With all my earlier talk of singing while I walk and moments of bliss, you may be imagining me as some sort of wandering minstrel, crazy and cheerful and chattering away to myself. It’s not always so. Today I was in a less vocal mood, just letting my mind wander and taking the time for a bit of quiet contemplation. The advantage of walking alone, of course, is that you can say almost nothing for a whole day and no one worries that you’re so quiet.

My B&B hostess, however, seemed to want at least a bit of chat as her due payment for the room and the cereal, so she hovered a bit and we went through the usual (where are you from, how’s the walk been so far, are you going home from Bath (Ha!), etc) before I was left to my breakfast.

The weather had turned a bit in the night, and it was noticeably humid and closer to 70 degrees than the low 60s and maybe a bit of upper 50s I’ve been having so far. It’s amazing how much difference that little bit can make. It’s not that one is great and the other awful—but it’s different walking in humid air (not pea-soup humid like Chicago in summer, but humid) than in a cold dry wind.

My B&B was at the north end of Wotton-Under-Edge (it’s less quaint than it sounds), but since I’d gone into town yesterday to buy my tasty pork pies for dinner, I was retracing my steps down into town for the first 500 yards or so, and then going across the small valley, following a little brook behind some houses and then rising through woods up a hillside, where I hit a steeply climbing paved road. For climbing steep ascents and for rapid descents, I don’t mind a paved road; you have to worry less about missing your footing on an unexpected slippery bit of mud. As I was slowly making my way up the road, I was passed, very slowly, by a spread-out group of ten cyclists, all men in middle-age (I still sometimes have to remind myself when guessing people’s ages that I’m 46 and must be seen as ‘that middle-aged lunatic singing as he walks’…). I was going about 1.5 miles an hour, they were going maybe 3, so it was a slow overtaking, slow enough for brief conversational exchanges with each cluster of two or three as they passed. Thus:

Cyclist: “Oh no,” said in mock horror, “a pedestrian. Haven’t you forgotten your cycle?”

Me: “I thought the pedaling felt strange. Damn, now I’ll have to go back down to town and get it.”

Cyclist: “And an accent, too.”

Me: “Worse and worse…”

Laughter between breaths all around, as they moved ahead, and the next group slowly came up behind me.

Once they’d left me behind, I saw very few people all morning, walking around the upper edges of small valleys with lots of tress (very different from the more rugged feel of the north end of the trail), dropping and climbing a few times before I hit my next interaction with people. On a part of the trail just outside Lower Kilcott, where the Way is also a bridle path, I came to a gate just as four riders on horseback were coming from the other way. This gate didn’t have one of those handy high handles for riders to undo the latch, so I opened the gate for them and had a very brief chat.

Yes, on the day when I have been in the most subdued mood by myself I have ended up having these little conversational encounters. So it goes.

In fact, much later in the day (this was a 16 miler), I actually walked through a churchyard where people were just going inside for a wedding. Them I didn’t talk to; the contrast of my sweaty hiking shorts and their suits and dresses was just too much.

Later, I passed through Dodington Park, the grounds of Dodington House landscaped by Capability Brown. Now here’s a puzzler; I knew that Capability Brown was a landscape architect, but why do I know that? In what college course would Capability Brown have come up? Whatever the answer, I know that he’s famous for these “natural” deployments of trees, where forests are carefully trimmed and thinned, and new trees planted to create pleasing views. I also think I remember that things like the outlier tree (see the pair below at right) were a trademark of his work. Man, the stuff you learn in life, just waiting to be trotted out at a moment like this.

But most of the day, I was left to my thoughts, and it was a good chance to take stock, think about how things are going in my life, what’s working and what I’d like to change, all that big picture sort of thinking. You’ll forgive me if I don’t go into details.

But you can only muse on big questions for so long (remember, I walked for almost eight hours today), so I let my mind wander to other subjects, like the question of the variety of manure. Sorry if this example of my musings is kind of icky but I am walking on a trail where every day I see shit. Sheep shit, cow shit, horse shit, dog shit. Sheep shit little berry-sized nodules, but in great profusion, so you often get little piles. Horses leave heroic, straw-rich lumps like a cluster of muffin-sized lumps. But cows just leave these awful big splats. Which got me thinking; what’s the difference? Why are cows such sloppy shitters? I’m not at all qualified or learned in the ways of animal digestion to say, which means I am left free to wonder and speculate. I know cows are ruminants (why I know this is a mystery, but I bet a lot of you know it to, even if you haven’t thought of it in years). But what about sheep and horses. Are they? I believe being a ruminant has something to do with having multiple stomachs, one of which does digestion that creates cud? Is this plumbing different than a horse’s? Or a sheep’s? Beats me, but that’s the sort of place your mind goes when you’re avoiding getting mired too deeply in self-assessment. Fortunately for you, I decided not to illustrate this bit of musing with photos. Instead, here’s some berries, a pheasant, mushrooms and flowers to close out the post.

Miles walked: 16.