CHAPTER 4: CHESTER, LITCHFIELD & SOUTHWELL WITH A WALK FROM CHESIL TO GRETNA

As we drove along the A5, I became aware that my car was not driving as smoothly as usual and after some furious flashing of lights to alert A and H, we pulled into a lay-by to see what the trouble was. It was immediately obvious that one of my tyres was not as inflated as it ought to have been. The car was still drivable and, as we were a couple of miles from Litchfield, we decided to call in there to have it repaired. As fortune would have it, the garage we found was right next to a park full of play equipment. That kept the children occupied whilst we waited for a new tyre to be fitted. Then A and I noticed the close proximity of the cathedral and decided to make an impromptu visit. As we walked through the city, we passed the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, little knowing that a few years later, A and I would spend a very awkward few hours in the building. It was A's fault of course. 

H had lived in nearby Rugely as a child and her father, the author of a number of  books on notorious criminal cases, had discovered the story of a gruesome murder on the Trent and Mersey Canal in Victorian times. His retelling of the story had been read by the author Colin Dexter, who used it as basis for one of his Inspector Morse novels, the inspector being laid up in hospital and using his recovery time to investigate the real life crime. Because of this, Colin and H's father had communicated with each other and then met up. When ITV filmed the story for their Inspector Morse series, H's father was invited to watch the filming at the Black Country Museum. A and H were also invited and I went along with them. Although the actual filming was fairly repetitive, the recreation of a canal side scene was amazing. The special effects people had done a tremendous job, lighting braziers and firing up the factories so that they belched thick black smoke. Following on from this, I received another invitation, this time to go and hear Colin Dexter speak at the Johnson Society annual lecture in Litchfield. The Litchfield local newspaper, to which H's father had contributed several articles, was sponsoring the event. He was their guest, his plus one was A and A's plus one was me. A picked me up minutes after I'd arrived back from work. I was still wearing my suit and tie but, on seeing him on the doorstep in jeans and jumper, I decided I was very much overdressed. I slipped into something casual and joined A and his father-in-law in the car. As we neared Litchfield, H's father supplied us with some hitherto unknown information: we were going to a reception first, given by the Johnson Society, in the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum. On arrival, it didn't take too long to realise that we were now very much under-dressed: it was a black tie event. Every other male in the building was wearing a tuxedo with black bow-tie to match. A and I felt like interlopers, dressed as we were. We barely dabbled at the buffet, spending the majority of our time studiously examining the various exhibits on the walls so that we could have our backs to all the well-dressed people and pretend it wasn't happening. The only saving grace was the arrival of Mr. Dexter who, whilst wearing a jacket and tie, was far closer to our sartorial inelegance. Seeing A's father in law, he made a beeline for him and restored a little of our credibility by engaging us in conversation for the remainder of the reception. 

As we approached the cathedral during our forced stay in Litchfield, we had a great view of The Ladies of the Vale, the name given to the three spires riding high above the towers that support them, a unique feature among British cathedrals. Like Wells, Litchfield cathedral has a highly decorated west front although the statues here stand flush with the wall rather than residing in small canopied niches. We then entered one of the oldest cathedrals in the country, the first one being constructed in the year 770 following the conversion of the Mercian kings to Christianity by St Chad. Christianity originally arrived in Britain from two different directions. Whilst Augustus introduced the new religion in Kent with Canterbury as his base, Columba arrived on the Scottish island of Iona. One of his followers, Aiden then crossed Scotland to set up a monastery on Holy Island or Lindesfarne off the Northumbrian coast. Chad was one of Aiden's disciples and after travelling around Ireland and becoming ordained as a priest at the age of thirty, he moved south to the vast Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Mercia was the dominant kingdom for many years before the rise of Wessex and unification of England. Its lands were bordered by Wales in the west, modern day Lancashire and Yorkshire in the north, and parts of East Yorkshire and East Anglia to the east. In the south, it stretched almost to the coast. The first cathedral, holding St Chad's shrine, was replaced with a Norman structure after 1066. Not a great deal of that building survives after most of it was replaced with a gothic structure in around 1340. The craftsmen who created the cathedral chose sandstone, a stone that was readily available and, as we'd seen in Chester, it was easy to carve into elaborate sculptures. Unfortunately, it is a fairly weak material that has caused all manner of problems during its history. First, the central tower collapsed during the 17th century, falling down again in the 1740s. During its Victorian restoration, many tons of stone were removed from the roof as the weight was causing the walls to bow outwards. If that wasn't enough, it suffered more damage than any other English cathedral during the English Civil War after being besieged on three occasions. Most of the medieval stained glass was destroyed at this time although we were able to see some fine Flemish glass in the windows of the lady chapel, it having originally been installed in a Belgian Abbey that was dismantled in Napoleonic times, purchased by the cathedral and placed in Lichfield in the 1800s. When they weren't besieging the cathedral, both Royalists and Parliamentarian troops found it a suitable place to stable their horses with the puritanical Parliamentarians putting their stay to good use by indulging in a good bout of iconoclasm - the destruction of idols. Our guide informed us that the western wall of statues that we had marvelled at before entering the cathedral were mostly reproductions, the originals having been heavily disfigured and poor old St Chad's body had also suffered as they destroyed his shrine and scattered his remains around the cathedral. We lingered in some second hand bookshops outside the cathedral and then rejoined our families. The tyre still hadn't been sorted and by the time it was, we'd decided to abandon the trip to the ice cream factory to return home. We wouldn't set foot in Litchfield again for many years, but when we did it was as part of what I'd loosely describe as a walking collection. 

As our children grew up, we began having more free time than just the annual Telegraph weekend and starting locally, we began going for walks. A Leicestershire ramble was very pleasant but we found that planning a walk in a different part of the country opened up a number of other possibilities: we could make a day of it and visit places of interest once we'd completed the walk. Sensing another collectable set of experiences, I suggested we to do a walk in each English county. This venture took us the Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. Then A had a significant birthday and to celebrate, he invited his family and friends to join him on a walk along the Cotswold Way just south of his beloved Cheltenham. We had a lovely day, stumbling upon a little cafe in the middle of nowhere where we were all suitably refreshed. The owner, a little old lady whose son was a big cheese in the nearby annual cheese-rolling festival, seemed a little confused when it came to producing the bill for such a large group. Well, some of us thought she was confused: others felt she was a consummate confidence trickster. We discovered several miles after bidding her farewell, that between us we'd paid more than double the amount it should have come to. Still, it was a welcome cup of tea. A week or so later, we were spending a pleasant evening with A and H when the topic of the next walk came up. It transpired that our Gloucestershire county walk had also covered a section of the Cotswold Way. Why not walk all 102 miles of the national trail that wends its way from Chipping Campden to Bath Abbey along the scenic Cotswold escarpment? So that's what we did, in a series of smaller walks, staying overnight when it became too far to drive for a day's walking. 

I have already described our boozy celebration in Bath's alcohol-free zone as we completed the national trail and then the question was, what next? I had the germ of an idea but it was too big an undertaking for our little group to embrace at this time so I suggested we walk another long distance walk, the Heart of England Way. This had two advantages: all the walks were within a car journey of our homes and they took us to places we were unfamiliar with. There was a third reason. The walk meandered from Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds to just north of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, passing through Chipping Campden en route. Our new walk would connect with the Cotswold Way and by the time we had finished, we'd have travelled a significant length of the country. The new walk was agreed on and, although the countryside was not as stunning as the Cotswolds, it was an interesting and varied route that passed through Shakespeare's Forest of Arden, over heathland between Tamworth and Litchfield and through the extensively forested Cannock Chase. Having completed this walk, I felt confident in proposing a series of walks to the south coast and another set to take us to Scotland in order to walk the length of the land. It took many years for us to finish, work and family commitments restricting the number of walking weekends away we could arrange. We followed a mixture of footpaths to get us to Chesil Beach in Dorset and another set to help us reach Gretna Green, including the Thirlmere Way which runs alongside the pipeline that supplies Manchester with its water, descending through gravity from Thirlmere reservoir in the Lake District. Our route took us through some wonderful parts of Lancashire with Tolkienesque names such as Oakenclough, Dolphinholme and the magnificent Forest of Bowland where we awarded ourselves points if we managed to spot any trees. The culmination of our epic journey, completed in the pouring rain, was a two mile slog on a service road right next to the M6, hardly a fitting end, but we didn't care and, as we sipped our teas in Gretna Green's Famous Blacksmiths Shop, destination of many eloping couples, we congratulated ourselves on our endeavours and I began planning an east-west journey, deciding once again to keep my little idea for a much later date.. 

While this major project had been in progress, Sue and I had begun a series of canal walks and, with other friends, we'd walked the Shropshire Way and begun the Shakespeare Way from the bard's birthplace in Stratford to Sam Wanamaker's Globe Theatre in Southwark. Things started to join up and I gleefully plotted them on a giant map of England that I'd constructed, photocopying page after page of an old road atlas and sellotaping them together. The others would say I began to get a little obsessive about the 'joining up'. If, for instance, one walk ended at a lay-by and the left hand side of the road whilst the next one began from a matching lay-by on the right, I would have to cross that road to the former lay-by to join up the walk. It didn't bother anyone else, but if was going to have the satisfaction of knowing I'd walked the complete length of the country then I was jolly well going to walk the complete length of the country with the emphasis on the word 'complete'.