JDK 26/01/07 © MY FIRST REAL HILL

Surrey, Sussex, The South Downs, home counties rolling farmland, Box Hill, the sum total of my walking experience at 14, nearly fifteen. But I was dreaming of Hills, real hills, Scottish Highlands, Snowdonia, the Pennines. I can’t remember now which it was. But I can remember when I got there. The Long Mynd, Caer Caradoc, these were real hills. I just hadn’t heard of them.

They dominated the landscape, towered above me, were not like those mountains in Switzerland on the school trips. School uniform every day on the bus, the funicular railway, the diesel electric train, looking, gawping, photographing with my Brownie 127 from a distance I had not been concsious of.

All distance gone. There was no distance between the mud and stones, the tussocks and rushes and sheep pellets and the toes of my new boots. The crunch and slide and click of stones in their tread, the thump of my self conscious walking stick [would I really need it?] and the rising smells of animals and soil closed what the camera had held away. Out of Wilderhope Manor and down the lane running with September rain and the dung of the morning’s trek to the milking parlour. We are going to walk past Caer Caradoc - not high enough for us - we are hill walkers now. We must have crossed the Ludlow Shrewsbury road and gone through Church Stretton but my memory is tuned to another signal. Up ahead now, the signal drowning out all the crackle of the town was a vast mass of the Earth. An unimaginable billion ton thigh of Shropshire.

Carding Mill Valley opened to receive us and closed about us focussing eyes on the disappearing fold, the V of the brook and Mott’s Road. Black birds rose up to make way for these unstoppable figures and settled back down at their breakfasts after us. Sudden sheep skittered aside acknowledging us with wary and reproachful looks. Reluctant to risk that much concentration on grass again until we were a sight more than a dog’s whistle away. Alan Jeffery up ahead, his thick legs in eternal shorts steadily giving me that metronome beat my walking did not yet possess. Roy, just bone muscle and sinew in plimsolls, no socks and his seaman’s kitbag on a cord over his iron shoulder; his falcon eyes seeing every mouse in Shropshire from up here; remember what he said, breath in for five paces, out for five. Don’t vary that. As it gets steeper just shorten your stride. It’s like changing down in a car. Up, up, up, breathe, up, up, up, breathe. I’m doing three. I can’t do five. I can’t be very fit. Skinny legs burning. Alan stops to check the path against the map. I stop, legs trembling, lungs gasping with gratitude for the chance to get my breath back. I turn and the vastness which no Box Hill can possess sinks away below me back along our path now disappearing down through that V and we’re off across the tussocks already. Off the path and the earth has a bounce and a lift like the sandy soil of Leith Hill but a much longer, uncompressed lift. Like walking on a mattress. I’ve never walked on peat before. I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t even know I need to know anything.

The ground isn’t there, where it was. It’s coming at my face and my stick won’t stop it. I lean on nothing. One boot through the hill into the liquid mud of a bog which is passing my knee as I realise what has happened. We’re out, up, on the top and I can see for miles and miles over into Wales [though I don’t know that either]. The three peaks; now I know the high one is Moel y Golfa; I’d just seen them when the hill turned to bog. Not looking where I was going but at where I would go 45 years later. Still walking.