Unwinding around Arundel

The title to this one doesn’t mean what you might think.  I took one more orbit of Arundel but at different distances and in the opposite direction from the two I’d done before, hence unwinding. 

Monday was my last day of country walking for the trip.  I started out with a short train ride to Amberly Station.  I’d walked by that station on the previous Tuesday and didn’t feel like repeating the walk along the Arun again.  It was just a little 5 minute train ride.

From Amberly, I picked up the South Downs Way west towards Glatting Beacon.  This cut through the walk I’d taken the previous Tuesday.  The South Downs Way is a long distance path that runs along the downs for 106 miles across the downs to the city of Winchester.  If you don’t mind a very great deal of modest hill walking, it’s a terrific path.  Mostly, it’s just worn into the chalk, so the footing is easy and you couldn’t loose the path if you tried – it gleams out bright white against the turf or crops or whatever happens to be along its edges.  I covered a few miles along it until I came to a parking lot where I’d turned down for Bignor on Tuesday. 

This time, I followed the track of the same Roman road going the other direction.  It’s called Stane Street and was part of a network of roads around the South coastal area to link various towns, forts, and farms.  Originally, it was 20-25 feet wide with a raised roadbed surrounded by banks and ditches, but only traces of those can be seen anymore.  What’s left now is fundamentally just a very straight path you could walk all the way to Chichester without walking more than 20 feet left or right if some of the roadbed hadn’t been so good that it got recycled into medieval and eventually modern roads. 

A few miles down, I ran into the strangest collection of signs I ever hope to see.  There were three of them, printed on ordinary paper then laminated and stuck to a pole. 

The top sign said simply that the bridleway was closed, identifying it by a number which wasn’t on my map, so only the location of the sign let me know that it referred to this particular path.  There were a name and contact number on it if I had any questions.

The middle sign informed me, in stunning legal detail that the county council provision requiring the closure which would have expired on the 29th of May had actually been extended until November.  This must have been one of those legal cliffhangers they make movies about, because the extension notice was dated on the 28th.  I imagine the plucky school kids, eager to protect this section of path finally talking the gruff but good hearted council member into . . . well you get the point.  This sign was saved from complete uselessness by the fact that it contained a map showing the extent of the closure – only a few hundred yards – and offering alternate paths, a little jog that would tack about a quarter of a mile to the trip.  At this point, I thought I had a grasp on what was going on and how I might deal with it.

The third sign plunged me back into confusion.  It was from the National Trust and offered a permissive alternate route running “just to the north” of the closed bridleway.  Now at this point, what I saw by way of trails, reading from left to right, were 1) a narrow path on a chalk ridge a few feet high, 2) a grassy lane that clearly saw the passage of the very occasional farm vehicle, 3) a short and recently installed fence that claimed to be electrified. 

I think what all of this was trying to tell me, without being so crass as to actually put it this way, was that I should walk on the grassy lane rather than on the chalk ridge.  This is probably what I would have done anyway since the chalk path was clearly eroded and broken in places, which erosion is probably what this whole closure was about.  However, I couldn’t quite convince myself that it could take three such confusing signs to send that message, so I used my map to hold down the top theoretically electrified wire and walked the distance in the empty pasture, ready to hop back across if anyone came by to correct me.

The rest of the walk was very straightforward and pleasant.  I touched at the village of Slindon which has a boys school and some very nice homes.  It also has a pub that claims to be open till 3 PM on Monday but doesn’t really mean it.

Garmin facts: 13.8 miles in 4:22 for a moving average of 3.2 mph.

Monday night, I saw Theft, a fluffy little drawing room comedy put on by the Arundel Players in the Priory playhouse just steps from my Inn.  It was surprisingly entertaining.  The play itself is of course negligible, but the acting was pretty good, on the whole.  As long as I thought of it as better than television rather than not as good as professional theater, I had a very nice time. 

I overheard a few of the people who were involved in the production.  The youngest actress was cast as a woman who is supposed to be slightly older than the other characters.  She had apparently decided, rather cleverly, that her character had just had more plastic surgery and she did manage to keep her brow line almost as steady as that of a botox user. 

I was very glad I’d attended. 

I suppose this about wraps things up.  I’m in London now, catching up on my play going and readapting to city life.  I’m still walking a bit, but it is a very different character of walking, and I’ve already written about London walking.  It’s strange to think of this whole trip as nearly over.  I spent so long getting ready for it then so long doing it.  I put more than 450 miles behind me, saw some gorgeous country, and met a wide cast of characters.  I’m feeling very satisfied and very ready to get onto the plane tomorrow to go home.

Another Ramble and Quiz Night

Sunday morning, I hopped on to the Ramblers’ site again.  The folks on Wednesday at told me that there were often group walks on Sundays as well.  I found a walk that started out nearby.  The rendezvous instructions left me in just a little bit of doubt.  They said to meet at the Lower Cissbury Ring Car Park.  I saw two parking lots near Cissbury Ring, which turned out to be another Iron Age hill fort with minimally visible earthworks.  One of them seemed from the map to be both further south and at a slightly lower elevation – I figured that gave me a pretty good chance that you’d call it lower.  I also had plenty of time to go there first and zoom to the other one if I didn’t find anyone.

I found a bunch of people at the first parking lot I tried, and got acquainted with a few of them while we waited for more people who were carpooling down.  This Ramblers’ group was from somewhere much closer to London.  Robin, the fellow who was leading the walk, has a weekend home in Sussex, and I think a few of the other members do as well, so some had driven there directly while a bunch of others carpooled.  Very sensible, but it meant we had a certain amount of waiting around and nose counting before we could get under way. 

There were nearly 40 of us by the time the last drivers got in.  Robin had planned out a very pleasant walk that took us over a couple of downs for good distance views and through a few pretty villages.  I’m not sure I could even trace the route.  I got very lazy and left my GPS in my pocket and hardly looked at the map. 

In one village, we stopped at the church shortly after services had ended.  The minister was still there and he pointed out a few features of the church.  He kicked back a rug to show us brass etchings representing ancestors of the poet Shelly whose family had been big landowners in the area.  He was sipping a sherry to restore himself from his mornings work and pointing out various bits of décor to us.  Allan, a fellow I’d been walking and talking with for much of the morning was amused to find that the minister knew a lot about the art history of the church but almost nothing of its iconography.  Not a tremendous surprise, really, as the church had, like any its age, been created Catholic but had participated in the slow slide of the Church of England toward the protestant over the centuries.  Unlike many others, no zealots ever went through it ripping everything down, so it had a lot of Catholic decoration left.  It also had some much more recent décor – including some purpose made tile work by William Morris – but that had all been designed to work with what was already there.

We left the vicar behind, zipping his sherry and trying to commit the names of the archangels Paul had explained to him to memory.

We had lunch in a nice pub called, for reasons I could never establish, the World’s End.  The sign was painted with the scene of a meteorite falling towards a village, so I believe the name was meant to be temporal rather than geographic, but that was as far as I got.  I joined three other walkers who made justifiable fun of what they called my fishing vest and were good company.

One minor complaint I have developed about Sussex is that the vast majority of the pubs seem to be supplied by the same brewing company, so I saw nothing like the variety of ales available that I found along the Pennines and around Coleshill.  Probably good for my health, as I always feel obligated to try new brews so less novelty meant less ale, but it made the pubs feel a little chainy.

As a finale for the walk, we went up to Cissbury Ring from the side opposite where we’d parked and walked most of the way around.  There was a visible ditch and bank around most of the hilltop, though substantially eroded in parts.  The views were spectacular.  It was a very clear day, and I could pick out a lot of the other areas where I had walked.  This is where I got the real benefit of having dropped anchor in Arundel for so long and done so much local walking.  I really had a strong sense of orientation and organization for where the terrain, towns, and roads were.  It helped me pull everything I’d seen into some kind of structure.

A few of us had gotten ahead of Robin, and we almost missed the turning down off the ring, not that I would have conceptually minded another lap to see what was to see from the other side, but I was getting tired.  We zipped back to join the middle of the column on the long downhill to the car park. 

Borrowed Garmin Facts:  Robin’s GPS said we did 12 miles even in just under 4 hours for a 3 mph walking average.  His doesn’t have an altimeter, but looking at the features we climbed on the map it was at least 400 meters.

My adventures for the day were far from over even as I parked back in Arundel.  I lounged around a little and washed up then went downstairs to discover preparations for Quiz Night in progress.  I was pretty much swept into participating and was almost immediately part of a team of 4 fiddling through a pair of questionnaires one of which wanted definitions for a bunch of terms each of which had a color as part of it.  The only one we couldn’t get was blue john, and I still haven’t gotten that one.  The other questionnaire had a bunch of photos on it, and we were to supply the names of the people in them. 

I think these do it yourself quizzes have become a standard part of quiz night, because the main event takes time to pull together.  There were about 8 teams scattered around different rooms of the pub.  This was the first time the St Mary’s Gate had tried to do this, so there was a lot of improvisation.  A fellow named Ted acted as MC and he had a hell of a time figuring out using the microphone they’d given him.  Ideally, the way quiz night works is each individual or team has a set of answer sheets, one for each round.  During each round the MC reads off a list of questions.  Everyone listens attentively and hears the questions clearly.  You attempt to answer the questions then swap sheets with someone else at the end of the round to score each others’ papers.  I don’t know how often quiz nights achieve or even approach this ideal, but we were pretty far off.

Between the microphone problems and the participants’ difficulty in resisting commenting loudly on the microphone problems, I don’t think a single question was repeated fewer than four times.  I also think a few teams decided to start a side game going in trying to wind up Ted and the other organizers, but I will give Ted credit, he maintained a perfect calm throughout.  He also had a very impressive voice.  If he’d been willing to take a vow of silence for Monday, I have no doubt he would have been better heard had he dispensed with the microphone and just bellowed.

Most of the questions were strongly British in derivation (The title of the first “Carry on” film anyone?  The title of any “Carry on” film?  The very faintest notion of what a “Carry on” film might be?) so I was almost no use at all.  Those who know me will be astonished to learn that the only question I contributed significantly to was in the sports category.  It was not, lest any of you become worried, because I remembered any significant sports trivia, it was just logic.  The question was something like “What major international sports event commenced at Soldier Field in the city of Chicago on the 17th of June, 1994?”  I knew from my time in Chicago that Soldier Field is an American football field, so would not usually be used in June.  I remembered that the US had hosted the Soccer world cup sometime in the 90’s, because a friend had taken me to see a match in DC.  Putting this together, I figured out it must have been the world cup.  I think we were the only team to get that one since everybody else moaned and made “Well duh” noises when the answer was read out.

The whole thing was good fun, though I don’t see myself making a habit of it.  My team mates, Paul, Trevor, and a blond woman whose name I never heard clearly above the noise, were extremely tolerant of the depths of my ignorance. 

 

Day Off

Today, Saturday, I took a vacation from my vacation.  I drove up to Petworth to visit a stately home there run by the trust.

On the way, I heard a very funny radio program which purported to be the coverage of an academic life time achievement celebration for a professor who, in spite of his drunkenness, philandering, and intellectual negligibility had managed to fashion a career as a notable authority on the history of merrie olde England.  It was done absolutely deadpan with interviews of people at the event who had known or worked with him all saying absolutely appalling things, but in the language and cadences that people usually use on such occasions to praise the great.  Very amusing in a kind of over intellectual way, so it appealed to me. 

Petworth House was a fun place to visit.  They’ve got a big park with herds of deer running around.  I was finally in a place landscaped by Capability Brown.  When you read guidebooks, you get the sense that this fellow was riding around England landscaping gardens of estates at the rate of about 3 per day sometimes without a commission or even permission (much like Olmstead in the US), but I’d never knowingly walked around any of his work.  It was very nice.  I also learned what a ha ha is – viz. a flooded ditch around a part of a garden to keep wildlife in or out without breaking up the view.  Presumably it gets its name from what the householder says when a careless guest falls in.

I spent four hours there, but I can’t come up with much more worth writing about it.  There is a sort of sameness to these stately homes.  It’s probably a good thing one doesn’t usually get a chance to visit so many of them in as short a time as I’ve done on this trip.  They lose a lot of the specialness that they honestly merit.  Petworth House, and the village hanging off it, are very lovely and fun to wander around, but mostly in ways it would be repetition for me to write about now.

There was an interesting exhibit in one room on the servants’ wing that had been refitted into a little museum.  It described the role of the owner of Petworth House in encouraging and even funding emigration to Canada.  For some reason, they called in “Northern Canada” even though it was mostly around Niagara, and you can’t get much further south than that.  I’d seen lots of information over the years about the reception of immigrants into North America, so it was interesting to see the story from the sending end. 

After a nice ramble in the grounds, I drove on to Chichester where I had a ticket to Midsummer Night’s Dream back at the festival theater.  I’d intentionally gotten to Chichester well before show time, so I poked around the shopping district for a while, people watching and scouting a restaurant for dinner.  There was a big do at the cathedral where they had apparently decorated with tens of thousands of flowers, but they wanted 7.5 pounds to get in.  I figured I’d seen plenty of flowers in the wild already.  I had a seat on a bench for a while and watched four guys playing croquet on part of the green.  This also positioned me well to see and hear passers by detect the price of admission and call out in alarm. 

I only saw the first act of the play.  It was a fine production, but I was only willing to drive back in the dark for a great production, and it wasn’t quite that.  I am spoiled for this particular play by having seen a tremendously creative and charming production at Washington Shakespeare Company year before last.  I think I have to take it off my list for a while.

I came back to do this journaling and of course enjoy the concert.  Had a nice conversation with a woman who saw my computer and started bemoaning the difficulty she’s having getting through her A levels with Microsoft Access.  She wants to make a career in web design.  I reassured her that you can make a perfectly successful job of web design without having a firm grasp on databases, as long as you’re willing to get good at subcontracting to database experts at need.

I think I’ll post this, then hope the concert, which is going on just below my room fades out soon enough for me to get some sleep.  They’re singing a few lines of the “Show me the way to go home” song, so that may mean something.

For the Shrimping

I think I timed this whole vacation just about right.  Friday morning, for the first time, going for a walk sounded like a chore.  I spent a while looking through the Sussex sections of my walking guides to try to get some inspiration, and decided instead to take a walk I had devised myself – following the riverside path along the Arun nearly to the sea, then walking along the seacoast to Bognor Regis.  I reasoned that this couldn’t be too difficult, since it had to be more or less flat, both from common sense and from looking at the contours on the map.  I was also curious to see Bognor Regis, because it was where Jeeves went on his holidays away from Bertie – for the shrimping Bertie would always say, and damned if I didn’t see numbers of people with dip nets on long handles pulling something wriggly out of the water, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I did successfully finish off Wildfell Hall on Thursday night, so I grabbed up my three Brontes in one as well as my guidebook and map for Dartmoor to carry down to the used book shop in town for a little change of reading matter.  I had crossed Dartmoor off my list because it’s all over hills (of which I had had plenty) and bog (of which I had had more than plenty).  I got a few pounds credit for the Dartmoor stuff.  They wouldn’t take the Brontes because of their condition.  Well, they had spent a long time in my pack after being dead for a while, so I couldn’t blame the book shop folks.  At any rate, I spent my credit and a few pounds out of my pocket on a range of the silliest, thinnest looking space opera I could find, one of which I read in the course of yesterday.  It was called SPACEHAWKS and had lots of exclamation marks.  It’s a real tonic after all the high literature. 

They had some “Anything in this bin 2 pounds” bins out front, so I tipped the Brontes into one of them on the way out.

The stroll back up to the inn worked the stiffness out of my left leg that had really been making me reluctant to walk.  I have implied this, but not said it explicitly.  Here in Arundel, when I write about walking up to the inn, I mean that literally.  Arundel is built on a steep slope, and my inn is at the street on the top.  These guys probably keep a certain number of guests here for dinner just because the thought of walking back up here after eating somewhere down the hill wears them out.

I was back to fairly enthusiastic as I headed out and down to pick up the riverside path.  It was a beautiful morning, but of course with a lingering threat of rain.  The walk along the river was easy in every way.  I saw hardly anyone beyond a few dog walkers for most of the morning. 

I did discover something very funny about the cathedral right next door.  From close to, it doesn’t look extremely large.  The buildings surrounding it are mostly two or three stories tall, and crowd it in.  The wall around the park runs just across the street from it.  You really can’t get far enough away from it in the town to see it properly.  As a result, in violation of everything you’re ever heard about perspective, when you get about a mile from it and can see it whole it looks much bigger.  I mean, it looks huge.  It looks bigger than the castle, even though the castle is both bigger and closer to you.  It suddenly looks as though Arundel is a cathedral with a few buildings crowded up to it rather than a town with a cathedral in it.  I think some of the buildings down the hill from it are a similar color stone as well, so they sort of get tangled up with it.  Anyway, it’s the first time I ever experienced that effect, and it was almost magical. 

The walk along the beach was also fairly easy, although much of it was loose packed gravel, which shifts under the foot even more than sand.  My calves got a good work out.  Bognor Regis turned out to be a pleasant enough town.  I was pretty tired when I got there, because there hadn’t been many good opportunities to rest along the way.  I did plop down on the sea wall pillowed on my rolled up raincoat reading SPACEHAWKS for a while, but I was near a major access to the . . . you know it’s so hard to keep calling it a beach . . . from a parking lot, so there were lots of families marshalling on and off the strand with all the attendant crying and screaming and threatening.  In the end, it wasn’t as restful as it might have been.  I got back up and walked on to Bognor. 

Once there, I bought a portion (OK, a bucket, but it was a little bucket) of fries and hired a deck chair to sit on the gravel and stare out at the sea and read more of my novel.  The seacoast makes the British do odd things.  For one thing, it makes them go in the water when the air is 68 degrees with a 15 mph wind blowing and a lovely bunch of stones to walk across coming and going, but that’s just the beginning.  I will confine myself to the most extreme case which was a portly father and son standing about 40 feet apart and hurling stones at one another as a form of entertainment.  Golf ball sized stones.  Fist sized stones.  They didn’t always miss.  Father tried to break off the game, I think, by walking over to stand near Mom, but that didn’t stop things.  It just meant she had to be ready to spring away at any moment.  Much hilarity ensued.

After a while, the chill started to get to me.  I poked around town looking for anything more interesting, but since I was too tall for the kiddy rides and didn’t care to feed a bunch of pounds into slot machines, I soon exhausted the amusements on offer.  There was a cinema showing the new Harry Potter, but it had just started a half hour before.  I found the train station and bought a ticket back to Arundel. 

I got back to my room and turned on the TV.  The best thing I could find was a game show in which a bunch of sports trivia cranks were shown photos and film clips and had to answer questions about them.  I actually watched about 20 minutes of this while trying to gather the energy to take a shower. 

I had a nice Indian dinner – all the way at the bottom of the hill, so you know I really wanted it.  The air had cleared remarkably.  If the world were run properly, there would have been emergency opening hours at the castle so I could go to the top of the keep for the views.  I really think I might have seen to London.

OK, time for a few words about right now.  I’m in the beer garden of the inn on Saturday night.  The lounge bar is crammed with people singing bits of various show tunes.  The bad news is they haven’t yet struck on a song they know more than two lines of, so they start and stop a lot.  On the plus side, they are sometimes all trying to sing the same song, not invariably mind you, but often.  There was just a bit of an interruption because someone’s chair fell to bits.  They just had a try at “In other words” but they literally only knew the “Fly me to the moon and . . .” and had to trail off right away.  On the other hand, they seem to know more of “I’m forever blowing bubbles” than I ever heard before.

Any more about last night?  I don’t think so.  I had a quick pint back at the inn while a bunch of people on the wide screen TV talked about a horserace scheduled for today then went up to my room and finished SPACEHAWKS.

Garmin Facts:  12 miles, 3:50, 4.1 mph plus 1 mile around Arundel.

Oh, but I forgot to put in when it happened, a few nights ago, I was reading myself to sleep and started hearing an odd clicking noise I couldn’t place.  I’m staying in a really old building that makes a number of odd noises, but eventually I figured out it was someone throwing pebbles at my window.  I pulled on a robe and poked my head out to find it was a couple of my fellow guests who were locked out because someone had failed to leave a key in the back door where I’d been told there always was one.  They were profusely apologetic, but it really wasn’t their fault.  I only include this story because it’s the sort of thing I don’t think of as happening in real life, but there it was.

Bull!

I have two literary ambitions tonight.  One is to get my journal all caught up, which this chapter will do.  The other is to finish Wildfell Hall, my third Bronte novel, which I’m quite liking, but I’m feeling ready to read something different.

One of my walking guides recommended a walk from a pair of windmills called Jack and Jill then out to a few hills and villages.  I’d mentioned this to a few of my Rambler companions yesterday and several of them endorsed it as a good area to visit.  It also had the benefit of needing a map I didn’t own yet, so I would have to dawdle around the inn until the outfitters opened.  I was feeling the 32 miles over the previous two days, and a little extra repose was welcome.  Walking out to the outfitters and back would also reassure me that I wasn’t too crippled to go walking (I wasn’t).

By the time I pulled into the parking lot by Jack and Jill, it was about 11:30.  The walk was forecast at 9 miles and looked pretty straightforward.  I even thought I’d figured out how to get to Pyecombe where there is a pub before 2 PM when lots of pubs stop serving lunch or close till evening. 

The windmills themselves didn’t strike me as anything special.  In fact, I was a little irked that these old useless windmills are viewed as picturesque while what I think of as very graceful electricity generating windmills some people are building in parts of the UK are viewed as eyesores.  Setting that aside, in the course of the walk, I did figure out why they’re such a feature of the route.  I could see them through probably half of the walk from all kinds of different points of view.  They do actually look nice from some of the distant hill sides.  In fact, the only perspective from which I didn’t find them pretty was standing right next to them.

Only a few journal worthy features of the hike.  I did not make Pyecombe before 2 PM because I finally ran across an honest to goodness bellowing, snorting bull in a field I was supposed to walk across.  He only had one horn, but that just made me confident he’d lost the other one running into something or some one.  I didn’t see him until he was quite close, and he made it very clear he didn’t like me being there.  He ran a few steps toward me and stopped, which looked enough like a practice swing to me that I hopped over a fence much more gracefully than I’d bet anyone I could have done.  I burned more than half an hour thrashing my way through a few other fields until I got back to a path taking me the right direction.  It was clear from light tracks in the foliage that I wasn’t the first one to have to dodge this fellow.

Fortunately, The Plough serves all afternoon, so I was able to get a creditable calizone and a couple of good pints.  On my walk out of the village, a woman in a car pulled over to ask me directions to a nearby village.  It happened to be part of my route, so I knew where it was but I had to fiddle with the map a little to change modes from “How will I walk there?” to “How should she drive there?”  We eventually got her sorted out and on her way.

I had a little more excitement coming down from a hill I started climbing just after lunch.  The map showed a path going due north from the summit, but as far as I could see it would take someone from a Mountain Dew commercial with a helmet and goggles and one of those luge with wheels thingies to really enjoy going straight down.  I found another way down without too much trouble, although part of the route involved a bridle trail that had a soupy clay surface that had me jumping from solid spot to solid spot.  Just like the walk yesterday, I ended with a long climb back to the parking spot.

There, I’m caught up.  Now, if I can get online, I’ll post these and go try to polish off Wildfell Hall.

Garmin Facts:  11 miles 4 hours 2.7 mph.  450 meters climbed.

Finally, another walk/theater combo

Wednesday morning, I decided to check the Rambler’s website to see whether there were any organized walks in the area.  I found one quite nearby, but it was starting in under an hour.  I scrambled into trail clothes, filled my water bottles, and made sure everything I might need was in my pack.  I raced down to the car, stopping at a picnic table to put my boots on, figured out the route and drove off.  I took a couple of modestly wrong turns, but got to the jumping off point just in time to see the group disappearing into some woods.  I figured I could probably catch them if I hurried.  I opened the back door to grab my pack and discovered I’d left it back at the inn.  This left me with two problems.  First, I wouldn’t have any water, which I would certainly need at some point.  Second, I’d look like an idiot foreigner who didn’t know enough to have all the “in case” stuff along that British walkers insist on.  I dithered about whether to just give up for about two minutes, and decided I’d still try to find them. 

I headed up to where I’d seen them on the trail.  There was a branching just there, but when I followed one of them with my eyes, it went straight towards a place name that I remembered being part of the description of the walk.  I figured it was a pretty good bet they’d headed that way and started pressing along that way.  Ten minutes along I still hadn’t seen any more sign of them, and figured I’d probably guessed wrong.  I just kept walking along while I thought about whether I should turn around to go back and get my pack or just take myself for a short walk around the area.  I’d popped out of the woods onto the top of the down by now and knew they weren’t ahead of me.  The views were nice, so I decided I’d carry on for a while then try to figure a circular route back to the car. 

Just a few minutes on, I saw a person walk onto the trail ahead of me.  I glanced at the map and figured out the Ramblers must have taken the other path down into the valley then climbed back up on an intersecting path, basically taking the punishing route to get exactly where I’d gotten walking nearly on the flat.  I decided I’d walk over and introduce myself and see about walking the rest of the way with them.  I still felt a little awkward, but they were amused to have an ignorant foreigner join them and were very welcome. 

They were a group of 17 people.  One of them, a woman named Cynthia, had put the route together and was acting as leader.  It was such a luxury to just walk without having to think about where I was going.  It was also nice to have a bunch of people to talk with, even though I wound up repeating two conversations with almost everyone I met:  a) What was I doing in England?  b)  How did I feel about the war in Iraq?  I got to where I could power through those two topics in under four minutes and leave room for them to tell me things.  Most of them seemed to be in their sixties and had started walking seriously only in the last few years.  They’d taken to it well, though.  Cynthia pushed a pace of 3 miles an hour.  A few of them complained about the pace, but they all kept up. 

I did hear surprising things about some of my fellow walkers.  I walked up on two of the women while they were comparing the finer points of their husbands’ infidelities and very calmly invited me into the conversation.  That’s probably the most extreme example, but how much more extreme do you need to get?  English reserve obviously falls apart when you start charging through the countryside together.  It was an almost uniformly charming group of people.  The only few who weren’t actively charming were just puffing too hard to enter into conversations.  I got advice about other walks to take, reviews of shows on stage in London, and good advice about what ale to try at the pub where we stopped for lunch – a small market brew called hobgoblin that was the darkest bitter I’ve ever seen and very tasty.

They even invited me to join them for tea at the end of the walk, but I needed to get back and wash up because I was going to the theater. 

Garmin Facts:  12 miles in 4:06 walking for a rate just below 3 mph  468 meters climbed, and my fellow walkers walked a bit further than I did and did one big descent and climb I got to skip.

Chichester Festival Theatre is a complex of three auditoriums and a bunch of restaurants distributed over two buildings.  They do a summer repertory season, and Wednesday night was the last preview night of a new play they are premiering.  It was in the Minerva – their smallest venue I think with a bit less than 300 seats.  It was over 80% full for a Wednesday night preview of a new play, so their audience developmentdepartment clearly knows its business. 

I don’t want to say much about the play, because I think it was good enough it might go places, and a lot of the fuel of the script is a sequence of surprises.  I don’t want to ruin it for anyone.  The use of language and the deftness of information revelation were both impressive.  I can tell you it was called Three Women and a Piano Tuner, which also lists the characters in the play.  The playwright sat next to me, so I felt very much at home.  It was an enjoyable evening all around.

 

Around and around arundel

Back at the Hilton, I did some web searching to find the inn where I am now staying.  It’s called the Saint Mary’s Gate Inn and sits right next to the catholic cathedral.  Arundel is a mid-sized town with a huge castle.  The castle is the main home of the Duke of Norfolk which is a long way off, so I’m not sure how it all happened.  He also has the additional duty of running the college of arms, so he more or less manages the table of organization for the whole nobility.  I know all this because shortly after I got into town I toured his castle.

All right, truth in advertising.  When I first got to Arundel I drove the car into the first car park I found, walked out to buy a map and find my inn, then I walked back to the car and drove it back to the car park.  I just want to make it clear that I do the park on the fringe and walk trick even when alone.

I did decide to visit the castle right after I settled in.  The town was alive with tourists, and I knew that would add an element of people watching to the visit.  I also knew that if I didn’t jump right on it, I could easily fill up my days and never get to it.  This castle combined features of many of the others I had visited with Mom or Sara.  Like Conwy it had started as a real fortification, though even older.  One end of the complex is a 12th century keep.  This means they built a hill with a dry ditch around it and stuck a tower on it.  The walls are yards thick, and the outside finish is a sort of mosaic of chipped flints in a matrix of mortar.  A lot of buildings in the south use some variation of this, and I’ve always thought it was very attractive.  Like Sizergh, it was extended over the years with living quarters being added and made increasingly more grand.  Like Penryth, the final coat of grandeur was layered on in the 19th century.  Arundel was done with more restraint, but also with even more precious materials. 

The most interesting thing, though, was the implied message of all of it.  While some of the other castles conveyed a clear goal of justifying the aristocracy, Arundel just celebrates it and reminds you that it has been going on for a long time.

After ogling the castle, I got into trail clothes and took a 6 mile walk or so – I’ll add in the specifics if I remember to.  It was basically a distant orbit of the castle, largely through Arundel Park – originally the castle’s private park but made public at the pleasure of the Duke a few generations ago.  The walking here is a lot like the walking around Oxfordshire.  There are modest hills, they call them downs for reasons no one seems to know.  Specifically, downs are long lines of chalk hills bordered by quite level plains (called Wealds just so nobody thinks I’m confused and it’s really the flat parts that are called downs).  This has a couple of benefits.  From the plain, the downs look almost like built walls going on for miles with the occasional break for a river.  From the sides and tops of the downs, the plains stretch for dozens of miles.  It makes navigation a breeze even for walkers without my fancy electronic toy.  All you have to do is climb a hill to a place without too many trees and the whole landscape spreads out below you and looks just like your map.

On one stretch of the walk, I was following a clear path, but by several other indications, I started to worry I might have wandered into a private part of the park.  It turned out I was fine all along, but the fear of being run in for trespass gave a piquancy to about half an hour of the walk.  I don’t know what kind of due process they’ve got over here if you’re where you’re not supposed to be on a Duke’s land.  I was sure the castle had dungeons I hadn’t seen on the regular tour, and I was just as happy to remain unacquainted with them.

On my return journey, it rained on me a bit, just enough to get me into my rain gear but not enough for real inconvenience.  I had a nice few miles along the river Arun (from which Arundel) and climbed the high street back up to my inn. 

Garmin facts:  5.85 miles in 1:51 walking with 17 minutes resting for 3.2 mph walking and 2.7 mph overall with 217 meters climbed.  Also 2 extra unmeasured miles between the habitrail at Heathrow and walking around Arundel and the castle.

Tuesday I did another orbit of Arundel, but significantly further out.  I started out towards the northwest picking my way through some poorly marked, heavily wooded paths.  There was no rain, but the tall grass I walked through was still wet from the night before, so my trouser legs and sleeves were soon sopping.  Three cheers for quick dry, though.  Every time I’d get out of the tall stuff for a while I’d dry out and be all ready for another drenching.  Fortunately, the exercise of the walk kept me warm enough. 

At one point I walked by a big operation of rows and rows of low cages in which it looked like someone was intensively raising birds.  I know they do that with pheasants to release on estates for shooting purposes, so that may be what I was seeing. 

Part of the way I walked on a long distance path called the Monarch’s Way – so named because it supposedly tracks the route Charles II took while retreating from, well all I’m sure is from someone he was pretty sure he didn’t want to catch up with him.  One section I walked was called “The Denture” on my map.  I asked a few other people I saw why, but no one knew. 

I eventually climbed up into the downs, specifically a hill called Glatting Beacon.  On top of that, I found the most useless trig point I’ve yet seen.  The hill top is lightly forested now, so you’d have to be lost within 10 feet of it for it to do you any good as a navigational aide.  The hilltop also bristles with tall telecoms towers, though, so it’s still pretty easy to spot and still sending signals as it presumably used to to get the name Beacon.

From there, I walked down into a village called Bignor where there is a partially excavated Roman villa.  The original building was probably very similar in size to the one I saw at Chedworth, but less of it has been brought to light.  It’s still privately owned, and the family has even less money for archeology than the trust does.  They did have some beautifully preserved mosaics that I enjoyed seeing.  The modern cottagers of Bignor make a pretty good show of their homes and gardens, at least what I could see from the outside.  A few of them were downright marvelous.

I walked back to the river by way of a few more villages then walked back along the river banks again.  Most of the riverside path was very smooth, grassy, and reasonably dry.  There was a pub to stop at about a mile and a half short of Arundel, so I was glad to have the trail cleaning my boots for me.  Of course, I hit a patch of unavoidable and highly goopy mud just before stepping onto the car park for the pub and had to go in and order my pint in socks.  The pub was where I’d hit the river on Monday evening, so the last little bit was a rerun but without the rain this time.

I got back ravenous and had a very nice roast chicken dinner back at St Mary’s Gate then sat in the pub writing until my computer’s battery and my own both pointed to empty.

Garmin Facts:  20 miles in 6:18 for 3.2 mph walking,  505 meters climbed.  I’ve given up on the resting time and overall rate, because I keep having to turn off the gizmo for long breaks to save battery power.