Rome

My place in Rome looked to be one of those operations without a street-level lobby, and I was pleased with myself for finding the building, buzzing in, and locating the rooms up on the fourth floor. But a uniformed attendant found me there and escorted me back downstairs and a few doors along to check in at the lobby of the hotel of which these rooms are apparently some weird annex. Then a different attendant led me back into the grubby ground floor of the first building, summoned the tiny stairwell elevator with a flourish, and guided me back to the place I'd already found.

It's a debatably-interesting fact that, no matter how grand the exterior, the ground floor of every building in southern Europe looks like a parking garage. There are always soot or dirt stains on the plaster that can't have gotten there through any human agency you can think of, a floor of tiny tiles, and a ramshackle wooden booth with a purpose lost to history. But the room is just off Piazza Repubblica, and if I blew up just one apartment building, I'd have a view of Santa Maria della Vittorio.

Of the two full days I had, I set one aside to walk the Via Appia. If you want to have the worst possible Via Appia experience, I'm in a position to advise. Go to the Porta San Sebastiano and head south. That stretch is busy, has ambiguous sidewalks, and is walled-in, so you can't escape. Cars and the route 118 bus you should have taken rumble continuously by on asphalted cobblestones, their exhaust hangs over the sunken road like a gross atmospheric river, and you have a long time to enjoy all that, because the first interesting sight is a fair ways away. I've walked this route before, many years ago, and had forgotten all that. I forgot, too, about the tour buses at the catacombs, the cyclists, and the classic car rallies. The classic car rally may have just been that one day, I don't know. At any rate, it was all a neat demonstration of the unreliability of memory that scientists are always going on about.

It was a relief to reach the grassy ruins of the complex of Maxentius (a mausoleum, a circus -- towers, the spine of the track, and the discreet doorway for removing wrecks -- and an inaccessible palace), just like something from an 18th century Grand Tour. You want to get an oil painting done, with some sheep added for atmosphere -- maybe stand over the artist and keep barking "more sheep!" -- to hang in your parlour. The baths of Trajan, back in the centre of the city, are the same. Too hopelessly ruined to do much with, they're a litter-strewn hangout for the indigent.

I took a bus back into the city and was happy to see the screwball comedy of tourists trying to use bus tickets playing out just like it used to. The transit system now takes cards directly, but everyone has tickets or passes. The various machines on board let you tap, scan, or insert, and it's not obvious which to try. Some people also have exotic all-in-one tourist passes that can do none of these things, and they can only stand around helplessly. Only later will they appreciate what a quintessentially Roman experience they've had.

That grudging coexistence of the old and new -- ticket machines, in this case -- is part of the city's weird charm. It's a beautiful, frantic, frustrated place where you can't change anything without destroying something priceless. Developers yearn for the happy medieval days when people knocked down anything that was in the way and used the wreckage to build whatever they wanted, locals halted by crowds think wistfully of the Goths, drivers -- actually, no one can get inside the mind of a Roman driver, and it's better not to try. And yet the city is somehow extending a subway line, and, strangely, the ancient centre is teasing new attractions: hoardings near the forum hide new excavations soon to be unveiled.

The plan for the last day of the trip was to just walk around and maybe hang out in the piazzas trying to look like Fellini. Many people don't know Fellini frequently wore hiking pants. It was great. Places I used to freely wander in and out of require tickets and have snaking lines, but I've seen them before, and it's amazing how much of Rome you can see in a few hours if you refuse to stand in lines. 

Along the Tiber, I rested and admired a derelict passenger ship with graffiti on its sides and bed sheets in the windows. It looked like a cruise ship for anarchist squatters; the fare would be a bag of flour and an anti-establishment artwork. The only buildings I went into were churches, a pizza a taglio place, and Tazza d'Oro, a cafe I went to many times on visits long ago and was happy to find totally unchanged. It's still madly busy, the cashier still responds in English no matter how perfectly you think you've ordered, and you still leave your receipt on the counter under a coin, drink your coffee, and are on your way in seconds.

You can no longer drop into the Pantheon on a whim, but Rome is the American Olympic basketball team of ecclesiastical architecture: the second string is still incredibly impressive. There's Sant'Andrea della Valle, an only-slightly-less-rich man's St. Peter's; Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, a stupendous renovation of the baths of Diocletian planned by Michelangelo; San Vitale's, a surviving 4th century basilica, now far below street level, which no one goes to because it doesn't look impressive and you have to go down some stairs. Skipping the baroque masterpieces also opens up real variety; if you want to get weird, Rome's churches can get weird. I didn't go this time, but consider Santo Stefano Rotondo, a round church economically dedicated to two different Stephens that has an interior covered in gruesome frescoes of martyrdoms.

Rome may be frantic, but it's also amazingly casual: people have to live among all this stuff. Some are walking their dogs in the Circus Maximus, and a woman leaning over a railing ashes her cigarette on Caesar's forum. The souvenir scene is another important part of the street life. This year, the shops are being undercut by street tables selling even worse crap for €1 per item -- "if you find cheaper crap anywhere... buy it" -- and eager buyers are rooting around in the bins of identical key chains looking for the perfect one.

On the last night, I woke up sick to my stomach (pizza a taglio? Questionable breakfast buffet items? That grocery store salmon carpaccio I knew was a mistake at the time?) and came close to skipping my flight. Instead, I took more Gravol than I've ever taken before and had a day that was not very much fun. 

Lecce

All of Puglia's train stations seem to be under construction. Otranto's is closed altogether, so the trip on to Maglie is by bus, which, confusingly, proves to be a tour-company coach with a small sign in the dash identifying it as a train replacement. There's plenty of time to explore Maglie station. Its amenities comprise some porta potties, a shrine with a half-life-sized statue of Jesus, and two benches occupied by people playing audio on their phones (I can't guarantee they'll always be there, but it seems likely). I don't know whether to include a third bench, because it's behind construction fencing, but someone is still somehow sitting on it and enjoying a video. You can leave the station, of course, but the most entertaining thing in the immediate neighbourhood is a stationery store.

I concentrated intently to try to understand an announcement and, based on what I'd gathered, got on the train to which it referred (if there had been platform displays, I would have listed them as amenities). It set off in the wrong direction. A better shrine idea would have been one to the patron saint of getting on the right train; and if there isn't one, there's probably some obscure saint who could use the work. What's St. Arwald been up to lately? Exactly. Anyway, I studied routes on my phone, watched anxiously for ticket inspectors, and got off in Poggiardo, which is remarkable for having no "attractions" whatsoever on Google Maps. I bought another ticket to Lecce and talked to a South African woman on the platform who had moved to Puglia. She assured me that the next train, though late, was indeed going to Lecce, and had some interesting things to say about the ex-pat experience here, mostly about how hard the written driving test is.

My place in Lecce was in a tiny B&B. It was up two flights of dingy stairs that smelled of cinnamon, but the room itself had 14' ceilings of girder-supported stone, a pretty, though cold, tile floor, and a little balcony, and was quiet, except for an overzealous guard dog nearby. "That passerby," it would say, "that bird, that cloud, none of them did us any harm, but can we be sure that would be true if I hadn't barked at them?" Happily, the dog was only on duty in the middle of the day, so was not much of a problem. Still, my main suggestion to the operator of the otherwise excellent B&B is to drug that dog. Wouldn't it be happier on barbiturates, anyway?

Charles V enclosed Lecce in city walls, and their route still forms a sharp border between the old and new towns. When you pass through one of their great gates you blip into a world of white limestone and curving baroque architecture, and most of the disagreeable things about modern cities can't follow; they can only fume outside waiting for you to re-emerge.

The main churches are splendid and require a ticket -- a single ticket, as they are a package deal. I think I'd rather see them competing individually on price, which would drive efficiency gains in the baroque-architecture market. One result of the charge, though, is that the churches were pleasantly empty; just a few tourists sitting in the pews, quietly determined to get their money's worth. I also paid to walk around the surviving wedge of the Roman amphitheatre, even though you can see it at least equally well from the street above. I wanted to do things properly. Also, I knew I wouldn't be going anywhere near the Colosseum when I got to Rome, so this would be my main chance to hang out in an amphitheatre and to read plaques about gladiators. 

These notes have been light on dining experiences, so I'll record that in Lecce I bought some of the oddest fake lunch meat I've ever tried. It looks like a stack of Fruit Roll-Ups and has a powerful but undefinable smell with great staying power. All the stores sell it, which is hard to understand, unless it's to people who want to frisbee slices at their enemies. In fairness, I should say that fake lunch meat is in no way a regional specialty. I'm pretty sure chocolate granola is, and that was excellent. Equally irrelevantly, it was nice to see that the miniature dachshund is still a popular dog in Lecce, and they've done a tremendous job at their breed specialty, as there were no miniature badgers to be seen anywhere.

I caught the correct train on to Rome, but lost the ticket barcode while trying to connect to the broken train WiFi (in hindsight, there were better options than keeping it open in a browser). Overall, I didn't put in a very strong performance on the trains here, though it would be untruthful to say it was any worse than average. The ticket-checker had to come back later, when I produced my ticket with a triumphant flourish. He seemed pleased and, I like to think, a little impressed.

It was a long but pleasant ride to Rome. Outside every little city was a clump of mid-rises hung with washing, and between the cities were olive groves. Many of them were being tended by farmers, which was somehow disappointing. I'd imagined that being an olive farmer was just a question of wearing a flat cap, pottering around with a stick, and hoping Carthage doesn't invade again. A number of the groves I walked past in Puglia were for sale, possibly because their current owners had thought as I did.

Otranto

I left Tricase in the rain, reached Maglie in a storm, and then caught a ride to Otranto generously offered by the man who manages the apartment I rented here. We could communicate only by auto-translation, which worked pretty well, except that Maglie apparently means "shirts" in Italian and dropped pronouns were replaced by the app at random, so I'd have to field questions like, "when does it get to jerseys?" 

Otranto's a beautiful place, and has kept a lot of its dignity despite having a Christmas store and a selfie museum. To avoid disappointment, be aware that the selfie museum doesn't display selfies, it has dumb props for the taking of selfies; it's a museum in the sense of being a temple to the muse of selfies. She doesn't appear much in classical sources, because everyone found her a bit embarrassing.

It is unmistakably a tourist town in the off-season: fairground rides, food stalls, and a target-shooting booth are shuttered or covered in canvas. The Castle of Otranto, namesake of Horace Walpole's weird gothic fairytale, is deserted, and so is the cathedral, with its medieval mosaic floor and its chapel holding the bones of people massacred by the Ottomans. Equally quiet is the tiny market on a gravel patch by the canal. A Piaggio Ape ("bee") tricycle is parked there and three old men sit on lawn chairs selling the small amount of produce you can fit in a Piaggio Ape. I like that the old men of Puglia don't do anything alone. If you have a head of lettuce to sell, you call up a couple of buddies.

Otranto has hikes for both kinds of people: those who love caves and those who love quarries.

The quarry hike

The most popular hike outside the city goes to an old bauxite quarry. It's fair to be skeptical of a hike whose chief glory is a disused quarry, but it is, in fact, an amazing route.

It runs along the coast to a medieval watchtower and climbs to a stone wall marking what a hand-painted sign announces is an agriturismo operation; a good place to advertise, except that the wall encloses an uninviting field of rocks and thorns. "Welcome! Your project will be to clear this field and use the rocks to build a pajara. And put something interesting in it for hikers. Drug lab, leopard den, kiosk, be creative."

Back down on the coast is a cluster of barrel-vaulted WWII bunkers you can wriggle awkwardly down into and a man fishing in a hidden cove. The coast here is bare eroded limestone, all pits and sharp ridges, like a coral reef or a hostile alien world with good fishing. I have always felt that two dumb similes are just as good as one good one.

Along the beach that comes next, some industrious beachcomber has built a lean-to of pallets and driftwood. Could beachcombing be the retirement hobby I'll need? No, modernity has ruined it. The internet says that serious beachcombers now track storms and study tide schedules; they'd always be combing out the good stuff ahead of you and then squealing off in black SUVs like the bad guy in Twister.

The trail was almost empty early on, and absolutely empty farther up the coast. The last person I passed was a shirtless man with an enormous pot belly, with whom I exchanged grave buongiornos. It was heartening to learn I was not, after all, the worst-dressed man in Italy. Later, I even took a page from his book -- Bare-Bellied In Puglia: A Failed Social Experiment, obtainable at any struggling bookstore at a steep discount -- and took off my shirt. A few minutes later, reflecting that one page was enough, I put it back on.

At the end of the beach, a row of skeletal limestone fingers tickle the sea, and then the trail runs along a steep slope for the long and tricky walk to the lighthouse. It becomes narrow and rugged and picks up the habit of disappearing among the rocks and then turning up later on, which is just starting to get tiresome when you approach the promontory. Just before the lighthouse is a low stone wall enclosing a shallow cliff in the hillside. If you eagerly explore it for archaeological wonders, you discover a grill and a bag of charcoal. "No doubt part of the Grillin' Horizon so well-attested in this region," you muse pompously.

The lighthouse seemed a likely tourist spot. I had a vision of a crowd of sightseers and maybe someone selling coffee from an espresso machine mounted on a Piaggio Ape -- it was a detailed vision -- but there was no one there at all. A sign in front of the lighthouse promises an ecological museum inside, but the lighthouse is locked and shuttered. From here, long gravel ramps switchback up to a road and a military base. Along the way, signs tell you about the history and wildlife of the area. One suggests that you might see sperm whales, or, at the right time of year, swordfish pursuing tuna. I saw a cargo ship and a seagull.

The way back up to Otranto along the inland path is a dawdle, and the quarry itself, notionally the star turn, is really just sort of interesting. It's surrounded by striking mounds of red earth, presumably bauxite, and the water is a milky green. 

The legality of access to the quarry is a bit ambiguous. Parts of the surrounding high ground are wired off, and to get out (having, admittedly, probably taken the wrong route), I have to duck under a locked gate hung with forbidding signs -- whether to avoid liability problems from the kinds of idiots who fall into quarries or to discourage bauxite claim-jumpers, I'm not sure. All I know is that I'll be flying home with what I assume is a fortune in bauxite.

The cave hike

Otranto and its hinterland are riddled with artificial caves (known here as hypogea) dug for storage, as graves, or to make olive oil in (advantages: temperature control, security, owning a sweet cave). My apartment complex has a glassed-in set of 17th century storage pits in the parking garage, and it celebrates them in its name and in framed pictures in the apartment. And yet, I didn't book it because of my love of storage pits; that's pure coincidence. If you're not satisfied with the ones in the parking garage of your building or those dug, somewhat unsettlingly, into the sides of the ridge on which it stands, you can hike inland to see hundreds more.

In the middle of Otranto is a stone-walled canal full of reeds and slime. Branching off the canal are hiking routes that quickly multiply into a confusing web of paved roads, farm tracks, and dirt trails running above and along the low cliffs that house the grotti. Maps also mark a number of pioggi (wells), but searching for hidden wells seems both unhealthy and unnecessary, as I was likely to fall into one, anyway.

The GPS track I downloaded turned out to be by a grotto completionist, so I picked and chose, but there were no bad choices. Olive groves covered in white wildflowers, sunken ruins overgrown with bougainvillea, farmers on tractors stoutly resisting the urge to run me down, pine forests, stone walls, a dovecote tower, a mountain biker who gives an encouraging fist pump as he passes ("yeah, bro, get after it! Find those grotti!"), a Piaggio Ape that goes by with a cheery honk and a wave, bowers of drooping cane, and tattered clothing spread on trees. In one place there's a drying rack on the trail, as well. If you live in Otranto and left your washing out during a storm, I found it.

I did laundry myself on my last afternoon here, and, braving the displeasure of people who want to read about other people doing laundry, will say only that there are shades of frustration unknown to anyone who has never tried to use a washing machine in a foreign country.

Tricase

There's a transfer in Lecce to a slow rural train that halts at listless, sunstroked little towns where no one boards and no one gets off. The platform at Tricase had no sign, but the conductor was leaning out of the car, watching for people like me, and he agreed when I suggested this might be Tricase. I stopped at the grocery store by the station and was a smash hit with the proprietor, who wrung my hand and insisted on knowing how tall I was and whether I was from Germany. I get these questions a lot. I won't reveal the answers here, because I'd seem less mysterious.

Getting me into the cottage I rented here took a whole family. The father, tearing up on a scooter, found me squinting at house numbers in the wrong alley, and joined the mother and two children in giving the tour. It's a "lamia", with a sunken floor, a star-vaulted bedroom, and windows 10' off the ground hung with cords with which to swing the shutters futilely back and forth. 

Part of the appeal of Tricase is that the Via Francigena pilgrimage route runs through here. It's a modern reconstruction of an itinerary from Canterbury to Rome, with this southern extension catering to pilgrims who wanted (while this was possible) to go on to Jerusalem. It's not popular. I walked the part to Marittima, and the only other walker was a man in a black tracksuit who turned off to Tricase Porto, and I'm not sure he was a pilgrim. If he was, he was treading water, spiritually speaking, because he was frittering away whatever eschatological advantages he was gaining from the pilgrimage. The tracksuit alone has to be worth a couple of years in purgatory, and playing audio from his phone was worse.

The Via runs along haphazard smallholdings of every shape but rectangular; the historical poverty of Puglia is easier to understand when you think of people trying to wrest a living from these little trapezoids of stony ground. The best option was to grow olives, and it apparently still is. Patches planted at different times show the various life stages of the trees, which start out proudly upright and develop into leafless, tortured-looking things (but don't be fooled, they love it here). Most fields also hold a curious dry-stone building like a truncated cone or pyramid; these are pajare, once used for storage or as temporary homes for farmers.

The prime stretch runs on red dirt through a national park and takes in a clifftop tower covered in scaffolding and a grotto. You can clamber down to the grotto, but I advise against it. The way down is thick with spiny weeds, the footing is bad, and the grotto is a dent filled with thorns. There's also a very nice pajara on the path, though, and it's important to go into one, because otherwise you'll never be able to shake the nagging suspicion that there's something interesting inside them.

Marittima was a attractive little town, but everything was closed. Nothing happens in the afternoon in Puglia. The day has seasons, and spring is at 4:30PM. Then, clothing stores and hair stylists raise their shutters; people come out, bundled up warmly against the room-temperature weather, to shop for clothes and get their hair done; lights come on; argumentative old men crowd onto benches in the piazzas and begin passionate discussions; butterflies emerge from their chrysalises, flowers bloom, flocks of colourful migratory birds return and sing songs of hope and promise, and so on. Then, at 1 PM the next day, everything slams shut again.

A section to delight lovers of long stories about public transit

Things in Puglia tend to turn into minor adventures, whether you want them to or not. Public transit is a good example. There's a lot to be said about the bus system here, but it's the sort of thing you really want to bang out on a typewriter and make bad photocopies of or turn into a 17th century-style pamphlet with nasty woodcuts. Essentially, knowledge of bus routes and stops and payments is a secret wisdom inaccessible to outsiders.

To get back from Marittima, I had a Trenitalia bus ticket, but Trenitalia wasn't telling where the stop was, and Google Maps thought it knew, but was, I gradually realized, wrong. It's a bit of a jar to find Google Maps fallible here; it also believed a weed-choked ditch in Tricase to be a public footpath. Missing the Trenitalia bus meant catching a local one, but how to buy a ticket? You can usually get them at tobacconists -- and note the opportunity to stamp out at once the two great evils of smoking and the Puglian bus ticketing system -- but Marittima's was, naturally, closed. The collective that runs the buses, COTRAP, has a web site, but it is pure evil. COTRAP also has an app, which orders methamphetamine precursors to your home address and then sets your battery on fire. 

The only option was to try to buy one from the driver. The internet can't agree on whether this is possible or not, but, in fact, that saintly gentleman not only waited for me to run over from where the signed stop was to where it actually was, he waved my cash and card away and gave me a ride for free. He's my best friend in Puglia.

On gorges and cod

On my last day, I went down to Gagliano to hike a gorge. There was absolutely no one else on the train. "Gagliano?" snapped the conductor, checking my ticket efficiently like he saw passengers all the time. Is it demoralizing running this ghost train back and forth? Is it a backwater assignment where you serve time waiting for a break on the main lines, or where you're sent for bungling something important, like a detective getting traffic duty?

The Ciolo gorge is a quality gorge. It's spanned by a locally-famous bridge, it has striking limestone cliffs on both sides, and its slopes hold enough pajare and dry-stone walls to satisfy anyone. The southern cliff is in the sun and is streaked with rusty orange, while the northern one is stained with black and dotted with shade-casting overhangs like the eyes and mouths of a row of ghoulish faces. It's market day in the town itself. Outside the supermarket are rows of canvas canopies shading stalls selling produce, meat, clothes, and fish. Huge salt cod lie in baskets and flies circle them, intrigued. I would have liked to buy a salt cod. I've always sort of wanted to hit someone with one. At one time, you could have built a whole Vaudeville career on an idea like that. Or leave one in the kitchen at work with a "help yourself" note.

Bari

There was a carnival atmosphere downtown, with thousands turning out to see me off, for game 7 of the World Series, or both. The flight was full, mostly of sick babies, except for two empty seats beside me in the exit row. Other passengers eyed these seats covetously, asked attendants about them, and trembled their hands at their seatbelt buckles like gunfighters, and then we took off and a woman just ambled up and dropped into one of them without asking the crew or completing any of the application forms I'd prepared.

I don't know why so many sick babies were going to Rome. It's probably our fault for following sick baby influencers, though I'm the first to admit that some of their content is pretty great. Sick baby at the Spanish steps, sick baby crawling the Via Appia, sick baby under the dome of St. Peter's -- those acoustics!

I took the train straight on to Bari, with the idea that napping on a train would be better than hanging around Rome until check-in time. That worked well, though I accidentally booked a seat in a facing pair across from a man with a soul patch who constantly ate clementines. This isn't really something to worry about. Soul patch clementine guy is quiet, stays on his side, and has a personal style that demands respect. Unrelatedly, I think I might grow sideburns and start eating a lot of pears.

The drawback is that you get to Bari tired and stumble through strange, dark streets like a gutshot character in a film noir. In the square outside my large, purple apartment, local kids were riding push scooters tricked out with LEDs and throwing "snaps", which make a tiny explosion and a sound like a gunshot and are traditionally used to celebrate city festivals and random Sunday evenings in November. The snap-throwing felt like it might happen daily, but the next night there was instead a group of men smoking and yelling outside a store. There might be a rota. I don't know what the kids do on Mondays, probably start fires.

The key landmark was an inactive Ferris wheel on the promenade by the sea. If you turn right from here, you strike an eerily lifeless row of public buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, while to the left lies the old harbour and the old city. Tiny fishing boats are tied up in rows and there's a wooden shade structure, marked on maps as a fishermen's market, where three or four men stand proudly over tiny plastic tubs in a "behold the bounty of the sea" sort of way.

The old city is a twisty town of alleys where compass needles spin randomly, homes stand open behind doorway curtains, laundry dries on balconies, voices float up from restaurants in bare cellars, and hands holding cigarettes poke from dark rooms through iron gratings into the street. A cruise ship docks and disgorges tour groups that straggle after the raised umbrellas of guides like soldiers after their banners, seeking loot in the form of fridge magnets and bags of orecchiete.

The church and the basilica are both 12th century or so, whiter and more austere than the cathedrals of northern Europe. Under the cathedral is a crypt with a glass-fronted casket piled high with gruesome relics from a variety of saints. Under the crypt lie the remains of an earlier church, some mosaics, and a bit of a Roman road, and that's as deep as they've cared to dig so far. You can't sink a fencepost here without striking a lot of fascinating history and having to install a bunch of glass floors and metal staircases.

In the early morning there's booming and hammering, as though preparing Bari for another day means firing up some infernal machine from the age of steam. You could draw the curtains and spend a day just listening to the sounds, then be surprised to find no revolutionary barricades or exploded boilers. But the liveliness of this piazza gives the wrong impression; Bari is peaceful, except for the traffic, and the people relaxed and friendly, when not driving.

The third night decided which of the previous two was the anomaly. It was the quieter one. The kids don't just stand in circles and throw snaps, they also have either a band or a very loud stereo and then someone sets off fireworks that seem to explode just outside the window. Not haphazardly, it's a beautiful show (was it a city event?). You can't even stay annoyed, because a mist of nostalgia descends and you remember what it was to be young and Italian and in love with fire.

Reading and the Thames Path

The historic centre of Reading, which I'm pretty sure is where I was, has a lot of graceful gothic revival buildings and a shopping arcade that's a refuge for oddball stores -- toy railroads, comic books, antiques and old junk -- that wouldn't survive the retail-chain jungle outside. The cute but confusing practice of naming businesses after those that first occupied the buildings is popular here. The "Corn Store" is a steakhouse, and there are many others. "Can I get a quick haircut?" / "Sorry, this is an asbestos remediation business."

Reading is light on major attractions; its one big draw is the ruined Reading Abbey, a massive 12th century affair of which the cores of most walls and a few other bits and pieces survive. It is famous for the gruesome execution of its last abbot by Henry VIII -- for heroically refusing to surrender the abbey during the dissolution of the monasteries (according to the abbey placards) or for unrelated charges of high treason (according to everyone else). Its monks also preserved an early English song, Sumer Is Icumin In, containing one of the earliest, albeit disputed, English references to goat flatulence. A 13th-century round about summer being good, it is every bit the equal of other Middle English party anthems like Mirie It Is While Sumer Ilast, God, Ich Hate Wintere, and What Fedest Thou This Goat?  

My room was above a pub and was as close to ideally located as it's possible to be while still being in Reading. The pub was noisy but hospitable. To extend the traditional Reading welcome of lukewarm Mexican beer, there was a single bottle of Corona standing on a table, and each day they left a 'breakfast bag' containing food I didn't want. These kept piling up. I could have taken a bath in the instant oatmeal, but there was only a shower. And the apples. I ate two -- I'm not a monster -- but what of the other four? Do I hand them out on the street? Teach myself to juggle? Wait for two more and carve apple portraits of the wives of Henry VIII? 

Up the street is the Reading Museum, which holds a 19th-century reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry, exact in every detail except for the pants primly provided to a naked gentleman, 2000 years of odds and ends, a collection of biscuit tins, and a taxidermied badger wearing a shirt asking people not to pet it. I don't often get political, but people need to stop petting stuffed badgers. They're delicate, and they're being ruined by your selfish insistence on touching them. It's nothing to do with me, I don't pet badgers.

Apart from being close to Heathrow and cheaper than London, Reading's other attraction is that it's on the Thames Path. Close to the city, there are multitudes of geese, swans, and ducks, whose down and feathers litter the adjoining green fields. Swans paddle up eagerly when a child pauses by the water but go away hungry, twitching their rumps in frustration. Swans' noble appearance really handicaps their begging. They want you to know that their beauty and grace don't mean they have any dignity. They are happy to do degrading tricks for french fries.

Interesting boats are moored along the river. There's a stubby green one with solar panels and a military-surplus look, like someone's post-apocalypse plan is to run canal tours of the Cotswolds -- everything will be valueless except ammo, canned food, and scenic boat tours -- and one that has sunk. It clearly sank some time ago, but disposing of it is probably an expensive job, and the owner, judging by their boat, may not be prospering. My suggestion, which I offer freely to the local authorities, is to put up a sign saying that it's an important habitat for riparian wildlife. And why shouldn't it be of historical interest? "Went down with no hands in the moderate breeze of February 11, 2018, which caused £18 of damage and annoyed several people in the greater Reading area."

Moving west, there are several rowing clubs, and scullers are going through their paces with coaches barking at them from little motorized coaching-boats running alongside. In a green space to the south, an inflatable theme park is taking shape behind trucks painted with "Inflatable Theme Park" and "In Town Now" -- self-evident, maybe, but the excitement is understandable. Would it be weird for an adult to go to an inflatable theme park by themselves? What if they really wanted to?

In the next open space, a toddler has begun to feed the birds, which converge in amazing numbers, swimming up to the bank and marching in columns across the pavement. The real reason for the 'no feeding' signs is surely that it allows anyone to muster a waterfowl army capable of terrorizing a city. This particular little girl has no supervillainous ambitions, but that's just luck.

The path, which is paved near the city, becomes a dirt track, and is pleasant enough, except for the caches of empty beer cans and some of the moored boats. A couple of these are owned by a species of nautical hoarder I didn't know existed. In general, the canal boats are not the charming type tourists photograph in quaint settings. If they were land vehicles, they'd be up on blocks. If you have a boat you don't want, you apparently moor it here late at night and sneak off. The riverbed on this stretch is probably clasping dozens in its mucky embrace.

The trail now crosses the train tracks that run parallel to the river and, for unclear reasons, takes a long detour through a suburb. It picks up again at a village commons repurposed as a playground but still feeling like a farmer's field, and then enters a pasture of shaggy horses, some free-roaming and some in separate electric-fence paddocks. A notice on the gate I exit by explains that there's been an outbreak of the strangles, which is apparently a horse disease. Having looked into it, it's less fun than the name makes it sound.

 

When the river reappears, it's running through a lock and weir. Nearby is this stretch of trail's main sight: the Mapledurham house, an Elizabethan mansion with a watermill that was featured on a Black Sabbath album cover -- surely a source of fierce pride to the inhabitants. Whether you're into Ozzy, 16th century English architecture, or both, the Mapledurham house has something for everyone. My first plan was to await a social invitation to a country-house weekend, at which my manners and neatly-combed hair (I recently purchased a comb) would have made me a great success. When no invitation arrived, possibly due to a postal error, I thought of stopping by from the path. In fact, though, there is no way across the river for miles in either direction, so I got only a distant glimpse of the house. But I did get exposed to the strangles. We always seem to be compensated for life's disappointments.

 

The final stretch to Pangbourne runs through vast and peaceful English meadows, where raptors circle in a gloomy sky and it's easy to imagine Jerome K. Jerome boating alongside with a couple of friends and a dog. Pangbourne has the look of an attractive and wealthy village, but it's the train station and its promise of a quick return to Reading that interests me most.

Penzance and Western Cornwall

Penzance is a lovely town of 15,000 people and 13,000 pasty shops clinging to the coast of west Cornwall. As a base, it has a lot going for it: there are good bus connections, it's on the coastal trail, its seal is a severed head on a platter, and the musical pirates have, the tourist board assures us, been all but stamped out.

In the morning, the gulls, fresh from a restful night of flapping and screaming, scream and flap to greet the dawn. The first car doors clump in the street and rush hour in Penzance breaks like a storm as yawning pasty makers unlock their doors and tourists drift towards the harbour. 

The coastal trail to the west leads to a long and pleasant promenade, beaches of polished pink and blue stones where a bracing wind carries news of rotting seaweed, and on to a backyard bird sanctuary and a garden plot full of signs asking passerby to, among other things, stop raising sea levels. Newlyn, the settlement next door, seems to be a real fishing village; its little lighthouse is inaccessible to frolicking tourists, and there's a real wholesale fish market, which tiny fishing boats trailing tiny wakes race to replenish.

Practically adjoining Newlyn is the town of Mousehole. Mousehole fishes, but tourism is more important, because Mousehole is a beautiful place, famously endorsed by both Dylan Thomas and myself. There's a craft show and sale today, which I have no time for, because my scheme is to find some of the local standing stones and maybe prospect for a new tin deposit. I had sort of counted on finding one, but admit that it didn't happen. I might as well not have packed my pickaxe and full-body red flannel underwear.

The best option for standing stones looked to be an overland branch of the trail. If you're in the habit of advising personal enemies on travel, encourage them to take this path. The farmer here has chosen to raise corn, so the only route is around the edge of the fields, where you squeeze between full-grown stalks and massive thorn bushes of the particularly filthy type that sneaks out branches to catch your feet while you're gingerly moving others that have flopped down at eye level. GPS says I got very close to a stone, but didn't much want to wade into a crop to grope for it. GPS also said I was off-route, which is always mildly stressful. It's hard not to imagine there's a person at the other end who tears off his headset and announces that you've gone rogue.

Anyway, there's a certain amount of debate about whether these standing stones are Bronze Age, modern stones set up for cows to scratch themselves against, or stones set up by the cows for purposes of their own. All three schools have persuasive arguments. On the way back, as an admission that craft sales are, after all, probably more my speed, I dropped by Mousehole's and bought a tea towel. The tea towel will stay in my kitchen to remind me of my failure to find a standing stone, to adjure me not to fail again, and to dry dishes.

As a further boost to the local economy, I bought some crab meat in Newlyn, partly to displace some of the chocolate granola from my diet. It's also supposed to contain hazelnuts, but I think this means that, once a year, a single hazelnut is solemnly carried through the factory on a velvet pillow to diffuse its sacred essence.

Back in Penzance, the famous Jubilee Pool is empty at low tide, and lying in the middle of it is a single  sunbather in red shorts showing the world what insouciance really is.

Day 2

The coastal trail immediately east of Penzance is deservedly less popular; it offers train tracks, chain-link fences, concrete, flies, and alcohol-restriction areas, which are nowhere near scenic enough to justify all the signs. You then walk along an incredibly long beach. A little stream lined with feeding birds, people with dogs far out along the edge of the water, and a couple walking along studying the beach bent almost double with their hands behind their backs.

Beyond the beach lies Marazion and the tidal causeway to St. Michael's Mount, which has been home to various castles and monasteries, all now renovated into a single stately home. The causeway is busy and progress uneven. Two people ahead have stopped to stare into a tidal pool because they saw a fish, and some behind them have begun to dawdle with the idea that they, too, might see a fish. Also, a small truck runs back and forth, scattering everyone to the sides.

I decided not to bother with the "castle", which restricted me, as a non-castle-ticket-holder, to the lower slopes of the Mount, which hold the ice cream shops and cafes. After that, two weedy youths in uniform deny further progress. There are murmurs of discontent from people who "just want to climb a little higher", but the social order holds. It's hard to launch a revolution when you're holding an ice cream cone. Anyway, the real entertainment is the sight of the causeway when the tide comes in and dozens of tourists are washed bemusedly out to sea. The local council meetings afterwards are also good value. "As previously agreed, we will erect a sign when it stops being funny. At the moment, therefore, no action is proposed." (I am told that, in reality, this hardly ever happens.)

After your visit to the Mount, Marazion hopes you will visit it, and you have to, if only to pick up the coastal trail. After the town, the trail detours around unstable clifftops by making squares around fields of cauliflower -- a splendid crop for showing off standing stones, of which there are none. The detour goes on until the beauty of cauliflower is almost ruined for you, but then you get a bit of lonely and rocky coast. Offshore, cormorants huddle on what they have decided is the best rock, and those that wouldn't fit stand alone on other ones trying to look like they don't mind.

In a curious little green space just off the trail there's an anchor, a cannon trained on St. Michael's Mount, and an exciting warning sign about a mine shaft -- but the shaft is fenced off and invisible under a thicket. There was another later on when I scrambled up a little headland to a lookout, but this one, too, was carefully blocked off. Very disappointing. Why are people so uptight about mine shafts? Is it just because of the high risk of agonizing death?

After this, trail traffic suddenly spikes, a sign that a beach with a parking lot is near, which it is, and the sense grows that getting back to Penzance would be a good thing. I ultimately leave from somewhere called Goldslithney. The bus is late, but when you ride it, you have to admire it for getting anywhere at all. The driver is a surgeon with the double-decker bus. In the tiny streets of the towns he seems to clear everything by inches, and the passage of a car is a supremely delicate little manoeuvre. It's like a bison doing needlepoint.

Day 3

I did an unusual amount of planning (i.e., more than none at all) to hike the coastal trail from Botallack to Sennen Cove. By Botallack sprawl the ruins of a tin, copper, and arsenic mine: furnace stacks, cramped and mysterious tunnels, and, at the bottom of the sea cliff, engine buildings that housed the pumps needed to operate mine shafts that had chased the tin far out under the ocean floor. Europe's Bronze Age was sustained partly by Cornwall's tin and copper, and Britain's Golden Age of detective fiction by its arsenic. Scotland Yard inspectors could not have puzzled so enthrallingly over whether the victim died of gastritis or being shoved out of a window.

There are melancholy stone ruins and menacing mine shafts all along the coast. The Cornish have forsworn tin-mining since around 1910, except for the occasional rebellious teen who sneaks home with a smudged face and a pasty shell gray with rock dust. "Ye've been mining tin again, haven't you? I've told you, we don't do that anymore!" The industry timed its collapse rather well; if they had carried on any longer, the ruins would be all metal sheds, asphalt, and cafeterias.

Next comes Cape Cornwall, where an inland mansion looks down on the ruined "St Helen's Oratory" (actually reportedly a farm building), which itself looks up to the majestic furnace stack that crowns the headland itself. A tiny cafe sells coffee in faded mugs and is probably a former tin mine. On the far side, twenty or thirty people in safety vests are standing staring up at a cliff -- a class, an especially dismal but highly visible party, or some secret surveyors' sabbath. An interesting fact about the climb up from the cape to the next height is that it never ends. I'm still climbing it, and am building a life with a supportive community of people in the same situation. We're planning a telethon.

In the following valley (or was it the preceding one? In a valley, at any rate) are two donkeys in a small field, one of them being hugged by a young woman on the path. Two other hikers hesitate just beyond, clearly in line for donkey hugs of their own. The donkey has a long day ahead of it. Next, there's a bronze age barrow somewhat mangled (the placard says) by its 19th-century discoverer, and some other structures, which I can confidently date to between 3500 BCE and 2010 CE based on their masonry and lack of USB charging points. If forced to guess, I will say that they had some connection to tin mining.

In the next flat place there are two dry-stone collars around mine shafts and then the trail runs along a cliff with half a dozen more -- black slits and sinister angled pits, some signed and roped off and others blocked only by spider webs. Mine shafts abruptly lose most of their appeal when you actually see one. They are wet and painfully cramped, and there is nothing cool inside except possibly tin ore, and there's no guarantee of that. And there are always balrogs to consider. Also, some of the spiders in the entrances are quite large.

Inviting, isn't it?

Around Sennen Cove, areas are roped off as an adder breeding ground, and a tiny snake I choose to believe is an adder slithers across the path in front of me. There's another glorious beach here, and there are surfers in the water and fighting their way out of wetsuits in the parking lot. Up at the bus stop, an agitated young man with a thick beard is trying to fix a flat on his bicycle. When I commiserate with him, he describes his predicament and dangles a badly-patched inner tube in front of me like the adder that slew his family.

The last ride back to Penzance is another run through the beautiful countryside, this time behind a local woman who points out things to her husband. It's from her that I learn the crops I saw earlier were cauliflower and that the crowd standing on three tractor-drawn carts comprise a bullock auction (a number of bullocks show off their moves in the field before them). She also points out a standing stone I would otherwise have missed.