Day 15:
Day 15: The North. A few miles on and accents are now all northern as in Wigan-Warrington with a little Scouse. The change is sudden, not gradual - which is suprising. So, the storming run of the last two days stalled against the Shropshire Way - back to the slow hedge hopping, field work of before. It's not a bad path. It reminds me of the Wayfarers Walk at home, a good trail but lacking in markers/logic in some key places. This all takes time. Gone are the quick road miles... Now, I wrote that bit before yesterday's (Saturday's) mental collapse. It went like this: I spent about 5 hours bush whacking along the Shropshire Way which I mistakenly assumed was a navigable well-way marked path. It isn't. I should have listened to the first clue: SW sign at Uffington directs across a small meadow then points at a garden. I follow it down to the Severn through the back garden...dead end! Imagine that kind of basic error writ large over 20 miles and you'll see my problem. It took 5 hours to walk 8 or 9 miles. By the time I was nearing Whitchurch I was forced back on the roads just to force an end to the day. But not before I was forced to climb through a funnel of matted waist level nettles that de-brided my knees. It took so long (over 10 hours) and I was so sick of it, all other qualities - confidence, happiness, interest - were stripped away and I could only rely on endurance. Listen to Life Goes On by The Damned - "Liiiiiife goes on and on and on, and you think it can't go on, go on and on and on [repeat]" that was me. I arrived at the camp site after dark. Lost my pitch. Shower wouldn't work. My knees were burning. Had to set up by a busy A road. And eventually realised I was at the wrong camp site. So I rough camped on a camp site.
DAY 16
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| The Shropshire Way...? |
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| The Shropshire Way...? |
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| No luck getting to this hill through the electric fences and overgrown choke points, I ended up back-tracking and taking the road to the next obstacle... |
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| The Shropshire Way. What is the point? |
A note about the blog
I must be the only LEJOGer without a smart phone. This means I don't have the ability to update this blog when I'm on the trail. My support team back home kindly offered to update the blog for me, so this will be communicated by text message and written up on my behalf. It will therefore be brief and without photos. I will expand on this when I get back from my journal entries, dictaphone recordings and photo journal. The detailed account will be published as a book which will be available on Amazon.
Charity
Thank you to everyone who has made a donation to
Helping Hands for the Blind, a respectable local charity. You can make a donation
here. Using Gift Aid, the charity is able to claim an additional percentage of each donation from the government as part of the
Gift Aid scheme.
While I am not tracking how much has been raised, the charity themselves may wish to do that; leaving a note with your donation such as "LEJOG" will help them do that. To be frank, it's more important that they receive donations than it is for me to take credit; they're actually doing something important whereas I am going on what could be described as a holiday.
My books
Lastly and leastly, I am an independent author. Writing is a pleasure even if reading it isn't! I will write an account of my LEJOG journey in the form of a book which hopefully will encourage other people to give LEJOG a try (and probably discourage many more). If you want a copy, the first batch will be given free of charge. Ask and you shall receive...
My other books are available on Amazon:
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