The earliest yawn of springtime

Springtime is just the most glorious time, isn't it?

The newness of it all, the novelty of the early flowers.  Winter wasn't even all that much of a hardship here in southern England.  The thing I had the most problem with was the darkness- if you didn't make a point of getting out, you could easily go days without getting a little daylight.  But now spring is here, and moody and damp alternates with sunny and hopeful.

Naturally, I jumped the gun and left my basil plant that had over-wintered on the window sill out too early.  I now have an ex-basil plant.

All the things you took advantage of in the cold months is now over.  Maltby Street in Bermondsey is  once again a scrum, with a tangle of beards and piercings and skinny jeans all pushing their way through the narrow alleyway, dodging harried waiters with fancy cocktails and inhaling the smells of whole roasted hogs.  Museums and restaurants are now packed, and having London to myself is a thing of the past.

Naturally, getting out into the countryside becomes a priority when the sun gets to my head.  After the mudbath of a couple weeks ago, I found a drier bit of trail...when in doubt, head for the hills!

After a train ride to Rochester, in which a hat lovingly handknit with Madeline Tosh Merino in the color Graphite was sadly left behind, we walked a stretch through the city, past adorable shops and an impressive cathedral and a Norman castle that stands guard the River Medway.  

We picked up a trail along the banks of the river, which were mudflats filled with gulls and ducks and waders.  Rather stupidly, I had doubled up on wool socks, thinking that it would be helpful in preventing blisters.  Less then two miles in and my heels looked bloody awful.  I stopped to put on the Compeed plasters that I always bring along (but never had to use!) and hoped for the best.

The North Downs Way passes over the Medway on this super motorway and highspeed rail bridge.  I really didn't mind skipping that bit of walking at all.

With the motorway behind us and occasional thunders of the train going from London to Paris at breathtaking speeds, the countryside opened up and once again we were walking in the lovely bucolic downland of Kent.  Considering this was only 45 minutes outside of London...not bad.

One notable thing:  a burial chamber on the hill, left by the ancients, the cremated remains long gone.

Rather mystifying why they would put the mile marker on a tombstone:

Really, I've only done 80 miles on this trail?  It feels like a lot more than that.  One thing I can say about this trail: it's great that it's so close to London and so easy to do stretches on the commuter rail.  Also, Surrey and Kent are both infuriatingly well served by motorways.  The trail has got some good climbs here and there, it keeps you in trees quite a lot, and there is very little chance anyone might ever get lost.  

The original plan had been to do 18 miles to Hollingbourne, but as we sat down at the pub with the obscene name for a breather I thought otherwise.  

My feet were in all sorts of agony.  New boots, the early double sock error.  Oh, what a world!  I took out the map and found a train station 4 miles closer than Hollingbourne.  I always feel like a lousy cheat when I take a shortcut or deviate from the original plan, but 14 miles is still not a bad walk.  Right?

Instead of climbing back onto the downs, we headed across the fields to the nearest train station, and let the rails take us home.

I did find a lovely little church tucked between some farms and some grand estates, which is always so charming to find.

So there.  We did our first big walk since early January.  My feet have recovered and I've been doing the fashionable thing and wearing my hiking boots around London, ignoring the fact that they don't go with a smart skirt and blouse combo.  The things I do for fashion!  

NDW Day 5: Oxted to Otford

With the gorgeous spring, the brilliant summer and the sun cream laden autumn, I thought winter hiking would be a breeze.  A little colder perhaps, with shorter days, but how could it be any different?  I looked forward to some brusque and chilly walks.

Not so?

I crossed the M25 and headed up the hills of Oxted Downs to find the trail a bog.

I hadn't thought of this.  I mean, it has rained quite a bit off and on but there have been lovely sunny afternoons, but with the dim presence of the sun so low on the horizon, there is no way for all the water to dry up.

It made for exhausting hiking.

When I wasn't hopping over puddles, my boots became so heavy with caked-on mud that I started to think of them as cement shoes.  Plus, every step you took you slipped back a bit, meaning there was a lot of extra effort involved.  Ten miles soon began to feel like 20 at the end of the day, and I really feel like I earned anything I chose to consume when I was safely back in the SW9.

No matter though- the grass is still blindingly green, the trail devoid of humanoids, and the motorway still humming a tune to keep you company.  Also, I feel perfectly safe walking it on my own.

What was special about this day was the crossover from the county of Surrey into Kent.  A milestone of sorts on an otherwise unremarkable day of hillwalking.

Oh, yes.  I've gotten very lazy about carrying my big DSLR on these jaunts, as nothing has been striking me as notable and picturesque.  Green fields, rolling hills and a motorway.  Sometimes I see green woodpeckers, and always kestrels and buzzards.  Pics taken on the celly just aren't as good.  I think maybe the iphone has better optics than the Galaxy 5, which does take remarkably good macro shots, but really rubbish in the great outdoors.

I will finish this trail eventually.  It's always surprisingly pleasant to be strolling on, but just not stunning the way the Highlands of Scotland might be.

oh yes, special effects makes shitty pictures so much better.

North Downs Night Walk

How did I celebrate the winter solstice this year?

With a night hike, of course!

After spending a weekend in Cornwall and Dartmoor (which I still can't be arsed to write about) I took advantage of clear skies and a full moon for to get my night-legs on- the mood reflecting off the water meant sleep was not an option, along with roommates that sounded like they were sawing a fence in two.  I do love the idea of night hiking- the quiet, the endless privacy, all the creatures that come out once the sun is down.  My love of walking doesn't really gel with the tiny amount of daylight this time of year.

A plan was made.  After being up way too late and eating way too much the night before (thanks, Christmas!) I got a relaxed late start to walking a lonely 16 mile stretch of the North Downs through Kent from Otford to Cuxton.  Normally, I would be horrified at the idea of finishing a hike in darkness, but with a new braveness, I packed a torch and powered up and down the steep, rolling downland and quiet forested paths.

For a trail so well-traveled for centuries and so very close to London, I rarely see anyone on it.  A dog walker here and there. Newland's Corner and Box Hill are both kind of packed, but once you get out of the car parks, you are by yourself on the outskirts of 8.3 million people.

I didn't even break for lunch- it wasn't terribly cold, but cold enough that the chill set in if I lingered.  As the woods darkened under clouds and the sun disappeared to usher in the longest night of the year, a beautiful stillness took over.

The sounds of owls calling greeted the dark, along with the loud squawks of pheasants roosting in the trees and their panicked flights to a safer patch of trees than one invaded by me.  But the owls!  I love them only because they are so elusive- I see them rarely, so hearing them is always thrilling for me, and hearing them in the quiet woods outside of London was even more fun.

Oh, and it never really got truly dark in the open...I could see the eerie pink glow of London illuminating the clouds in front of me, and the city of Rochester lit up the other direction.  The woods were proper dark though.  One foot in front of the other, I slowly made my way through mud and over tree roots.

I used my torch rarely- to check to make sure the way-marks were being read correctly, and to check my compass.  Going through fields proved challenging as it was easy to lose the trail, so I would find a spot on the horizon that lined up with the compass and follow it until a fence was hit.  It's hiking in England!  I was more concerned about having a torch so that cars could see me if I did a stretch along the roadside, which I did.  The one time I did lose the trail in woods, the crunch of deep leaves underfoot alerted me to the fact that I was on A trail, but not THE trail, and I was quickly able to correct (rather than take a more direct route to the train station, it turned out).

In the end:  success.  I found a pub (!) and while waiting for the train back to London, I had myself a glass of wine and some chicken liver pate to celebrate my newly found night vision.  I was exhausted.  16 miles with a couple steep climbs and I was knackered, and the last four miles were in the dark and by far the slowest I've walked in a while, but I found the concentration needed on a moonless night taxing as well as I had to really look for every step.  In total, it took me 6 hours and 20 minutes from station to station, which isn't bad time at all on a muddy winter trail, and a happy peaceful walk is the anecdote to a plethora of seasonal maladies.

Hope you had a fantastic solstice, and enjoy the return of the sun.  Oh, unless you are in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case: enjoy the waning daylight, suckers!

 

A lovely walk to Hever

So...my camera was in the shop last week.  Nikon DSLRs have a way of spattering oil from the shutter onto the sensors, which creates odd distorted splotches on the images, and then the oil goes on to collect lots of dust.  This doesn't really matter so much on run-of-the-mill snapshots, but when you start blowing up images and shooting a lot of fine detail, you won't be able to unsee them and they will drive you mental.  Plus, you will see the dust once it gets to that point.

So I took it to the local shop- Fixation, which happens to be excellent.  I just asked for them to get in there and clean the sensor, but they said, Oh, Nikon is fixing that for free.  You get a new sensor.

The best part was that it took them about four days to turn it around.  Now that I have it back, it's shooting really cleanly again, and the new sensor appears to be an upgrade as it is super fast and accurate.  Have I really been riding in a jalopy this whole time when I could have been in a Bentley?  And why didn't the Nikon dealer in Paris tell me that Nikon was replacing the sensors on this model, gratis, and charged me for multiple cleanings with a shrug and a smile?

Bitterness aside....not having a camera to shoot meant I had to depend on my cell phone camera.  Granted, it's a new Nexus 5, and supposedly the camera integrated in the phone is A-MAZE-ING.  I've had it for several months now and never really bothered with it- I used it when I was apartment searching, and that was about it.  I decided to take it out on a walk through forest and field in the countryside with me, like it was perhaps a loyal dog.

It was a lovely Saturday and I had a great little guide that I had picked up at a charity shop on local-to-London countryside walks.  Here it is if you want one- it's about 10 years old, so you might have to improvise the route here and there, but no problems so far.  There are a few of these guides out there, and I saw several other couples on the trail following book guides as well, proving that e-readers haven't taken over every subset of publishing.  England is filled with lovely old paths- public rights of way.  These are paths that used to connect villages and farms and churches, and are still widely used to today to get around, even though some are now on private land.  You can connect the dots across the countryside on these lovely muddy lanes and walk all day.  The guide books come in handy to plot out your day...they usually give you a rather realistic time line and detailed instructions on how to find some of the paths, and there are plenty of themed walks and recommendations on how to find a place for a pint where you wouldn't have thought to find one.  Me, the queen of overambitious planning, sometimes needs help in choosing an ideal route to walk, if only to save myself from hustling to finish off a 20-miler before the sun goes down.  Most of the walks avoid the roads whenever possible, but sometimes you'll find yourself on a short stretch here and there.  It's really become one of my favorite things to do here:  choose a walk and head out and try to follow it.  The directions are minutely detailed, and with good reason, as most of the paths aren't labeled at all, but more of a folklore through the hills and downs.

I chose a route, rather randomly, that started in Hever in Kent, if only because it was an easy train ride out.  Much to my delight, the path left the quiet countryside train station and veered into a sheep field.  

Look at that camera phone at work.

 Oh, ugh, these are fairly terrible.  The issue with a lot of these phones is that the lens is always dirty and easily scratched.  Being put in and out of pockets and handbags all day makes my dusk and oil problems look minor in comparison.  Also, the limited amount of camera settings meant that I got a lot of over-saturated colors and grainy pixelation.  It seems to be much more geared towards macro photography.

But...lambs!  There were several parts along the path where you either have to squeeze through a chute or climb over a fence and cross various pastures.  The animals would always look at you as a curiosity before moving on to graze some more, not really bothered by someone clumsily heaving themselves over the stile, trying to avoid landing in knee-deep mud in the process.

The book came in super handy, as at some points, the trail twist and turns and ends up in someone's back yard, and I would never even think to find a trail there.  The American in me is weary to cross private land, but it's not a big deal here to follow a path over the fence and past a cute little house and come out their driveway to continue a walk.  Back in Maine, I had a friend with a beachfront cottage on a public path that went through the dune grass and skirted the edge of her yard, and she said that no one ever ever used it- they assumed it was private and took a much longer path around her land.

Onward, to Hever Castle.

Admission was kind of steep at 18 quid, but probably in the category of being worth it at least once.  I'm sure if I was local, I would get a membership and come here all the time, if only to picnic in their fantastic gardens.

Plus, the castle wasn't bad inside either.  Like everything else castle-like, this started as a Norman fortress, then a posh country house, but this place goes down in history of the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, and the place where dearest Henry VIII courted her, and later a country home for the American family of William Waldorf Astor.  They restored it beautifully, planting vast Italian-themed gardens and building a lake to row around in.

Inside the castle- (no pictures allowed, of course) was some period pieces of furniture from the Tudors, and some very luxe turn-on-the century art nouveau formal rooms courtesy of the Astors.  There were old religious text that were owned by Anne, notated in her handwriting, and a couple of timelines of owners of the castles.  After the Boylens fell out of favor with the King, he gifted the castle to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, as a sort of divorce gift.  How romantic!

Outside the moat: it was May Day, and there were all sorts of bizarre fertility rituals going on.

Still, my little phone camera captured rather odd things.  In the late-morning strong sunshine, the colors became rather over-saturated and vivid, like a 1950's postcard, with no depth of field at all.  Le sigh.

See?  It looks fake, or painted.  It's not.

I loved the gardens here, with the roses and rhododendrons and hedge mazes framed by tulips.

A walk around the man-made lake got a little wilder and quieter.

 

You could spend a good part of the day here, as they allow for picnicking on the lawns.  You can get a gardens-only admission ticket for a bit cheaper than the castle ticket and have a really nice day out.

I spent hours there, and almost forgot about my walk!  I picked it up again at the old Norman church outside of the castle walls.

If you cross the cemetery, a public footpath appears.  I would have never even thought to look for it there, never mind have the gall to follow it.

The trail crosses a lot of woods and fields, with small farms of chickens and pigs along the way.

Lucky me, the forest floor was covered in bluebells.

This area of Kent was known for it's pork once upon a time.  There were lots of old oak forest here, which is an ideal food to get a pig to be less than skin-and-bones.  As a child, I tried to eat an acorn once, after cracking one open with a rock.  It was terrible, and too bitter to do anything but run around wanting to get rid of the cottony texture in my mouth.  I'm still not quite sure why pigs love them so much.

The path took me to Chiddingstone.  There was another castle here, but it was closed for what appeared to be a raucous wedding.  Chiddingstone the town was purchased wholesale by the National Trust, and maintained as a slightly sleepy tourist attraction of perfect Tudor-style homes that adorably line the main drag.

There was an adorable tea house in one of the courtyards that serves a really refreshing slice of cake with your tea.

Just behind the village, on the edge of some farm fields, there lies the actual Chiding-stone.

It's a large boulder, which is quite unsual for the countryside here.  The legend is that naughty housewives and petty criminals would be brought to the rock to be chided and heckled, hence the town name of Chiddingstone.  Today, it's a place for aspiring graffiti artist to have a go at wearing the stone down bit by bit.

I allow no one to chide me here.

By this time, my sturdy little phone up and quit me.  Batteries, schmatteries.  In truth, I never knew how much power this thing sucks up because I generally only check it a couple times a day.

Off to Cowden train station from here, which is the next station south from Heaver.  It was a perfectly pleasant walk through the countryside, with lots of woods and friendly cows and some nice lofty hills to climb.  We stopped at a tiny country pub called The Kentish Horse on the way.  These tend to be my favorite kind of pubs: friendly, local, with a cast of characters taking up residence.  A rather drunk woman showed us her boobs.  She had gray hair.

As the sun was setting, Cowden finally came into view.  It's a train station in the middle of nowhere- no pubs or cafes within walking distance- so you better get your timing with the train right.

The entire walk was only about 7 leisurely miles, with a couple more miles added on for wandering Hever Castle gardens and around the lake there.  It was just so perfectly pleasant we picked another one right away, and went out for drinks at a posh London pub in our caked-mud clothes to meet up with some friends.