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.

Plymouth

The little inn in Okehampton couldn't store luggage, ruling out many options for killing time until the train. Drawing on my long experience and natural flair for travel, I improvised by sitting on a bench staring at a bottle cap. Then I went to a cafe intended for mothers with young children. Then I went back to the bench, but now it was occupied by three old women offering a free bible course, so I walked up to the station early. To be fair to Okehampton, it's really quite nice; historic buildings, sunken rivers gurgling over stony courses, a Victorian shopping arcade, kind and patient people.

Okehampton's train station -- yes, I'm going to describe a train station -- was built in 1871 -- yes, with dates -- and is largely unchanged, partly because it was closed down for a few decades and just recently reopened. At one end of the platform is a sign advocating a further reopening of the line to Bude, a measure I, as someone who doesn't know where Bude is or why people would want to go there, strongly support. It's a very good station to waste time in, with its tiny museum, its Dartmoor display, its recreated 1960s ticket office, and its bookstore exclusively selling books about railways. I wasn't the only one charmed by it, judging by the middle-aged train enthusiast with an overbite who appeared and began avidly photographing the place.

The connecting train in Exeter was an hour late, and the posted delay crept up as time went on, making its likely departure time an annoying math problem. Exeter St. David's is a less delightful station than Okehampton. It's bigger and busier, and a demented fugue of recorded announcements from different speakers sweep up and down the platforms. Cutting through are frequent "we are sorry to announce" announcements of delays and cancellations with sundry pre-recorded explanations: broken-down train, fault on train, train keys stolen by seagull, train crew delayed by other delay, train crew savaged by hyenas, moor-beast activity on tracks. Sorrow over train delays is part of the British identity. The train network ties the country together not just physically but by supplying a common enemy.

Large parts of Plymouth were bombed out during the war, and much of the city is now a) an important example of postwar architecture and urban planning and b) kind of a dump. Many of the hastily-rebuilt areas are, on second thoughts, being rebuilt again. My comfortable hotel is brand new and faces a glowering rival, the grand but slightly dowdy Duke of Cornwall hotel, across a parking lot and traffic circle. I chose a Marriott property marketed to hip young people like myself. "This noisy, irritating area on the ground floor is called The Now. Come down and hang out in The Now whenever you want! Here's your voucher for a probably-disgusting cocktail we invented. My name's Marty; now that we're friends, make sure you stay here again. Remember, The Now." I think Marty may have been drugged. Maybe I would have preferred the staunchly traditionalist Duke of Cornwall, which controls its staff with mesmerism. 

West is the abandoned-theatre district, which, despite the name, also includes abandoned parking garages and abandoned nightclubs. Brightly-painted store fronts bearing optimistic messages add cheer but thicken the pathos. The largest and most famous husk is the New Palace Theatre, a grand red-brick place that has been a vaudeville theatre, a bingo parlour, a dance hall, a strip club, and a nightclub. You hope 'derelict building' is just one more act in its variety-show of a career. There are so many things it hasn't yet been: a co-working space, a roller derby arena, a wax museum, an ice-capades venue, a youth hostel, a model train showroom, a reptile zoo.

To the east are the tourist attractions: Smeaton's Tower (a relocated lighthouse that now warns drunk tourists not to walk into the sea), war memorials, a bowling green close to the site of Francis Drake's famous game where elderly bowlers calmly insist on finishing their own even though Tesco is closing soon, the royal citadel, the Barbican, some museums, an aquarium, and, Google Maps insists I add, any number of seafood restaurants and escape rooms.

Also: a phone booth being "preserved for future generations", a toddler in a Santa costume running amok, a swing bridge that opens frequently for fishing boats, an Elizabethan house, and more. Plymouth is an interesting and historic spot that I don't regret seeing. The popular belief that its official motto is the sound of someone hacking up phlegm is definitely untrue.

Dartmoor

I must have really wanted to come to Okehampton, because it took three trains. One was cancelled; a serious annoyance for Castle Cary, which had me clattering around its streets with a suitcase for half the afternoon. In hindsight, the trip here was a gamble: the probability of three British trains all running as promised is not high. 

The way from Okehampton up to Dartmoor's edge is steep and uninteresting, so I found the town's taxi rank, where the second driver asked agreed to make the trip. The first mulled the prospect over and decided against it. Okehampton's taxi drivers, who are all over seventy, gather at the rank to stare at the sky and await a fare that stirs their soul. A quest, a heist, one big fare they can retire on. You have to pitch your trip. "I'm rightful heir to the earldom and seek proofs of my claim in the grocery store on Fore Street."

It was a day of mist and rain well-suited to moor-walking. On a clear day, you would experience none of Dartmoor's damp mystery. Spectral hounds, moor-beasts, druids, ancient kings restless under toppled cairns, ghosts that moan in the bracken, none of these are going to pop up when it's sunny and caper about like Disney characters.

A zig-zag walk up a bracken-covered hill and a lot of frowning over a GPS app took me to a paved road, then a gravel farm road, gravel paths, mown strips, and into open country. The soft mist became light rain, and a wind whipped up to drive it sideways. Sheep grazed half-hidden in grass and bracken or lay in the shelter of low trees, watching the world with that calm acceptance that is the great compensation of having a brain like a cherry tomato.

The moor is yellow, green, and hummocky, with hillsides covered in ferns and tall grass, lonely trees, and jumbles of granite blocks. Here and there it's pinched up into tors, modest peaks with screaming winds. On a rainy day in early fall, you get soaked, frozen, and disoriented. Many of the legends arose from half-drowned hikers glimpsing each other through the mist. "It was definitely a barrow wight. It had cold, hopeless eyes, and the blowing of its nose was like the horn of a fell huntsman summoning the hounds of hell." Is someone excitedly telling a new story at a local pub? I'm hopeful, but don't expect to make it into the mythos. It would be hard to evolve a harrowing backstory that explains the toque and the peanut-eating.

I found a stone circle, climbed a tor, and got possibly wetter than anyone has ever been before. I saw no one, though once there was a blue tent in the distance, and cars were parked where the road ended. A man was climbing out of a van, and I was going to wittily observe that it was a nice day, but he shouted it out before I got a chance.

To add spice to Dartmoor, the southern edge has a military base where artillery testing is conducted. There are poles topped with warning lights along the road and signs advising against playing with unexploded ordnance. Not getting blown up here was one of my goals. If you're going to get killed on a moor, you should do it in a way consonant with the spirit of the place, like following dancing lights into a mire or getting murdered in some fiendishly mysterious way.

This first hike was such a success I did it again the next day. A taxi took me to Malden reservoir and I crossed the dam and followed a soggy trail around the water and up into a field where cows lay with their calves wondering if it was worth their while coming over to kick me. The path was becoming a river, so I decided to climb the ridge, hoping for dryer ground, and meet the trail where it doubled back.

That worked out as I deserved. The entire slope ran with water. There were fast-flowing streams audible underfoot but invisible in the tall grass. You can only lurch from one dubious knot of vegetation to another, grabbing a fistful of grass when something gives way. It was a splendid time. When I came to a block of granite I would stand on it for a while just to savour the footing. And when I finally struck the path, I forgave it immediately for the ponds it held in low places. Don't take random shortcuts on the moor: another well-known principle I preferred to work out for myself. Should the worst happen on my next moor hike, I'd like my estate to be used to erect a monument to people who have been sucked into bogs. Tell the sculptor to make it gruesome.

Back at the reservoir, the hiking scene was picking up. Several people were defying the signs by walking unleashed dogs, as is customary, and a friendly Labrador escorted me back across the dam. Out on the road, I made way for a dozen horseback riders, most of whom followed the lead rider in turning to thank me as they passed. No trouble, hello, happy to, cool horse, you're welcome -- you know, your spokeswoman and I really covered all this earlier?

Google Maps sent me on a deeply unpleasant and rather dangerous road walk back to town. Jumping up into the brush when a car approached, flattening against hedges at blind corners, crossing back and forth to whichever side seemed less deadly -- my curse on the whole stretch of the B3260 between Okehampton and the Malden reservoir parking lot, except the bit closest to town, which was acceptable. After a day of mud and poor decisions, you restore yourself by degrees: showering, setting clothes out to dry, eating a packaged meal from Waitrose and some cookies -- each is a stage on the way back to civilization.

Cluj-Napoca and Weymouth

I was in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, for a conference on the illicit reanimation of the dead. I wonder if Romanians ever get tired of those jokes. I bet they don't. I bet they're as fresh and welcome every day as the morning dew. The conference hotel was 1960s sci-fi on the outside and purple carpet and bossa nova on the inside; that's what's known in the hospitality industry as covering all the bases. The conference was fine. I gave a talk and no one threw any bottles.

From Cluj, I went, for reasons that probably seemed excellent at one time, straight to Weymouth in Dorset. I waited for an Uber at 4AM in a dark lobby where hotel staff lay invisible on the couches, suddenly sitting upright at intervals like startled vampires. At dawn, I was in a little blue-and-yellow airport full of signs I couldn't read and thought might be anagrams. Passport control, standing on a crowded staircase waiting for the transporter to the plane, flight, Luton airport, queues, crowded shuttle to Paddington, train to Westbury, suitcase-towing sprint for connecting train to Weymouth, walk to a little hotel opposite the beach. Of all this, the flight was the worry, because it was at 6:15AM and it was with Wizz Air, the airline that spotted room between RyanAir and the bottom of the barrel and dove to fill it. (Not many airlines fly Cluj-London direct.)

Weymouth was a Victorian beach resort, and some of the attractions that drew the very first generation of mass tourists are still here: donkey rides, "amusement parlours", Merry-go-Rounds that play Rule Britannia, a Ferris wheel, and a Helter Skelter, which is a zanily-painted conical tower with a slide around the outside. In the summer, the town must be thronged with children beguiled by the magic of Victoriana; but the September-weekend visitors fall broadly into three groups: elderly people on mobility scooters, people with hand tattoos, and families with the kind of kids whose idea of a good time is to sit on a cold beach breaking rocks with other rocks.

As beach resorts go, Weymouth is uniquely clean and wholesome. There's nothing to displease Queen Victoria, who looks down censoriously from plinths and towers and building facades. If you want cheap cocktails in plastic cups or to visit a strip club or to commemorate your visit with a bad tattoo or by getting your tongue forked, you simply can't. Even its sillier shops have some character. The ska store, for example. Is it an appeal to nostalgia or the last surviving stronghold of a once-mighty cultural empire? It doesn't seem to serve a local market. Of the music scene, I can only say that there was a busker singing Oasis songs in a warbling soprano and a man on a bus wearing an Elvis Lives sweatshirt. 

Weymouth is joined to the "island" of Portland by a pebbly barrier beach, and the walk takes you through its beautiful harbour, where you can rent equipment for recreational crab fishing, past a cove where people are stripping down for a swim, a bird-watching spot where men in camo lie like snipers behind powerful telescopes, and on to Portland Castle, a gun fort built by Henry VIII as part of his divorce proceedings. The man who sells tickets at the castle is in a jovial mood because the Disney cruise ship that was due to dock nearby had to stay away because of high winds.

To the west, the coastal trail runs along a beach where a metal detectorist works, dragging his spade noisily behind him, past a storm-damaged resort and on to crumbling clifftops; and the loop back takes you to a dozen bright and cheerful little attractions: Sand World, a miniature railway, a piracy-themed mini-golf course, a midway, and something called "Sea Life", which has penguins and is divided into zones offering different kinds of quasi-educational sea-themed fun.

On a rainy September Sunday, the amusements are wrapped in nets and tarps, the pedal boats are chained up, the beach "chalets" are empty, and hungry gulls contemplate the empty beach with the insane outrage with which gulls contemplate everything. The lean season is starting for employees of creaky waterfront hotels and dicey chipperies, just as it did for their forebears when the last consumptive urchin of the summer reeled away from the Helter Skelter.

Tomorrow I go to Dartmoor, where I expect to be sucked into a bog.

Ronda and Cordoba

Ronda's old town features a famous bridge over a deep gorge, a bullring that regards itself as the birthplace of modern bullfighting, and a string of elegant parks overlooking the valley below and the misty ridges lined up beyond. Here, you can see the track leading back to Montejaque and reflect with awe on the superhumans who hike it. In the new town, rectangular blocks of asphalt and stained plaster house the grocery stores and parking garages that support the touristy appendix of the old.

The bullring, for a fee, will let you walk around in the great sand circle, look over the bull stalls and guillotine gates, and view exhibits on the history of bullfighting, freak survivor of the old bloodsports and lonely descendant of ancient rites. A bullfighting ring is the most alien place in Spain. It's also interesting to look over the matador outfits and contemplate radical changes to your personal style.

Unexpectedly, the bullring has an adjoining dressage ground, where a young woman with a squeaky saddle quacks in elegant ovals on a prancing black horse and large placards try to explain the sport to tourists who know it only from post-Olympics stand-up comedy routines.

I knew the Ronda train station as a gloomy place of heavy rain and anxiety, but it's actually a gloomy place of mild boredom with a surprisingly busy cafe. The monitors on the train, which is only moderately late, show a closed-captioned period drama about disabled children, and it's exciting to try to follow the plot based on the 40% of the dialogue I understand. At the time of arrival in Cordoba, things seem to have been going well, but it also may have all been a dream in the mind of a killer shark.

My place in Cordoba was a little apartment by the Guadalquivir -- a lazy, wide, olive river -- on a street that, like all the streets of Cordoba, is lined with orange trees heavy with fruit. The oranges are inedible, but you still want to furtively fill a sack and run off and find a use for them later. What a chance was lost when decorative oranges were chosen over sweet ones; this could have been a post-orange-scarcity society where people pluck fruit from the trees on their way to work. The apartment feels luxurious after the cramped shower stalls and narrow beds and confused multilingual check-in discussions of the village inns. I washed all my clothes, which were disgusting, used a microwave, and felt like an emperor.

Cordoba is a lively old place. The squares and the riverside restaurants that block the sidewalks with their patios are jammed not with tourists but with locals, and the plazas are filled with Christmas markets and giant Santa statues with Neanderthal faces.

The Roman bridge is the navel of Andalusian tourism. It's a graceful and striking thing itself, it very usefully lets you get across the river, it overlooks patches of trees and rushes popular with herons and ducks, and it's a variety show of tourist nonsense and local oddness. A keyboardist and an accordionist -- who arranged the Macarena for the accordion, and can anything be done to stop them? -- and a young man who just about knows how to juggle, vendors selling bouncing balls on strings, a group pasting poetry on the bollards and photographing themselves and hugging each other, and, on Sunday, groups of chanting soccer fans. Just off the far end, young women in llama-themed outfits stand in a circle and sing. The leading theory is that this is also possibly somehow soccer-related.

At the business end of the bridge is the Mezquita, the mosque-cathedral whose fields of striped columns are the city's most-photographed sight. They are enclosed by rows of Catholic shrines and themselves enclose a post-reconquest nave and grand altar lavishly built up in layers of different styles. There's a heavy smell of incense, tour guides chant explanations, a cleaning cart stands by the altar to remind viewers of photographs what tourist sites are really like, and a toddler screams for papa until everyone else wants to find her papa -- or any papa she might find acceptable -- just as badly. But it's all well worth putting up with.

The rest of the old town is a business of crenellated sandstone walls and towers and cobbled alleys, some that cars seem to clear by inches and some passable only by scooters. There are brown churches, huge wooden gates with human-sized doors cut out, palm trees, old buildings of pitted stone joined to modern ones of white plaster, and horse-drawn carriages for the convenience of lost 19th-century aristocrats and tourists who insist on the jerkiest and smelliest ways of getting about.

On Sunday, it's blindingly sunny and so hot that some Spanish men take off their puffy jackets. In the evening, the Christmas markets are alive, lit by spotlights, blinding as the daytime sun, that strike the Santas' brow ridges and cast their cannibal faces into shadow. There's a lively trade in cotton candy, children run around and go on gentle rides, a crowd sings and waves phone flashlights around a newly-married couple emerging from a church, and tour guides pedantically explain that Neanderthal Santa's cranial capacity was actually larger than those of modern Santas.

In the largest plazas, crowds mill around, possibly waiting for the carnies working behind barriers of striped tape to finish erecting midway rides. Sunday-night-stroll clothes are rather stylish and formal by North American standards. A young woman walks out of a grocery store wearing a gown and stole, and she is not overdressed. For men, a collared shirt seems to be the minimum acceptable, and only my age prevents me from being thought a ragamuffin.

The morning I left, there was applause coming from out in the street -- not for me, which was a relief, because I didn't feel I fully deserved it, but for runners in the Cordoba Marathon. How complicated would that make the walk to the train station? Only moderately, and I had a backup plan, anyway, which was to duck under the tape and pretend to be a runner in a stupid costume. The marathon and I took separate routes but met at intervals. There were patchy crowds all along the streets, cheering happily, except for a homeless man and his dog, who watched sourly from the bed they'd erected at the side of a usually-quiet street. Members of a marching band -- before their show, after their show, or having given up early on marching the marathon -- drifted with their instruments to cafes and viewpoints.

The two main points of interest about the train station were a woman in a tracksuit leaning out of her train to smoke while it was stopped -- a practice we'd learn more about on the way to Madrid -- and a dusty archaeological enclosure by the platforms, which was the site of Maximianus's palace. On the train itself, I had to kick out of my seat a woman who had spread makeup and brushes across the row and was working away with a handheld mirror. I'm sorry, but my preening is just as important as hers. The train bewildered us all by not just being on time in Cordoba, but by arriving early into Madrid.

Hiking in Andalucía

Madrid-Grazalema was a day of disasters alternating with narrow escapes from further disasters. It was a reminder of the importance of propitiating the travel gods before departure. It's understandable to be squeamish about this, but millions of chickens die every day for less important reasons.

The train was cancelled. After standing around in a ticket office holding a number, I booked another one via Cordoba. We got to Cordoba after the departure time of the connecting train, but that one was also late. When we pulled into Ronda in a rainstorm, half an hour late, I couldn't find the driver who was supposed to take me to Grazalema; but he popped up after some anxious texting. 

Finally, I discovered I'd left my plug adapter in Madrid, which would mean no GPS or camera and would leave it up to the outside world to find me should anything happen. Probably, an exhausted runner would appear one day to gasp out the news that someone I've never heard of has posted something I don't care about on LinkedIn. Grazalema is small, but after waiting out the siesta, I found a ferreteria ("ironmonger") who sold chargers. In triumphant relief, I charged all my devices, whether they needed it or not, and thought steep, whitewashed Grazalema, as its town sign says, uno de los pueblos mas bonitos de Espana.

Around Grazalema

The next day was a circular route: to the top of the village, past a construction zone proudly funded by a Programa de Fomento de Empleo Agrario, then down the street and around some road works where more agrarian employment was being fomented, and finally off into the mountains.

The mountains are wrinkled, blinding white, clung to by gnarled conifers, and circled by soaring griffon vultures, and the passes and pastures they enclose are covered in loose white rock. A sign somewhere claims that people once somehow raised crops here, but now the land supports nothing but  sheep, and those of the least discerning kind. Some rough stone walls support corrugated metal roofs, and from one of these a dog barks at me, angrily but with a note of puzzlement: clearly a sheep rustler, but where's his black cowboy hat? 

There are steep and windswept paths you sweat up in a t-shirt and shiver down in a hoodie and toque and quiet bowls of grass with eroded limestone blocks like abandoned experimental sculptures or the toppled columns of some weird civilization. These are eerie places where it's easy to imagine cowled villagers gathering at standing stones to sacrifice for a good tourist season.

Grazalema to Benaocaz

The next morning, a puzzle. I wanted to label my luggage for transfer. A team effort involving the hotel staff and some extremely questionable Spanish -- I won't say whose -- finally produced a row of tiny sticky labels that immediately fell off. I borrowed clear tape, which also fell off, so I wedged the whole mess into a zipper and left. I don't look for pity; I know others have suffered more than I from Andalusia's adhesives crisis.

On a quiet path I met two old women and three dogs, which ran up and barked. Why are Spanish dogs never happy to see me? The first climb is a little one to an outcropping where a group of ibex graze unconcernedly while their young scamper and their designated watchman eyes me warily. The much longer climb leads to a stony col where there are flat rocks to rest on. A jogger who has just come up this brutal climb trots past, asks if I'm okay, switches to English, praises the view, and says a cheery goodbye, all without stopping or letting his heart rate fall below 400.

Wind rips across the pass and the trail edges along jagged, crumbling peaks before going through a rusty wire gate bearing a variety of unfriendly signs and entering what the route description calls "an open area" where "route finding is difficult". It advises you to look for a blue marker on a rock and then pass between two trees. There are many trees and many million rocks. There are cairns, which is nice, but which trail do they mark, and when were they built? Maybe this whole region was home to a neolithic people known as the "Rock-Stacking Culture".

There's a ruined farmhouse with two surviving walls, one of them cracked up the middle with both halves resting on a chock-stone or two, and then small mountain streams to cross and old stone walls to pass through, and then cow pastures where the track turns muddy, because cows make a mess of everything. The next novelty is an enclosed field with a single pig so enormous I thought at first that it was a bull. I've never had dealings with pigs before, but I seem to have the knack, because it didn't kill me.

Most of the villages start as a bright white gleam in the distance, but you come down into Benaocaz suddenly. It lies up against the base of a cliff, and its very top layer is one of brick ruins and cobbled streets, the "Nazarene quarter" from the Arab period and after. Some buildings have been made habitable again with a few bricks and a lick of paint, of others only part of a wall survives. Andalusia has a lot to offer ruin-lovers: long-abandoned homes, decayed farms, and stone walls that peter out or slump into loose piles of stone. It's sometimes hard to understand the purpose of the stone walls. I think some of them may have been built out of boredom.

"Welcome, hikers!"

Around Benaocaz

The inn is on the far side of the village, above a very busy restaurant staffed by servers in blue uniforms. The room has raftered ceilings and is bare, white, and scrupulously clean, with an iron headboard that clangs like a gong when you lean against it and a heater that begins making loud rattling noises promptly each night at 3AM.

There is one food store in Benaocaz, and that is Juan's: an unmarked door opening onto a counter with room for one person to stand in front of it. It's less like a shopping in a supermarket than opening a kitchen cupboard to find a helpful Spanish man inside. Juan's reopening after siesta is an event people turn out for, and there's a lot of pressure when your turn comes. But what Juan lacks in space he makes up for in genial efficiency.

Benaocaz seems like a happy village. On weekend afternoons, people sit on restaurant patios to talk loudly and wait for Juan's to open, or lean on standing tables outside tiny cafes to chuckle amiably. The doors of many homes stand open, and friendly collarless cats make their rounds, checking that everything is as it should be.

I was two nights in Benaocaz, so there was a day for hikes around the town. The one to the Ojo de Moro goes all the way down the slope, past the bins for old clothes and the snack truck parked for the season, into the unmowed grass by a traffic circle, through one of Andalusia's broken wire gates, which, like all the others, creaks like the door to a vampire's castle, past a sheep pen with angry and mistrustful dogs, along rocky paths, over an ancient stone arch bridge, and up a slope to a sign that says 'Fin de Sendero'. This is the Scenic Spot, a place where griffon vultures breed and, when not breeding, soar overhead in their dozens waiting patiently for something to die. The designated scenic spots are often not much more scenic than all the other spots, but this is because most of the region is scenic.

That took only half a day, so I went down to the restaurant for a traditional Andalusian meal of fried rice served on a roof tile and then picked a dashed line on my GPS app to follow. This ran long more steep dirt tracks and past stretches of tormented wild olive trees. At the end of it, I found the Scenic Spot firmly in the possession of a herd of cows, but I outflanked them by climbing onto the deeply-eroded limestone ridge alongside and caught a glimpse or two of what may have been a scenic river.

Benaocaz to Montejaque 

Breakfast was two pieces of toasted bread, fruit, tomatoes, yogurt, roughly a pound of cheese, cake, and a ramekin of something like chocolate icing. I've resisted the hype about the "Mediterranean diet" for too long. It has a lot to recommend it.

There's a long uphill drag into the sun on a quiet concrete road. A flock of sheep have wandered onto it and an ancient shepherd courteously waves it off to the side; so much like a tourism commercial that you have to wonder if he's some sort of plant. Then a forest or plantation of Holm oaks where free-running pigs gorge on acorns and a gate that leads into a surprising flat valley.

Here, a very friendly dog, restoring the average of all Spanish dogs, came over to say hello, putting paws on me and licking my arm devotedly. I wondered if he would follow me, but he didn't. He knew his duty, and it was to stay by the gate, greet visitors, and redeem the reputation of the dogs of Spain. In my view, he is a good boy. 

The track turns off gravel and onto dirt, which is a relief, until it turns to mud and you remember how great gravel is. A sharp right takes you up into endless switchbacks up the high wall of the valley. Someone did take a lot of trouble over these trails, if not over the marking of them. Then there's a more level stroll over another field of limestone chunks and then steeply up and then a plunge down into a newly-planted orchard at one end of the green valley. Beyond that is a soggy cow pasture scored by a thousand tiny streams. Staying to the left, where the ground is higher and the cows farther away, there's one of the region's many low, roofless stone shelters, a good place to withstand a siege should the cows attack. These are incongruous places, these blessed little fertile valleys in the dry, wrinkled mountains.

Through the gate that exits the cows' pasture are empty fields with regular piles of stone, as though someone has been very gradually clearing them by mounding up the loose rock. This is a project that might have been going on for millennia. It's not clear that the rate of rock-piling exceeds the rate at which new rocks tumble down from the mountains.

At the end of the valley is a flock of sheep and then a gravel road that leads down into barren country. Here, there's a rare human encounter: an official-looking vehicle pulls up ahead, a woman gets out holding her phone up in front of her as though recording video, walks straight towards me, says hello as she passes, slips on the gravel, falls over, says she's okay, and gets back in her car and drives off. She was the first person I'd seen all day, and it may have been a rare chance for her to record a hiker.

More rocky fields, with rock walls piled up to separate one field of rocks from the next, and wire fences sometimes running alongside to underline the point. Whoever owns these rocks, they don't want there to be any doubt about it. There are more informational plaques, mostly about birds and karst. There are a lot about karst. The authorities have bet heavily on karst tourism, and I'm not saying it won't pay off.

From here there is a very long road of white gravel that leads eventually to Montejaque. Once past the livestock, it's completely still. Close to the village, a car goes by, and then there's a woman sitting by the side of the road frowning at her hands, and then nothing at all for another hour. This is a very, very quiet part of the world.

Montejaque, too, is empty and still, as though the inhabitants have fled some danger you haven't heard about or it was built for an atomic bomb test. This is partly because I arrived during siesta; in fact, at least seven people live here. But it's very different from the merry, crowded restaurants of Benaocaz.

Around Montejaque

The inn is run by a lovely old woman, and staying in it feels like visiting someone's grandmother. I hadn't planned anything particularly depraved, but you still feel constrained by the dainty touches and by walking past the proprietress watching TV and waving cheerily when you come in or go out. Keith Moon would have spent a quiet night here and made the bed when he left. The building is also slightly askew, so that the doors, old paired ones with ancient locks and enormous keys, wedge shut rather than close. It's dark, with only a few dim yellow lights, and the sink is a ceramic bowl with a curtain below to conceal the plumbing and, less successfully, the fact that it leaks.

Breakfast is the customary thousand calories of dairy fat, and then the question, as for all visitors to Montejaque, is which cave to go to. Montejaque has a "speleology centre" and a heavily cave-based economy. It lies within walking distance of several, but most sound silly. The Cueva del Hundidero seems like the pick of them.

The walk sounded bleak, and it is. It runs not on the gravel track I arrived on, but along the main road. There are a few old men shuffling along the roadside, some with sticks and some with their hands behind their backs. It's a route that maintains both fitness and alertness, because the shoulders are narrow. There are no other walkers on the next stretch, which is long, curvy, steep, shoulderless, and full of blind corners. Google and a GPS app estimated 40 minutes for the walk, but I think that may have been a life expectancy. Even though the passage of a car is an event that happens every five minutes or so, it is not a terrific route for pedestrians.

You also do not simply rock up and stroll into the Cueva del Hundidero. You squeeze down a dirt path to a larger gravel one and come eventually to a fork with cryptic signs. One way leads through a creaky gate, over the top of a charming but singularly unsuccessful dam (the karst around it is, it turned out, leaky), along the cliff face, and then turns into a via ferrata. The other goes down via essentially infinite stone steps to the bottom of the gorge, where a sign halfheartedly tries to convince you that you are at the 'fin de sendero'. But the path goes on to the cave entrance, a looming fissure 50m high leading into a cathedral-like space. If it were less clammy, it could be a gateway to the underworld.

The cave offers fluttering bats, dripping water, slick rocks, moaning echoes with no obvious source, and light fading to absolute blackness. I get to use my headlamp, which I brought partly in case I get caught out after dark, but mostly because I think it's neat. The cave goes on to link up with other caves in a vast network, but it seems smart to stop a couple of hundred metres in. Maybe I was still on a dairy high, but it seemed like a fantastic cave. Whether you're a paleolithic kin group or a hiker who makes strange decisions, it has everything you might want. Karst: it truly is amazing.

All the dread of re-ascent I felt on the way down was amply justified.

Up at the top of Montejaque, where I went after a long rest, is a 'karst garden' with a cat colony, many choice pieces of karst, two picnic tables, sweeping views of the town, and a couple of odd fenced-off shanties, from one of which faint hammering sounds come. The slab of rock above is deeply fissured, like a dirty stone glacier poised to crush the village to dust. A bilingual informational plaque says, in a phrase I probably would have used if I'd thought of it, that the karst has a "ruiniform aspect". Quite a few properties up here have 'se vende' signs, usually with German and English translations. On the way down, two middle-aged Englishmen are trying to load a large wall unit into a small car. "Maybe come up at your end. It's a big bastard."

Montejaque to Ronda

The last stage goes to Ronda, and it starts with a cobblestone road that would be charming if it weren't canted up at 30 degrees. You can't help but have occasional thoughts about how the route could be improved. "This would be a good place for a sidewalk." "This would be a good mountain to blast a tunnel through." This section, at least, is part of a well-marked trail, so is easy to follow.

At the top of the ridge is a small "hermitage" built to commemorate the end of a 17th century plague. The vultures have found a juicy thermal here, and are patrolling in large numbers. It's tempting to lie still and try to lure them in, but it was probably cruel enough panting up the switchbacks like a dying animal.

Along the dirt path is another reassuring marker about the plague definitely being over and an almost overwhelmingly impressive collection of overturned bathtubs. A grumpy-looking hiker with a wrist cast, the only one I see today, stumps up towards the pass. The route goes along wide dirt roads that my tracker's eye tells me are much-used by tractors. Along the ridge are more serene flights of vultures. It's hard to understand how they do enough business to survive in such numbers. The cliffs behind are dirty gray streaked with orange, and the November Andalusian sun is at a low angle but blindingly bright.

The route swings along a little river and begins to smell of sheep manure. You don't smell the free-grazing livestock in the mountain valleys swept by sanitizing breezes, but here animals are concentrated in pens. Every property also has guard dogs who start barking while you're still well out and are still yelping triumphantly at your retreating back when you're well past. Next, there's a ruined building full of tires and sheep droppings, with the graffiti that is the clearest sign that a city is near. 

Sloping up yet another ridge past another sheep farm, there is a loose dog. Fortunately, it's the size of a kitten and just sits nonchalantly until I'm well up the road, when it starts barking after me as though it had heroically chased me off, possibly so it wouldn't be left out when the other dogs were swapping yarns about how they protected their sheep and tire piles from a sinister biped in dirty trousers.

There's a forest up on the ridge with some stone ruins, and then you're looking down into a rich, orderly valley of orchards and fields. The road plummets down into it and then winds fair-mindedly among all the properties. There's a riding school, an orchard where chainsaws ring out cheerfully and are answered by more chainsaws across the valley, and another orchard with a sign rather overselling a "dangerous dog" that's napping peacefully in the sunshine. 

You can see Ronda glimmering whitely at the edge of a distressingly huge cliff up ahead, and there's a roadside shrine labeled "Property of the Gardeners" where I eat a messy lunch while an olive-tree pruner of the old, pre-chainsaw school snip-snips with shears nearby. Further on, a thoughtful homeowner has set out a chair and table by the path, with prayer flags and a sign that says, in English, "have a little rest". 

Finally, there's the long climb up to Ronda, past its famous arched bridge and up cobbled footpaths where other tourists appear in ones and twos and then in multitudes. The old town itself buzzes with tour groups. Harpists play Enya when you sit down to rest, and people drift by with ice cream and block sidewalks to take pictures and dance deranged comic jigs next to accordionists.