Walking: Whitchurch-on-Thames and Mapledurham

We may be back from our long-distance walk, but down south the weather is still warm and summery and it would have been a shame not to make the most of it by going for a walk today. We picked one of the slightly shorter walks we'd rejected over the summer as not quite long enough to be good practice for Scotland, though at 8.25 miles today's only just didn't make the grade (and in fact it turned out to be more like 9.25 miles as we had to divert slightly at the end to avoid walking down a busy road which the book swore had a footpath, but if so it was in stealth mode).



The walk we chose started in Pangbourne, on the Berkshire side of the Thames, but in fact Pangbourne only seemed to have been chosen as a starting point because of the availability of car parking. Having managed to find our way to Pangbourne despite the best efforts of Google maps, which appears to have something against the A329 and instead sent us down a tiny road with lots of very narrow bits and across Whitchurch toll bridge, we immediately crossed back over the toll bridge (fortunately there are no tolls for pedestrians) to the Oxfordshire side and walked from Whitchurch-on-Thames to Mapledurham (a typical Oxfordshire Chilterns village whose greatest claim to fame is probably pretending to be a village in Norfolk in the film The Eagle Had Landed), passing Hardwick House on the way (something which surprised us both, as neither of us had realised Hardwick House was in Oxfordshire), as well as fields full of alpacas and horses. We then returned to Whitchurch by a different path, further from the river and climbing up and down through beechwoods and across grassy Chiltern slopes. The weather was glorious, with enough of a breeze to stop it from being too hot, though as after a few weeks away I've clearly lost my getting-ready-for-a-walk-routine and had managed to leave my sunhat at home I was quite glad of the shady parts too. We also passed lots of bushes absolutely laden with ripe blackberries and picked enough for a crumble for pudding tonight, though we could have picked more if we'd had more plastic bags with us.

Reading: Footnotes

Peter Fiennes's Footnotes is subtitled 'A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers'. Given the title, I had been expecting the journey to be on foot, but in fact although there is some walking (including a walk up Snowdon in a fog, which exactly mirrors my experience when we climbed Snowdon some years ago) the writers in whose footsteps Fiennes is following use a variety of modes of transport, particularly horseback and train, while Fiennes's journey is mainly by car. He starts in Swanage, Enid Blyton's preferred holiday destination and the inspiration for the fantasy Devon of her books, all cream teas, smugglers' caves and lashings of ginger beer; he then moves on to Cornwall, where he follows Wilkie Collins and the surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun around the coast. The seventeenth-century diarist Celia Fiennes' journey takes him from Launceston to the Welsh borders; he then follows medieval cleric Gerald of Wales through South Wales and the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Anglo-Irish writers Edith Somerville and Violet 'Martin' Ross through North Wales. Returning to England, J.B. Priestley and Beryl Bainbridge take him to Birmingham, Bradford and Liverpool, and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to the Lake District and Doncaster. He follows Boswell and Johnson around Scotland before returning to Priestley and Bainbridge who take him from Newcastle to Lincoln, and then, finally, he shares Dickens' final journey from his home in Gad's Hill to Westminster Abbey.

Fiennes's narrative merges together background information on the authors he has chosen to follow, many of them writers who are not particularly well-known, and key facts about their journeys, with his own observations as he follows in their footsteps, and, linking them, a meditation on the ways in which Britain has changed over the centuries; what has been lost, what has been gained, and the impossibility of ever really quantifying this. It's a interesting and thought-provoking book, and also a very enjoyable one, as Fiennes has a chatty, self-deprecating style which makes his narrative a pleasure to read. I very much appreciated that he managed to include equal numbers of women and men among the authors he follows (which can't have been that easy to do, given the male dominance of the travel genre) and now very much want to seek out the writing of some of the ones I hadn't previously encountered, in particualar Ithell Colquhoun, Celia Fiennes and Somerville and Ross.

(Because I had an e-ARC for review, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, I can't comment on the maps and illustrations, though a quick glance at the hardback in the gorgeous Highland Bookshop in Fort William suggests that it is also a beautifully presented book.)