Writer and planetary modeller David Angus humorously reflects on a sweltering hike through the ‘Surrey Stockbroker Belt’ along an old Roman Road, recounting how busy ‘A’ roads and landowners’ decisions have made hiking in England unnecessarily treacherous.
Our recent heatwaves – the first having been in May – with temperatures over 30° C should shame the climate change sceptics.
I’m reminded of adventures in hot climates abroad, but one of the serious challenges I faced was not abroad at all. During a summer heatwave, I did a sponsored hike through the Surrey Stockbroker Belt, trying to follow a Roman road. I was deliberately misdirected onto a dangerous thoroughfare by a landowner who’d got rid of a footpath.
Anger, rage, fury: they all get a bad press and understandably so. Socially, they can be frightening and dangerous. But they have their uses. In the battles I’d fought in my life, I’d learned that some anger would give me that emergency reserve of raw energy needed to pull me through a crisis. So I harangued myself sergeant major-style – or centurion perhaps – with the following:
‘Right, now listen up. You went through a Boer war-style siege in Cape Town (minus the bullets), holding out successfully for work there, which enabled you to cross the whole of Africa! You won a showdown in El Paso against Greyhound buses in the best tradition of the wild west! You’ve been told by an ex-sergeant of the British Army that you frightened him into paying money he owed you when even the accountant was done for £197 (I still have trouble believing that one)!
‘You’ve seen death in the Great Martian War and still met the worst deadline in a thousand years! You’ve fought and won battles of the spirit on four continents and even on other worlds (after a fashion)! With that regimental history, are you going to let yourself be defeated by a bunch of over-privileged landowner tossers when a special school is depending on the money you can raise for them with this sponsorship gig?’
‘NO! Because you’ve got the experience and the BALLS to see this through! You’re hiking a Roman road, so you’re in the Roman Army now! So forget politically correct conventional wisdom; anyone caught using that word ‘inappropriate’ will get a gladius where the sun doesn’t shine, now MARCH! This time it’s WAR!’
I guess it used to be known as ‘fighting spirit’.
And so I hit that road in a black storm of furious resolve which seemed to darken the brilliance of this hot blue day. I needed it because this ‘A’ road should have been classed as a ‘B’ for bastard road. Not wide like it should be. The odd blind bend, of course. Little if any room for manoeuvre on its edges without flattening oneself into greenery as anything on wheels swept past, creating that sound of traffic I hated by now: a boring, moronic symphony for the humdrum at heart that rose and fell but never finished. Never allowing one to relax.
I knew that sheer aggression would keep me alert and get me through this. Hanging on to just enough sense of self-preservation not to play chicken with oncoming trucks, I had less respect for anything smaller. I’d heard it all before from some drivers, about how anyone who didn’t drive must have something wrong with them and about how their vehicle was bigger and better than others blah blah. I could see that type on that road now as I battled my way down it. Well, suppose you get out of your SUV or BMW, Mr Mouth and Trousers, so I can include you in my death march. Then we’ll sort out the men from the motor-mouths, health and safety wallahs, legal beagles, status seekers, corporate creeps, bonus buggers and property pests! It’s not going to happen though because none of you wankerheads could make it out of Dorking, let alone get this far!
That dead tree overlooking this car culture bobsleigh run would do for a photograph a mile. As well as not causing an accident, I had to attend to this record as proof of my effort.
After a stretch of this, I reached a dangerous roundabout holding me up with a blind bend on the right, a vortex of traffic otherwise. Eventually, I made it to the other side. The good news was that it was most of the way towards Stane Street.
Some way beyond that, I made it to the Roman road! Not far down it I came to a bridge over a stream and sat on the parapet for a drink and a look at the map. Although this road was longer, it was straighter and there was even a lull in traffic at this point. Half the battle was won, or more like a third distance-wise. Just a straight slugging match of endurance now between me and fate down that road.
Onward on the march of heat and sweat-ridden endurance down the Roman road, maybe in the same spirit as the Roman legions 2,000 years ago.
What the hell? I’d have to be a little crazy to walk 65 miles in the 21st century anyway.
Somewhere on this road, two landowners had tried to claim the utmost by planting two hedges on opposite sides of the road, inches from it. Yep. On both sides of the road on the crest of a hill! A well-organised death trap is just what you need when you’re played out in every sense of the word. Calmly, I assessed the situation, moved quickly when the time was right, flattened myself up the left-hand side of the road. Took the hill. Got back smartly when the time was right to the right side at the top. And soldiered on.
At some point, there was a break from little or no verge and pretentious landowner driveways with CCTV cameras. There was an attractive-looking greensward and the road was strangely less than busy again. It was the way Sod’s Law worked. The traffic seemed to build up when hedges, or walls, or trees were inches from the road. I stopped and checked the map because there was a road sign for a golf course and there had been a map symbol for that one on the North Downs where I’d bought that Lucozade.
I could find no symbol, nor anything else of use. I had no idea how far down that road I was. The grass invited me to lay down, but I dared not. It was getting to the stage where it was an effort of will to put one foot in front of the other and there’d been no pubs or anywhere to buy any kind of drink, so this Surrey-Sussex border region might as well be a desert! I had to move on. I knew how to fight this battle: just imagine you’re hiking to eternity and simply won’t give up until you give up the ghost. That way, any progress is a nice surprise.
I’d reached unusually flat ground where the road stretched ahead for a depressing distance. After a while, I noticed an unusual movement repeating itself at random intervals just before the vanishing point of the road. Could that be a junction?
There was a place on the map called Five Oaks where a main road met this Roman road, with another road junction just to the north. If there was a junction ahead, could that be it? Five Oaks looked insignificant, but it was insignificant in the same way that places like El Alamein and Waterloo were. Sometimes geography determines that decisive battles are won or lost at such railway halts or villages. The significance of Five Oaks was the Travelodge I’d booked, being about a mile south of there. Get to Five Oaks and the battle’s won!
It was definitely a junction. I could see a tractor and trailer swinging across the road into it, then there was the odd car. No sign when I got there though. Keep going.
There was a sign… Five Oaks! I’d made it! Nothing but a huddle of houses and a small trading estate. I passed the second junction.
The view suddenly opened up as if in reward for my effort: a panorama of distant hills of a slightly deeper blue than the glare of the sky. Those long level ridge-lines – that’s the South Downs! It was like one of those films where someone sees a mountain range from a desert and exclaims: ‘There! You see! We really can make it!’
That wasn’t all. Down the road in the far distance was a red square on a pole. Could that be the Little Chef logo? There was a Little Chef at the Travelodge, so journey’s end could be in sight.
There was even enough space for a conversation; there was a pavement and an old man came up it wheeling a racing bike. He looked the way I felt. The weather had brought him out, but he’d had enough and was heading home, about a mile back where I’d hiked. The view and having made it made me throw caution to the winds so I regaled him with my adventures, including when I gave one of those landowner driveway CCTVs a sign that Churchill was fond of (and I do hope you record that for training purposes)!
It was The Little Chef! Now for the Travelodge. I shambled into the first entrance, but there was no Travelodge in view. Must be on the other side of The Little Chef. Not a problem. On the other side, I could see it, but I also found myself mingling into what looked like a lager lout convention: huge, bare-chested blokes with tattoos lugging cold packs of alcoholic cans out of car boots and into the building. Any of them looked as though they could have blown me away like a feather, but they were so polite. It was weird actually just how polite they were, which went completely against their appearance.
The fellow on reception was polite too: a young man with a foreign accent who proved himself to be no company clone. He gave me a painless registration process and the keys to my room. The lager louts, meanwhile, diminished in number and were soon to disappear. Quietly. Weird indeed! One can experience strange things when one’s knackered.
My room was cheap and cheerful. Laboriously, I ran the bath and got out of my clothes.
At last! A relaxing hot bath. I eased myself in. Aaaaaahh……….
Where’s the soap?
No soap.
Laboriously, I reversed the process that had got me into the bath just far enough not to be arrested through lack of clothing; then went back to reception.
This worked in my favour. The young fellow with the foreign accent opened up a store and I got two small shampoo containers unclaimed by previous customers, along with a domino-sized bar of soap.
“If there’s any other problem you need help with, just let me know, sir.”
“Yeees. You’re quite good at that, aren’t you?”
He chuckled at that. We parted on good terms.
Back in my room, I found another domino-sized bar of soap.
Aaaaaahh… a second time. I stayed in that bath until I felt capable of getting to bed. Maybe I was in such a state that those lager louts had been polite to me because I looked like the old man I’d met on the road, or at death’s door.
I had no alcohol or even any food to speak of, but I just wasn’t hungry. No really. My body seemed to be telling me that I’d pushed myself to the limit, so what it really needed now was to lie still in comfort for long enough so it could prepare me for the morrow, which should be easier. As long as I had water, I could relax in bed surfing TV with the remote until I became drowsy. That was all the luxury I needed. Forget about anything else.
Photo courtesy of David Angus.
