After all yesterday’s moaning about the relentless Cotswolds and the painful ups and downs of the paths located therein, my third day was in fact pretty gentle. I think it’s a case of having climbed the hard edge of the escarpment, and now working my way down the more gentle undulations (Ha! Thought I’d given that word up, did you?) of the land that was pushed up to form that long edge. Of course, there is always up and down, but the topographical lines on my ordnance survey maps (which I have so far consulted on the trail a dazzling once, because the guidebook is so much more useful) tell me that in 16 miles I dropped over 100 meters.

But I am also descending toward London, into the area where second homes for wealthy city dwellers are common, and possibly even first homes (I’m about 65 miles from London by car, though I’ll travel another 99 miles on foot to get there). And on the path and in my experience, I can feel a change. Last night’s meal was in the hotel pub and was a sandwich with people watching the (muted) television coverage of the Welsh rugby team. Tonight’s dinner was at a place where the small pub part of the business is really more like a front for a very nice Italian restaurant. More on that later.

In terms of the contrasts on the day, I started by rising to the hilltops above Chipping Norton past the local school and the local farm allotments for townsfolk (think of city gardens for residents who want to grow some vegetables on a few square feet—same idea, except on a much bigger scale). I immediately passed into farmland where I encountered many sheep. The trail rolls gently into smaller valleys, weaving near the line of a small river (the Glyme, for those keeping score).

After a while (that’s so easy to type, but remember I am humping along across the landscape at about 2.5 miles an hour with a daypack on my back that is loaded with stuff—maybe somewhere between ten and fifteen pounds?) I came to a rather surprisingly manicured farm with several small landscaped ponds with geese and swans. This farm has crops growing; it’s not a fake farm. (cf. the video below of the wind shaking the crop, which I think was actually barley, so if you were waiting for a movie reference in a blog by a former film critic, here it is: It’s my video homage to “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your server.) But while they are definitely growing things, it looked pretty and clean in a way that is notably different from the farms of my first two days.

The path today was even vaguer, with some field crossings becoming a test of faith that this slightly less rough line of wild grass (or sometimes not that) across a long rolling field would in fact lead to that next gate or stile somewhere over yonder. And maybe the gate would have a way marker. Or maybe not.

Today also involved several stretches of sharing the way with another path. I spent part of the day on the Wychwood Way and another bit sharing the path with the Oxfordshire Way. This is pretty common, since trails crisscross the country. Yesterday I spent some time with better markers for the D’Arcy Dalton Way, with which the Shakespeare shared a path for a few miles.

***A Long-winded digression on my gear***

And today was when I felt like I’d gotten fully settled with the adjustments of straps on my pack. Anyone who hikes knows that, no matter how silly all those straps and clips and whatnots on a pack may look (especially silly on packs used as book bags by students), all those straps allow subtle adjustments. Look at my pack in these two glorious photos taken at the shady edge of a wood next to a field during my lunch break (this lunch break brought to you by the good people at Clif Bars).

It has lower straps attached to the shoulder harness, for big adjustments to high high or low on your back the pack sits. The shoulder harness also has upper straps that can be adjusted for a more subtle change in how the upper part of the big is pulled to the body. It has a waist band with handy zip pockets. One contains my camera, with easy access. The other is where I store a ziplock with some coins (I respect the British principle that anything smaller than five pounds is coin, not a bill—two pound coins, one pound coins and on down. So my little change purse can be carrying something like ten bucks that are easy to get at without taking off my pack, a useful thing if you want to stop in a shop to buy, oh, I don’t know, a Diet Coke.)

One the back, my pack has another set of straps just for tightening the bag if you aren’t carrying a full load but don’t want stuff sloshing around. And, as my photo shows, my pack has useful little hooks and clip systems just for carrying walking poles. I am, as you can see, carrying walking poles. I haven’t used them very much so far, but it’s nice to have them, and I may try to use them more, since they reduce the strain on knees and leg muscles significantly when going up or down hill.

My pack (God, is he still going on about his pack?) has a handy small pocket at the top, perfect for stowing my glasses case (holding my regular glasses if it is sunny and I’m wearing my prescription sunglasses, or holding my sunglasses if it’s more grey out), my wallet, a Clif bar for lunch, the gorilla grip tripod for my camera (which I have to remember to use to take photos of myself on the trail!), and Ibuprofin. The main zippered pouch of the bag holds, right at the top, a bottle of water. Below that in a careful layering come a first aid kit, a change of clothes in case I fall in mud, rain gear in case I am too much of a wuss to accept getting wet, my computer in a cushioned case in a ziplock bag to keep it dry in case of floods. I’d send the computer in my transported luggage, but the tour company advises against it, and I defer to their judgment. It’s only a few pounds. Ha! A few pounds is never only when you are adding it to your load for a 16-mile hike.

In case you were dying to know, I wear a baseball cap to shade my eyes from the bright sky, since I am cursed with the double whammy of blue eyes and near-sightedness, which means I am more sensitive to all that horrible bright light out in the world. I wear synthetic miracle fabric T-shirts, mostly UnderArmour, and hiking shorts with those handy cargo pockets for carrying trail notes (see Day Two).

My hiking boots are, I fear, coming to the end of their life after this trip. One of the seams in one boot is starting to go, and the sole on one is almost worn through at the outer front edge, where my supinated walking stride (I roll my feet outward when I walk, so I am pushing more on the pinky-toe side than the big-toe side) has taken its toll. That means that they are waterproof only in the most abstract sense. If I cross through wet grass, the feet stay dry. But splashing through a small stream is no longer recommended. I wear nifty socks with an inner and outer layer, which means that unlike many hikers, I am not wearing sock liners and then heavy socks. Just one pair of socks.

***Here endeth the gear digression***

Midway through the day, I came to the first major manor-house that path really comes close to, Ditchley Park. Winston Churchill and his war cabinet came here for retreats from London in the early part of the war. We’ve now entered the England of Capability Brown, that landscaping genius and, one likes to think, distant relative of Encyclopedia Brown. Though he didn’t design the landscape of this place (you can tell because the straight lines of trees are too boring for old Capabilty), it has hints of that manicured nature. In fact, the website for the Ditchley Conference Center (of course it’s a conference center; what else would you do with a sprawling house like this?) talks about how the landscape was “naturalized” in the 1760s, which meant smoothing out the lawns leading down to the lake. You know, smoothing things out all natural-like.

But I am sure I was already thinking of Capability Brown because my path was leading to, and crossing right through the grounds of, Blenheim Palace. I visited Blenheim once before when I was in college but I have little memory of that visit beyond massiveness, the Column of Victory and Capability Brown.

All those memories were confirmed when, after 14 or so miles of walking, I got to the massive stone wall that encloses this once private estate. The fence encircles the grounds, and it is nine miles long. Now that’s a display of wealth.

I crossed the grounds, which most poor suckers pay to enter. Of course, they get to tour the house, and technically I am only allowed to stay on the public right of way path that weaves through the parkland, while the paying customers get freer rein. After three days of rough nature, Capability Brown’s tamed, tasteful take on nature (a clump of trees placed just so on the hillside) seems precious, but it also reminds me of walking through any large public park. I can see how heavily the park designers in Chicago (and other cities, of course, but I’m thinking of parks I know well) were under the spell of Capability.

I got to Woodstock, the town just outside the Blenheim grounds, a few hours before my bed and breakfast’s hours for arrival, so I walked into town and sat on a bench and watched the world go by. It’s a fussy little town with a high number of shops selling antiques or high-end home decorating (one shop’s window display was the color range of expensive clay-based paint, which looked to me like it would set you back a fair bit of cash to get those mellow colors on your walls).

After hiking back out of town to my bed and breakfast, cruelly located a half a mile in the wrong direction out of town, I napped for an hour or so, then walked back to town and had my dinner at the restaurant masquerading as an old English pub, the King’s Arms. I was delighted by the maître d / waiter, a grey haired man with tortoise-shell half glasses dipped precariously on his nose and a purposeful stride as he monitored the small dining room. In a rich accent, he described the freshly made pastas. And indeed the linguine with clams was delicious. I was a little crushed to learn by eavesdropping on his conversation with another set of customers that he is in fact Spanish, not Italian. (Yes, I know I should have recognized the accent, but when someone is describing pasta made fresh today here in the house, you make assumptions.) But there you are: an old English pub converted into an Italian restaurant run by a Spaniard.

And my eavesdropping on other diners also confirmed how much I am now in the land of those with money. At a nearby table, a woman explained to her dining companions that it’s not worth buying truly nice clothes (i.e. expensive) for her daughter, since her school seems to just wash everything in hot water. That would be boarding school. Their conversation turned to holidays, with a litany of places that one goes if one can afford to. Tomorrow, I have a short walk, just ten miles, to get to Oxford. Of course, that will put its own special spin on this ascent into the playgrounds of the well-to-do, because I’ll be more likely to encounter the older sibling of that poor girl getting inexpensive H&M T-shirts that the school laundry just throws indiscriminately in hot water. College towns always put their own spin on the world.

Total distance: 16 miles on the trail, but an additional mile and a half to walk to my B&B, back to town for dinner and then back to the B&B. 17.5 total.