him to dismount, but I managed to avoid this two-wheeled vendetta and walked across to the Bishop's Meadow.

Hereford was at play.  The grass was covered with families, couples, football games and children playing.  There was a buzz of laughter and joy.  As I walked the riverside path I was joined by dog walkers and hikers.

Water gives everything a sheen of glamour.  From the bank of the Wye the city suddenly became romantic.  The cathedral dominating.  Although let's be honest; if you're at your best seen from a distance...

The path rose to road level as I crossed the foot of the ancient Wye Bridge, now superseded by a concrete 20th century construction, then I was back on the slightly scrappier end of the river walk.  It was a bit rougher here, more unkempt, and the views weren't quite as pretty.  In the distance the ironwork of the Hunderton Bridge, which once carried the railway, slid into vision.

I went up to the bridge.  For a hundred years this carried rail traffic, but now it's utterly peaceful, the loudest noise being the whizz of bike wheels or the crunch of footsteps.  I was feeling absolutely exhausted by this point, but there was still that familiar thrill of walking where trains once went.

The route went round the side of the supermarket and ended up in the car park.  The only hint of its former importance is a building on the far side which housed the Great Western Railway Staff Association; a social club for rail workers that still operated today.

I went into Sainsbury's and stocked up on essentials - by which I mean cold and flu remedies.  Then I staggered the last few metres, past the Cider Museum (closed on a Sunday, because obviously who would want to visit a leisure attraction at the weekend?) and into the bland yet comforting surroundings of my hotel room.  It hadn't been made up but I didn't care.  The Do Not Disturb went on the door and I collapsed onto the bed, feeling terrible, and yet, satisfied.  The Hereford End was complete.

Over The Hills And Far Away

I wasn't entirely sure Ledbury was a real place.

There was something about the name.  Ledbury.  It sounds too quintessentially English, too clichéd.  Ledbury is a place a Penelope Keith sitcom would be set.  Ledbury is a place Steed and Mrs Peel would motor round the village green.  Ledbury is morris dancers and may poles and pubs.

Having visited it, I'm still not sure it's a real place.

For starters, this is the sign on the platform.  The Ledbury Poetry Festival is the biggest in Britain and the station had a permanent memorial to it.  Two, actually, as on the opposite, westbound platform a slab of tree trunk had been moulded into a chair shape.  This was, a nearby plaque told me, The Poetry Chair, and it invited me to sit a while, compose a poem and stick it in the box underneath.  I considered pausing and writing an ode to the scattered packet of Skittles at the bottom of the footbridge (But how can I/Taste the rainbow/when it is torn apart?) but I didn't have time.

 
Instead I headed out into the car park.  Ledbury is at a spot where the single track railway briefly becomes double, meaning that trains are timed to pass through at the same time; it meant there were a lot of people milling about, picking up loved ones, people I didn't particularly want to see me fannying around beneath a signpost.

I headed south into the town centre.  At first it was pretty standard, large grand villas overlooking the main road, bus stops, small terraced homes.  After the brute of a Tesco Ledbury developed an unmistakable charm.  This was a proper, pretty market town, still well preserved and thriving.

Old whitewashed buildings, their fronts curved with age, housed bakeries and chippies, cafes and ironmongers.  The awning across a butcher's window boasted they were the Heart of England Supreme Champions while the former Woolworth's had been transformed into Well Worth It! in exactly the same font and stocking more or less the same stuff.

It really was that clichéd English town I'd imagined it to be, except real.  It had everything.  Working clock tower, central market square, a stout town hall.  At one point I rounded a corner and got a look up an side street and saw this view...

...and I genuinely said "oh come on!" out loud to myself.  I'm surprised the place isn't constantly closed off so that filmmakers can film an Austen or a Dickens or a Brontë.  Alison Steadman should be permanently based in the town with a variety of bonnets, ready to leap into action at a moment's notice.  (Actually the most famous actress resident in the town is Elizabeth Hurley, who lives in a mansion to the south, and I think we've all agreed we really don't want to see Liz acting again, thanks very much).

I turned off the main street, passing a large, still open police station with a series of houses in its grounds for the constables, and then crossed over to a small side path.  I was going off road.  My next station, Colwall, was a ten mile walk away cross country.

Straight away I was presented with a curiosity; a set of steps that doubled as a stream.  It had been dry the previous few days, so this wasn't rain run off.  It was a steep set of steps with water gushing down one side, over each tread and down into a culvert at the bottom.  I clambered up them, walked a bit further, then clambered up another set of steps.  Then another.  The rise out of Ledbury was steep and sudden.  I was on the fringes of the Malvern Hills and they were clearly testing me out for the real climbs.  By the time I reached the top I was already sweating through my undershirt to the shirt outside.  (The idea was the undershirt would soak up the worst of the perspiration and leave me looking fresh to passers by.  This was, it turned out, a fantasy).

At least it was cool in the woods, immediately shaded from the sun by thick trees.  I rose higher and higher, passing dog walkers taking the far gentler cross paths, until it suddenly opened out into a meadow.  There's always something arresting about the burst of sun and greenery when you leave a wood.  Like you've walked out into freedom.

I briefly passed through spinneys, a single rope swing idly moving in the breeze, then I was heading downhill again, across another long open expanse of grassland.  In the distance I could see the ridge of the Malverns proper, a raised blue spine I'd be travelling along later.

I was passed by a teenage boy, all in black, shouting into his earpods and blithely ignoring me.  Out here in the countryside he looked incredibly out of place, which I'm sure was his intention.  He vanished into the woods behind me as I reached a yellow field of wheat.  Scurrying around on the road ahead was a flock of pheasants, young looking, just a blob of fat belly with a head precariously poking out the top on a too-narrow neck.  They ran about wildly when they saw me coming, darting all over the mud path and disappearing into the undergrowth.  Centuries of careful breeding had knocked all the brains and common sense out of them, and I was practically in their midst before one of the birds remembered they could actually fly and lead the rest off into the air.

There were still stragglers, the dopiest of the lot, who looked shocked as I approached, dithered, and finally legged it into a hedge.  Frankly some of them deserved to end up as a Sunday roast.

A quiet football field signalled I'd reached the edge of Eastnor, a little village gathered round a green.  It wasn't quite as peaceful as it should be - the village school was being refurbished in the holidays, with the workmen carving the stone walls and carrying timber out of the building - but there was a charming church and flower-covered cottages.

I walked across the grass to see what the little building at its centre was.  There was a small water fountain, with a trough and a carved piece of spiritual art: If any man thirst let him come unto me and drink.  I'd only had a couple of gulps from my water bottle, but I gave the tap a push to see if I could fill it up to the top.  It didn't work.  So much for divine intervention.

On the edge of the village is Eastnor Castle, now advertised as a wedding venue but also a stately home and deer park.  There was a banner hanging outside advertising Lakefest, a music festival featuring the Kaiser Chiefs, James and the Happy Mondays and therefore specifically targeted at sad old ex-indie idiots like myself.  I was mildly annoyed that it was the following weekend so I'd miss it.  I was even more annoyed when I approached the stile for the next stage of my walk and found a sign had been posted on it.

The Deer Park is CLOSED

to all visitors

due to an event taking place.

Thank you for your co-operation.

The park will re-open on Saturday 17th August.

I was furious.  Absolutely livid.  I'd been following a long distance path, the Geopark Way, and it was clearly marked on the Ordnance Survey map.  It hadn't occurred to me that the route would be closed so that Bez would have a place to set up his toilet tent.  Worse, this was the bit of the walk I'd been especially looking forward to as it took me across the Eastnor Deer Park.  Had I quietly entertained fantasies of being surrounded by affectionate deer, perhaps feeding from my hand, making me a beardy Snow White?  I hadn't not had these thoughts.

In that moment I decided it would be best for the entire nation if private land ownership was banned and all property belonged to the people.  Open the closed paths!  Liberate the countryside!  Did the Kinder Scout trespassers die in vain?  I scrawled Viva la revolución! across Eastnor Castle's sign and set fire to the Lakefest banner as a protest against Ricky Wilson, both for his participation in the capitalist destruction of our nation and also his decision to lose all that weight when he clearly looked better before.

With no hint of an alternative route, and the nearby bus stop informing me that due to reductions in central government funding... service 388 will no longer operate and serve this stop after 30th August 2014, I took to the road.  It would add a couple of extra miles to my walk and it was a lot less interesting.  I trudged along the verge, miserable and disappointed.  I'd come all the way to Herefordshire with ambitions of a long, scenic country hike.  Ducking into hedges to avoid Ford Focuses and stepping over the crushed corpses of pheasants, hedgehogs and rabbits hadn't been on the list.

Being herded off my main route also dialed up the anxiety.  Things weren't going to plan, and that is always a bad thing for me.  I was miles from home and having to wing a new route.  The Ordnance Survey app on my phone was a great help, but the mobile signal was spotty, and when I'd downloaded the map to its memory I hadn't thought to include this alternative route.  I knew that there was another long distance path, the Three Choirs Way, which went north-south and which collided with the Geopark Way.  I'd hoped to reach it later but I guessed it would spur off this road somewhere.

That sign was a shock, because I hadn't realised I'd crossed the county line.  A little check of the map when I got home revealed they were cheating - the sign was technically still in Herefordshire - but it was still a reminder of how far I'd walked.  It was lunchtime now but I wasn't hungry.  I'd had a big breakfast and the anxiety of the new route had gripped my stomach and knocked any hunger out of it.  The only way I knew it was noon was the hot, hot sun.

I passed a Private Property - Keep Out sign that informed me that despite walking two miles I was still close to Eastnor Castle land (seriously: eat the rich) and a laminated poster informing me that I had sadly missed the return of the Sealed Knot Society to Ledbury.  Civil War recreations are just below having a fag with Nigel Farage and abusing foreigners on the list of Brexity activities I never want to get close to so I breathed a sigh of relief I'd left the town behind and turned onto the Three Choirs Way and the true Malvern Hills.

If I'd been able to walk through the Deer Park I'd have gently risen up to the top of the Malvern ridge.  It would have been a slow rise over country that would have taken me to the top.  This route, however, went straight up from the level road.  I was suddenly thrust onto a high steep path I hadn't planned on taking.  It was open and exposed, made of hard earth, and I baked.  My shirt was literally sodden now.  I paused now and then to try and pull some of the worst excesses off my forehead before they dripped down my glasses or into my eyes.  It was steep, and hard, and I was tired.  I paused for another drink of water.  I'd been rationing it, but I was aware that the flask was now only about half full.  And I was thirsty. 

At least I had a moment of mobile signal.  The Ordnance Survey app really is brilliant, and I highly recommend it.  I was able to spot that my intended route, to the top of the hill, was off to the right somewhere.  Up another steep climb.  I sighed and took it, then, at the top, where a single cottage sat waiting for murderers to recreate Straw Dogs, I branched off into the woods.

I was surprised to see the main route for vehicles had flooded.  The dark forest must have stopped it from drying up.  It was clearly a regular occurrence, as a footpath had been carved into the side of the roadway.

It continued like that for a long way.  Any time the road levelled, the water from the hills had flowed down and filled it, turning it into a mucky trench.  I darted around, crossing over and back, jumping even though I was too tired to jump.

This was starting to feel like a mistake.  I realised I should've done more long distance walking before I decided to walk ten hilly miles.  I'm forty-two.  I can't just do this any more.  Darker thoughts also started to spin round my head.  The realisation that nobody knew where I was.  That my nearest friend was a hundred miles away.  That a slip and fall would leave me stranded.  That I was only halfway to the next station, and there was no alternative other than pushing on.

I took a wrong turn.  I don't know when, or how, but when I looked at my phone again, I realised I was on a side path, well away from the main route.  I'd walk the Malvern Hills that day, but at no point would I reach the top of them; instead I remained stuck on the edge, thick woodlands stopping me from getting near the summit.  I never once got a view because of the trees all around me.  I drained some more of my water ration.  The bottle was getting worryingly light.

I was now feeling a little dizzy; the heat and the lack of water were starting to get to me.  Whenever I get hot and sweaty and weak like that I get flashbacks to being eleven.  Our whole year was being punished by the PE teacher for some infraction and we were made to stand outside, in the sun, instead of having a lesson.  I remember a blackness creeping in at the edge of my vision, like a closedown dot, and the next thing I knew I was somehow on the floor.  I'd passed out, which was good news for the rest of the year because the PE teacher panicked and sent them all in the changing rooms quick in case they all flaked out as well.  (My parents were absolutely livid when they found out that night - my mum was all for storming the school, and my dad, who was not a violent man, was very close to going down and punching him - but I persuaded them not to prolong my embarrassment.  Today we'd have probably got a nice little apology and maybe a bit of compo, but this was the Eighties). 

It was a one off, a series of circumstances, but it stayed in my head as a thing that could happen if I got overheated.  And here I was, my shirt a sopping rag, alone and weak. 

I turned up a steep hill, ridiculously steep, almost vertical.  I had to stop halfway up to breathe.  I reached the top and there was a choice of paths so I pulled out my phone again.  And realised I'd come the wrong way.  I didn't need to climb that slope at all.  I should've turned left.

I collapsed on the grass and let out a sob.  (Though I didn't know it, I sat in a big load of mud, and would have a brown-smeared arse for the rest of the day).  I didn't want to be here any more.  I didn't want to do this any more.  I'd had enough.  I drank the last two mouthfuls of water and realised that was the lot.  I wanted to lay down and sleep.  And I was still terribly aware that even when I got out of these woods, I still had miles more to go.  I was about two thirds of the way there.

After a while, I picked myself up.  I staggered back down the steep hill, praying I wouldn't slip and tumble to the bottom and have to lie there with a broken ankle, and took the correct route.

And something wonderful happened.  The trees began to thin.  The waterlogged path became dry again.  Small houses appeared, silent and empty, but a sign that I was reaching civilisation again.  Then there was a road.

A road meant people.  I followed it round what seemed like a million bends until suddenly I reached the tiny tourist spot at British Camp.  There was a car park, and a hotel, and, most blessed of all, a small hut selling drinks and snacks.  Even though I was rasping with thirst, I queued politely, because I was extremely well brought up, and I bought an orange juice and a bottle of water and an ice cream. 

Note that the orange juice is half-empty.  I'd guzzled at it before I thought to take a photo.  I must've looked a real sight, with my sodden shirt and my red face and my scratched and muddied legs under dirty shorts.  I really didn't care.

The ice cream and the juice gave me the lift I needed.  I felt a lot more positive all of a sudden.  I also knew that I was now back on track.  I could return to the route I'd planned for myself on my computer.  The anxieties began to drift away.

By the time I was crossing the fields to Evendine they'd almost completely vanished.  I was still tired - every stile caused an "ooh" noise that I recognised as sounding almost exactly like the sound Olivia Colman made when she got up onstage at the Oscars (yet another sign that I have watched that video way too many times) - but now at least I knew I was on the final stretch.  I didn't have much hope of making my train, but that was ok.  There was one every hour.  It'd be fine.  I'd just sit on the platform at Colwall and recover.

Evendine was a snug cluster of cottages threaded along a single road, some of them thatched, some of them half-timbered, all of them lovely.  The Malt House put the usual country fare to shame.  I was used to a box of eggs by the side of the road, maybe the odd jam, but at the Malt House they had an entire shop of drinks and cards:

I will admit, a bit of me was furious at finding a wide range of liquids on sale - where were you an hour ago? - but I popped £3.50 in the honesty box and took a small bottle of apple and mango and one of apple and ginger.  I drank them later at my hotel and they were a little sharp, but very tasty.

Then it was another walk across fields, though now it was populated and I didn't have it to myself.  There was a middle-aged man who walked a few paces ahead of me for a while, until I hung back deliberately to get some distance between us (he later turned up at the station after me, so I'm not sure where he went inbetween).  A couple of ladies walked excitable collies, one of them moaning when their dog went to the toilet; I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been there to shame her she'd have left it and not bothered with the poo bag.  I walked under the railway and into a cul-de-sac where a miserable looking teen sat on the pavement and contemplated the absolute misery of existing.

This was a newer part of Colwell, a very recent looking development, with the houses still having a vague air of showhome.  There was a gloriously crappy playground that the builders had clearly been forced to pay for under duress.  It consisted of two benches and a slide and they really should have replaced the No Dogs Allowed signs with Will This Do?  I followed the main road into the quiet village centre, a strip of shops and amenities that felt more suburban than rural.

I almost cheered when I saw the arrow pointing to the station.  I ignored the call of the beer garden at the Colwall Park Hotel and staggered down to the single platform of Colwall station.  There was no proper sign on the outside so I grabbed a shot with the first sign I saw then collapsed on a bench.

Please note the comedy effect excessive sweat has on my hair. 

After a while, I took a look at the next train indicator.  It turned out my train to Great Malvern had been cancelled.  It was a sign.  I took the next train back to Hereford, where I walked to my Travelodge and had a very long, very cold shower to wash the day away.  Walking can be fun.  Getting home is always better.