I did not complete my planned walk today, and I have to say I am proud of myself. On a walk like this, it’s easy to think as a completist, wanting to lay feet on every inch of the trail. There are still missed sections of trails I hiked years ago about which I sometimes think “yes, I wouldn’t mind going back to the Lake District to capture that missing ten miles from the rainy day I took a bus.” But I will have no regrets about the 5.25 miles I missed today when I called it quits after 8 miles. I was going to write ‘the heat defeated me’ but I’m trying to think of it as ‘my better sense of self-preservation prevailed.’

The day started with a lovely breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked trout. Let me just say if you ever happen to be in Symond’s Yat, go to the Saracen’s Head and order something with smoked trout. Symond’s Yat is perched on either side of the river, with a hand-pulled ferry service running from the Saracen’s Head as a tourist attraction.

The day’s walk begins with some easy field walking along the riverfront for six or seven hundred yards, and, as the guidebook warned me, cuts off a bend in the river by climbing over the hill “steeply.” That’s never a good word in a walker’s guidebook, because the writers tend to be masters of understatement.

What the guidebook failed to mention was how badly marked this part of the trail is, and how overgrown with thorny plants and stinging nettles. First I had to cross through a kissing gate (see photo) where the first of the stinging nettles got at my shins. The next twenty minutes would be a series of oaths and moans as the poison from stinging nettles made my legs and even my exposed forearms hum with pain.

This part of the path seems to have been left with minimal marking in an effort to discourage people from actually attempting it. Once the trail had joined a forestry ‘road,’ I missed a completely unmarked turning off and hiked up the forestry road for hundreds of yards before realizing my search for a sign was a fool’s errand and turning around to find this unmarked descent from the road into the brush.

Sure, it’s obvious when you center it in the photo, but I went up the path to the right for a long way before I sensed that the path had not, as the guide describes, descended steeply. Down I plunged to regain the riverside, then the damn path winds through an absolute forest of ferns where you can’t see the trail through the ferns at all and have to trust the feel of the dirt under your feet. And then it climbs into the woods again to, wait for it, rejoin what appears to be the same forestry road further along.

Through all of this, I could feel the temperature rising through the 80s.

And in case you think I am overstating the rough treatment the trail gave me, here’s a photo of my legs from a trailside water break later in the day.

This makes the trail sound awful and me sound like a grump, but I should say that the scenery was beautiful, and I think I heard, though I did not see, one of the peregrine falcons that nest in the hills.

The path winds through the landscape following the curling, looping path of the river, which wiggles through small valleys like a piece of string thrown on the floor. I saw more sheep wisely lying in the shade, but on I went through the sunny fields

It’s a tranquil stretch of the river, with no roads nearby and only the occasional canoe in the river to remind you that there are people and towns tucked somewhere in the landscape. The trail had a fun twist when, at an abandoned factory, it crosses the river on a former rail bridge.

And this is where my photos taper off to nothing. It was probably around 10:30 when I crossed that bridge, and after that there is some lovely walking on the edges of farm fields on the river bank. What I shall remember about them is my thought process about the increasing heat. I always study the map and the guidebook before I set out for the day (obviously), and I knew that I was about five miles into a 13-mile day. I also knew that the path comes to the small hamlet of Kerne Bridge (hamlet is actual word used in Google if you look up Kerne Bridge, so don’t accuse me of going all poetical), which is the only place along the whole day’s route with a) refreshments at a pub, and b) public transport. As the nettle sting continued to hum in my legs, now joined by the furnace-like heat, and as I sipped away at my water and felt more and more dazed, I began to speculate, at first in a tentative way, about not doing the whole hike for the day. I knew that after Kerne Bridge, the path ascends “very steeply” (yes, the guidebook uses the intensifier, which is a truly bad sign) and the last five miles would be in the hills, away from roads, in the heat. Gradually, my tentative ‘what if I caught the bus at Kerne Bridge’ turned to ‘I wonder what the bus schedule is’ to ‘let me get out my phone and see if I can find the bus schedule.’ After much field walking and then another more wooded section with so so many felled trees you have to climb over on the path, I came to Kerne Bridge. Here’s a but of agriculture just before the bridge, which I had to cross to get to the bus stop.

I waited at a bus stop for about 45 minutes, finishing the last of my three liters of water for the day, which reaffirmed the wisdom of my decision to call it a day. Five miles in 94-degree heat with no water? No thanks. I know what heat exhaustion is, and I was pretty close to it already.
The bus whisked me into Ross-on-Wye, where I was giddy enough to actually take a few photographs.

My inn for the night, the King’s Head, is an old building, and the floor of my room is more like a roller-coaster than a flat surface. I can’t put anything heavy on the bedside table because it slides off. But the mushroom risotto in their somewhat air-conditioned restaurant (!!!!) was very nice. No, the rooms don’t have air-con. Only the restaurant. Would that I could have slept in the dining room. It’s 6:30am on Wednesday now, and the temperature has dropped to 67 degrees. If the forecast is accurate, it won’t go above 73 today, and this afternoon it will rain. I’ve got eleven miles to cover today, mostly very flat, and I am content to have survived the heatwave.