After a day off, I was eager to get moving again. But my B&B host doesn’t like to start breakfast until 8am, so nothing to be done about that. Last night, as I was relaxing in my room before walking to a pub for dinner, a group of French people arrived. (Warning: gross stereotyping follows.) Though my French is very rusty and was always pretty minimal, I got the sense from an extended bout of loud-voiced discussion, with the one English speaker making enquiries of the host and then going off in extended conversations in French with his companions, that the shared bathroom was creating a scandal on the scale of the Dreyfuss affair. I dreaded the thought that they are walkers and that I might be encountering them again. So at breakfast, I was relieved to see that they were dressed for tourism, not walking.

I also incurred the first real injury of the trip, though minor. Of course, I have the odd bruise and lots of little scratches on my legs (stinging nettles, I hate you), but this bruise is a bit bigger, and done in the dumbest way possible. I was using the timer and the gorillapod flexible tripod for my camera to photograph myself in front of the B&B (I’m doing a shot of each place I stay). I had it set up on the post of the front gate. I pressed the button, and in the dash to get through the gate and into position in the ten seconds available, I clipped myself but good on the gate. No skin break, but a heck of an ouch and a bruise just above my ankle.

And then, about two minutes after I set out to get to the starting point of the trail, it started to rain lightly. Not an auspicious beginning, I thought. The rain soon stopped, but in my mix of pain from the winging of my ankle, the rain and being out of habit for a day was enough that, when I had found the trail and was heading toward the start point about the river Severn, I missed a marker and went wandering up a country lane. This added at least a mile to my ramble as I tried to find way signs, wondering if the Offa’s Dyke path is simply not as well marked. Finally after some consulting with my Ordinance Survey Map, I concluded I had gone wrong somehow, retraced my steps, and found the turn I had missed. That brought me here:

I set off in a renewed, buoyant mood, walking along a bit of the top of the dyke. Offa, by the way, was an 8th-century Mercian king who planned a massive earthenwork dyke (high earth wall—not stone—with a trench in front of it) to keep out those pesky Welsh raiders. It was never completed, but many sections were (the labor was divided out by village along the route, no doubt making Offa much hated by the serfs who had to add dyke-building to their to-do lists.

The trail starts with a bit of dyke walking, but for much of the way you’re not actually on the darn thing, and in fact there are long stretches where you aren’t even near any bump in the earth. But I think it’s cool that it starts that way.

The path crosses some fields and then, just to alter the mood a bit, goes through a housing estate, so that after walking the dyke for a bit, you’re walking down streets of houses in what I guess counts as the suburb of Chepstow (It’s not a big city, so the name suburb feels a bit wrong. But even in the housing development, you get little flashes of beauty in the scenery, since you are after all near a river with some cliffs.

I cut off the trail and crossed a bridge into Chepstow to see the castle, which was cool from the outside. I opted not to take the tour, since it’s early in the first day and I was eager to put in some miles.

So, I have just a teaser of the castle, but I promise more Welsh castles, since they are pretty thick on the ground on this trail.

The rejoined trail after Chepstow quickly breaks from the residential and starts climbing into woods and farm fields. I had the morning marked out by the prospect that I would easily make Tintern Abbey by lunchtime.

And then the rain returned in earnest. And this time it wasn’t the pleasant little spitting or thin drizzle; it was full-on get-your-socks-wet rain. I soldiered on, my mood quickly turning to something a bit more grim, like a Tolkien dwarf, and I had phrases like ‘getting on with the business at hand’ running through my mind. And then, just as it was letting up, I had another bizarre moment.

You’ve been hearing me mention sheeps and cows a lot, and all the U.K. trails have you walking through fields where animals are grazing. It’s easy to get a bit jaded about it. Until something like this:

That’s the kissing gate through which I must pass. But you can’t just walk among the cattle. If they get nervous, you could get hurt. So I approached the gate. They stared. I started to clap my hands and say things like “Shoo” and “Get on”. No dice. So I had to stand at the gate shouting at these cattle, clapping my hands and opening the gate slowly while they backed off sloooowly. Then something in the communal mood turned, and as a group they walked about ten yards away from the gate and the path, giving me access.

After getting through that rather ridiculous episode, I made it to Tintern Abbey, about which I spent a fair amount of trail time trying to recall what I know. Which is this: It’s a ruin, and it was a ruin when William Wordsworth visited there with his sister. Then he visited again five years later, and wrote a poem called “Tintern Abbey,” which starts “Five years have passed, five long years since…” mumble mumble something about his sister, the…dearest companion of his heart, maybe? Hey, my course on romantic poets was 25 years ago.

But it looks amazing, both from the hills above:

and from close up:

After stopping to eat among the ruins, and taking the opportunity to change my socks (I carry spares in my daypack), I set out again. Oh, and just after taking that first photograph, but before descending, I met a nice Australian couple, whom we shall encounter again.

After the town of Tintern, which amazingly is not on the official path (the descent was a ‘diversion’ on another path), I rejoined the path, which then hits a decision point: there are two official routes, one running over the high hills, and the other winding through the Wye Valley, which is all as ridiculously picturesque as that first photo would suggest. I opted for the low road, which meant some wonderful walking on riverside paths. Until my second sign mess-up of the day. At a big farm gate at the edge of a field, I somehow missed the way ahead by the riverside, and, seeing a path leading up into the woods, figured it was a short diversion up around the field and back down to the river. After hiking maybe three or four hundred yards and gaining huge amounts of elevation, I realized something was wrong. Ordinance map again, and, reluctant to retrace down a wet, slippery trail I saw that the path I was on (assuming I was right about where I was) would eventually hook up to the Offa’s Dyke Path high road. So I trudged on. It’s hard to explain the feeling of smugness that took me when, after some worrying stretches and probably 45 minutes of walking through he woods, I hit a sign with the Offa’s Dyke Path badge. Hooray. But I’d clearly added something like .75 miles to the day by doing this, and lost the advantage of the low road—which was avoiding all the up and down for a while. Oh well.

Finally, made it into Redbrook a little after 5pm (started the official path at 9:15am) and showered (much needed). At dinner, I discovered that the Australian couple are also staying at this same inn. In fact we are all being booked by Contours (the company that did my bookings), and we’re staying at the same place tomorrow. This is especially handy, since our accommodation Wednesday is off-trail; my instructions say to call the hosts in the morning to arrange a pickup point in Llantilio Crosseny. So we’ll save the host some nuisance and arrange for one pick-up, not two. I will still walk alone, since we’ve determined I am a faster walker, but that means I can relax and read for a while at the end of the trail while I wait for the arranged pick-up. We’ll see how our schedules mesh up after this.

Two final things. First, comments are appreciated; it makes me feel like there’s a reason I am writing.

Second, I’m starting a little series of notes on walking to end each post. So here’s the first.

Walker’s wisdom: The shoelace tuck I’ve been made fun of by certain people (cough, cough, Tracy) for the elaborate morning ritual of tucking in my shoelace ends under the crossing of the laces between eyelets. But here’s why it’s worth the extra few minutes. 1) Your laces never ever come untied, 2) your laces don’t make little clicking noises when the ends hit your boots on each stride (a minor concern, but it kinda drives me nuts) and, most importantly, 3) your laces aren’t free to flop around in the muck on the trail. Thus, cleaner, muck-free laces (and I take it we all understand muck is a euphemism). The shoelace tuck. Learn it, love it, make it your own.

Miles walked: 15.5 (I’m estimating. The official number is 13, but I had to walk from my B&B to trailhead, got lost getting there, and did that ‘modified route’ from the low to the high path.)