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 descendent 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.

Madrid

Instead of the comfortable lobby and early check-in I'd been daydreaming of, the hostal was an inconspicuous buzzer that no one answered, so my luggage and I wandered around central Madrid until check-in time. It was bright and noisy and full of charm, and there was a street performer dressed as a shrub, or some kind of Christmas sniper, who stood still for long periods and then jumped at people to startle them. This set an impossible standard for Madrid's other buskers, and, rather than trying to meet it, they mostly just stood around in elaborate animal costumes. Busking used to be a skilled trade. If I were dressed as a gorilla, I like to think I'd at least stage fights with people in other costumes.

The hotel, when I got into it, was a floor or two of a grand old building with a squirrelly little stairwell elevator. The room was nice enough, and the plumbing made sneezing noises at random intervals, which was very exciting. It was in the middle of Gran Via. At one end of this busy and historic street is the Plaza de Cibele, a traffic circle surrounding a statue of Cybele in a lion-drawn chariot that would be no less stuck should she come to life: Madrid drivers aren't going to let you merge just because you're a holy mystery of the ancient world. Cybele and her lions would take the metro, where they would attract no particular notice.

Another point of interest was the Tim Hortons "Canadian Coffee House" across the street. Open-minded Madrilenos were visible inside giving it a cautious try. Will Tim Hortons coffee culture be the next global sensation? People have been duped into wearing plaid flannel before, and the new generation knows nothing of grunge. 

Its unique eating hours make Madrid a fine city for the jet-lagged. Your random wakings might put you on a delicious schedule. You might even make some anthropological discovery by surprising everyone having high tea at 3 AM on a Tuesday. However, the language spoken here is nothing like the one I once tried to learn. That was a simple tongue for describing library locations and the properties of objects, while this one runs wildly off in all directions. I arrived primed to talk about what colour the hat is, and it simply didn't come up.

I saw sights. The palace is a vast and graceful block, closed when I visited for some official function on which incredibly slow motorcades were converging. A small crowd of tourists nevertheless lingered across the street, hopeful of some sort of spectacle. Maybe there would be a changing of the guard, or the king would come out and wrestle a bear. Pushing along past the ornamental garden lined with statues of past monarchs leads to a convent and a little square with a large wire sphere covered in lights. If I understood the conversations of passersby correctly, motorcyclists dressed as Santa and Jesus will drive into it and whirr around and around, eventually colliding in an explosion of new religions.

One of the unexpected things in Madrid is just beyond: a small Egyptian temple, donated by Egypt when it needed help saving important sites from flooding and found it had more temples than friends. The temple of Debod is not hugely important, but its history is strange, and there is always something going on there. For example, a man doing one-armed handstands beside it, probably after being kicked out of the nearby yoga group for being a showoff. Admittedly, I may just be jealous because no one follows the Instagram account where I do shaky tripod headstands in mundane settings. 

There is a guard at the Temple of Debod, and he is an unhappy man. He has to keep tourists off the grounds and has nothing but a whistle with which to do so. One couple ignored all his whistle blasts and shouts and then actually came closer to get some more selfies with him glowering helplessly in the background. If he were properly equipped, he could have pepper sprayed them. Or do they need to hire a falconer, like an airport? "Go, Windlord!" and the tourists would cover their heads and scatter in terror.

Walking in Madrid is perfectly pleasant. Drivers are not patient, but they are fair, and there are hardly any signs of the civilizational collapse that the combination of e-bikes and food delivery apps has triggered elsewhere. Cyclists are rare, except for the Dutch tour groups that sweep happily around and around the few safe paths that exist as if in some commuter-bike criterium.

Niche museums abound. If Madrid needed half a dozen dedicated to ham, that need has been met. Really, there's no reason for any ham enthusiast, no matter what ham-making discipline or form or aspect of ham particularly interests them, to leave Spain disappointed.

And there are the other museums. I visited the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and can reveal that they have many nice paintings.

Walking Hadrian's Wall

Day 1: Wallsend to Heddon-on-the-Wall (28km)
In the morning, discovered that Pennine Express had sent me two emails. The first said that my 11:50 train was cancelled and the other asked "how did we do" on my previous trip with them, which had also been cancelled. The one train still running was at 10:54, and I stepped aboard at about 10:53:35, having made things exciting by getting confused about everything it was possible to get confused about: where the station was (where the map says it is), whether my ticket would be valid (it was), why the machines weren't letting me collect my ticket (I already had it), and how the ticket-scanning pass-gate worked (in the way you'd expect).

The trail starts from Segedunum, a Roman fort in the mildly depressed and tedious-to-reach Newcastle suburb of Wallsend. I was in a carpeted suburban B&B containing a full-sized horse sculpture and a lot of shiny Roman bric-a-brac run by a man who was friendly and generous with his views on what was wrong with the country. Getting to the beginning of the walk added 1.5km. I didn't love adding anything to the distance, but also worried that Pennine Express might find a way to cancel the bus.

The path follows quiet asphalt trails along the Tyne, past informational plaques about the tar and lead works formerly located along here, warning plaques about tar and lead contamination, and people cheerfully fishing from the bank, and then plunges you into a busy tourist market in central Newcastle, where you suddenly have to weave through a crowd of people carrying iced lattes and resist the offers of "real Welsh gypsies" to help you understand your future. A couple of junkyards with wrecked cars rising over their walls, the skeleton of a river boat half buried in mud, gulls, cyclists, and an ill-advised detour to the M&S in the train station -- it's so temptingly close to the path, but the rise is steep and the route winding and the station entrance in the wrong place altogether.

You don't see countryside until near the end of the day, and then you're shunted onto a strange path through a golf course and make a sharp push uphill towards Heddon-on-the-Wall, which is finally reached through a gauntlet of closed gates and barking dogs. Directed by a local who'd come out to reassure me that her furiously-barking dog just wanted to play, I found the farm, a nice stone one, and let myself in through the gate. After calling a number posted on a wall, a woman appeared and said "sorry for the mess, I was just moving some cows".

On this day, I set a personal best for the half-marathon, depending on what levels of ibuprofen and caffeine are allowable, of just under six hours. I think I can get that down to 5h30m by reducing lunch to two courses. It was gruelling, but you do get a pleasant sense of accomplishment from a long day of walking, even though the world would be much the same if you'd stayed home and hit your feet with a hammer.

Day 2: Heddon-on-the-Wall to Chollerford (26km)
Stores and pubs along Hadrian's wall are to you what wells and oases are to the Bedouin. The first business of day 2 was therefore to detour to a gas station Spar and do a very carefully-considered shop. I could have been more scientific about nutrition, but I think I got the amount of junk food I could reasonably carry about right.

Today's path runs along farmers' walls through green tunnels of bent-over trees, and is soggy after rain the night before. After a heavy one, you'd want waterproof boots, or, ideally, a fan boat. There are swarms of tiny flies; not the kind that bites, but the kind that needs to annoy someone before it can lay its eggs. A pair of walkers in front is making smart decisions, and I follow their lead by taking the road for a while rather than squelching through the muddiest fields. This is the Military Road, which the English built in the 1740s to move forces around to deal with Jacobites. For this, they turned to the handiest source of stone, and so the wall isn't much in evidence; you're walking on more of it than you can see.

As the trail works its way into pastures -- it's a public footpath on farmers' land, and you're constantly opening and closing gates and climbing over stiles -- you start sharing it with animals. Up ahead, there was a pair of gates to cross the neck of a field, and a white horse charged over to the gate when it saw me coming. I took a picture of it so it would be the last one on my phone should anything happen. It was friendly enough as I eased into the field, but tried to charge through the other gate as I opened it, forcing me to spring through and latch it hastily. Then it stood around trying to look like it never wanted to come through the gate, anyway. A woman was coming along in the other direction, and I pointed back to the horses and warned her to look out for the nonchalant one. That's how it gets you. You think it's not even paying attention, and then bam, it's through the gate and on the run, and then you see its face on the news because it's wanted on six continents -- nothing in Europe, oddly, but it has a bigamy charge at the South Pole Station.

All the other horses were perfectly indifferent, while the sheep are interested in you mostly as a spectacle. If you got too close, they'd bound clumsily away. Otherwise, they'd stare a bit, and then lower their heads to the lush grass again, their strange eyes rolling back in the ecstasy of the gourmand. I'm not in touch with the rhythms of the countryside, but it turned out that May is lambing season. The lambs were very vocal, exchanging regular baas with their mothers. Are you there / yes I'm here / are you there / yes I'm here / are you there / no, I've joined the navy and shipped out on a guided missile frigate.

The one tricky entry in the short Cumbrian bestiary is the cow. They can be unfriendly, and there's something inglorious about getting savaged by one. Your dying words would be "tell my family... it was a bear". None of them kicked me, but I made no lasting friends among them, either. Some were vaguely hostile, especially when the path led into their midst and they'd spread themselves across the width of the dry ground, leaving you no alternative but to walk through the herd. I know very little about putting cows at their ease. I tried talking to them, but one pawed the earth. I have heard that they like jazz, in case that helps anyone. Cow starts charging, you crank Kind of Blue, it stops and cocks its head, and soon you're riding it comfortably to the next town while enjoying a glass of fresh milk. I can't guarantee that this would work, but it does feel pretty ironclad.

The trail hugs the edges of most fields, but cuts diagonally across a couple of rising ones, providing views of some glorious countryside. Then there's a surprising tree plantation -- a field of young trees and another of stumps and mud -- and then, because the topography doesn't allow for a steep climb at the end of the day, you finish up with a grim walk along the side side of a busy road and then cross the Tyne, find the hotel, and curse the long walk from reception to your bed.

This day was 26km, and if it had been, say, 5km shorter, that would have been just fine. I was surprised when I shook out my shoes at the end of the day, because I was sure I'd lost a couple of toes. This route tests the limits -- not quite of human endurance, but of what your casual middle-aged walker wants to deal with.

 
Day 3: Chollerford to Steel Rigg (21km)
On a rainy day three, the route climbs up into misty moors and rocky pastures and past silent stone farmhouses circled by cawing crows. You could set three Gothic novels per kilometer of path along here. The wall appears and disappears, replaced by straggling farmers' walls made of suspiciously similar stone. The wall isn't really gone, it's just been reorganized. This is better than the Military Road, whose builders are responsible for at least two problems with the earlier part of the route: the lack of an actual wall and the presence of a busy road alongside.

You pass through a Roman fort, of which little is left, though there is a Mithraeum, surrounded by a wire fence but sporting tufts of fleece where sheep have sneaked through a gap to have a scratch against the ancient stones. The sheep snooze all over the vanished fort; real Ozymandias stuff. The great attraction for the walker is a man in the parking lot selling coffee and muffins. You hand him £1.50 and he conjures a little muffin from his van's dark interior and says "lovely".

The countryside is so stunning that it's hard to place your feet carefully, which you need to do because no one has been picking up after the sheep. It's hilly and dramatic, the sky broods mysteriously over the isolated stone farmhouses, and the wall snakes unbroken into the distance. There must have been less demand for stone in this remote country, and a 19th century antiquarian managed to buy up sections to save them. Late in the day comes the Sycamore Gap, where a famous tree stood until it was mysteriously cut down a few years ago, prompting a well-covered outburst of public emotion. When I tell you that the sycamore was a former Tree of the Year, you'll understand how serious the matter is. The stump is fenced off now, and various sources hold out hope that it will re-grow, but caution that it will take time, in case you were thinking of coming back later in the day.

The arrangement tonight was to call the hotel for a ride down from the trail. The innkeeper apologized for coming in a Kia and talked about plumbing and how much money there is in sheep farming (none). Hope is being placed in tourism, instead, and he points out an enormous new youth hostel and attached visitor's centre. Whether there's money in youth hostels is unclear; the average age of wall-walkers seems to be around 55. Maybe the place swarms with youth during the summer; or maybe, as the innkeeper in Wallsend would lament, kids just aren't interested in walls anymore.

The inn is in Bardon Mill, a little village with defunct mills, a salt glazing kiln that they say the last of its kind in the UK  -- we're so close to wiping out salt glazing altogether, why can't we close the deal? -- and a little shop that sells toasties and junk food. I turn up to the shop more or less intending to clean it out. "All right, put everything in the sack. I'm going to pay for it, the sack is just more convenient."

Day 4: Steel Rigg to Walton (28km)
At breakfast, a TV news program is airing an update on the case against two men charged with cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree. It shows them hunching away from a courthouse with their faces covered. Media coverage has been heavy and the investigation intense. The tree was expertly cut down during a late-night thunderstorm which, as in a mystery novel, prevented the nearest neighbours from hearing the chainsaw. The tree autopsy revealed that the cause of death was being cut down. DNA tests showed that it was unequivocally a tree. Celebrated amateur detectives ruled out its being left-handed, a Freemason, or having traveled recently in the Far East. Motive is unclear, but may be connected to hooliganism by Tree-of-the-Year contest "ultras".

The land is flattening out and the isolated grey farmhouses giving way to red-brick villages. There are lichenous village churches on mounds with yards of weathered tombstones that have been gradually falling over for two hundred years, village greens, and a shelf of books in a bus shelter serving as a local library. One village has a row of plaques awarded for victory in a Village of the Year contest (hamlet division). It had a great run until 2014, and then they ran out of room on the wall, the award ceased to be awarded, or the village couldn't compete with one that's dominated the league since being bought by a Gulf billionaire.

You crunch up to an old quarry on a gravel path and find it's been turned into a public park -- the quarry is now a shining little lake, though the signs tell you not to swim in it -- and that there's a class of children there, who seem as much at a loss as I am to understand why they'd taken a field trip to a quarry. However, there are picnic tables and a little visitor centre with food and coffee, making the quarry an important attraction for wall-walkers. You wish for more quarries. Next is one of a few museums along the path. I'd promised the publican I'd look at it, and its cafe was extremely interesting. I skipped the rest. At this point, I wouldn't have gone out of my way for the lost city of gold.

The trail runs through more sheep pastures and up to and around Thirlwall Castle, a crumbling mound-top 14th century fortified home that Wikipedia says "fell into decay" after 1748 and has been decaying aggressively ever since. It's a modest place by castle standards, good mostly for sheltering from raiders and whatever else was going on outside -- and, really, most of the 14th century would have been worth sitting out -- but it's your only chance to poke around one, and, if you like, "imagine the scenes" that the plaques nearby invite you to imagine. Down country lanes, more emerald pastures where sheep spray-painted with numbers graze industriously, hills, sections of wall, and the foundations of its regularly-spaced watchtowers and mini-forts.

The hotel for the night is a grand Victorian house with black and white photos along the stairs, plaques describing service in the wars, cooking smells, and a parlour where Edwardian detectives would gather the suspects to gradually unmask the killer. The parlour is decorated with horse pictures, my room with rabbit knickknacks -- a rabbit coat hook, a rabbit lamp, a framed drawing of a rabbit in a coat smoking a long pipe. On the opposite wall is one of a dog wearing clothes, but even here there are ghostly rabbits in the background, possibly former victims preparing to drag the dog down to hell. There is also a bumblebee bedspread, the incongruity of which feels like the key to some mystery. Where is the rabbit bedspread? Could it be in the village pond, wrapped around the murder weapon?

Outside, chickens strut and rescued horses stand around shaking their heads. A mantel clock ticks loudly, and downstairs a grandfather clock booms the hours. Under the glass of the table is the wifi password, which follows the general rule that, the smaller and more remote the hotel, the more paranoiacally long and complex is the wifi key. Only thus can the family scone recipe be safeguarded from cybercriminals. Centred on a small plate by the bed is a single apple. I would have been expected to toss it in the air a couple of times, shine it on my waistcoat, and crunch into it while peering out at the horses, but I just didn't feel up to it.

The operation is run by a mother and daughter, with some little children also running about, unless they're the ghosts of Victorian children taken by scarlet fever, and the martial arts gis and trampolining make that feel less likely. They're lovely people, really, the food is good, the house is comfortable, and the anachronistic oddness of the place is pretty glorious.

 

Day 5: Walton to Carlisle (19km)
It was raining when the hotelier dropped me off at the trail in Walton. I exchanged nice-day-ha-has with an elderly couple draping themselves in rain gear and hobbled off across flat and uninteresting sheep pastures where mosquitoes rise from the wet grass as you swish along. The farms are larger here, the wall is gone again, and the sheep have little new to offer the non-specialist. It's a short and easy stage, which is for the best. Getting towards Carlisle, I ate a strange lunch of leftover snacks in a freshly-mown field in the shadow of an electricity pylon and got up so painfully that the crows started to take an interest.

Closer to Carlisle is an honour-system snack shack, where you pick up what you want and leave money in the "honesty box". There are several of these along the trail. This is the least heartwarming of them, as it's festooned with video surveillance signs: steal a bag of chips and your image goes straight to the Interpol snack-bandit database. The nicest of the shacks is back in the countryside. It offers encouraging messages, fresh-baked flapjacks (oat bars), eggs, blister kits, and gear-repair tools dangling on strings.

Back among the farms, a horse named Paddy nods hello from his stall, but then there's the most sinister herd of cows I've come across yet. As I circle around, a few detach themselves and stare. Every time I look back, they're closer, but in the end they're satisfied with having chased me off. The beautiful brick barn beyond their field has a huge sheet-metal annex with an enormous hole torn in the side, possibly crashed through by some uncontainable monster cow bred by mad agricultural scientists, or, and this is much more common, perfectly rational scientists chasing funding from a mad granting agency. There are also rows of glamping pods here and there.

The trail links up with paths leading through Carlisle's Rickerby Park, where you're close enough to the city that you need to stop saying "hi" to strangers. It's easy to mis-time this, like walking around with an umbrella after the rain has stopped. This might be how I fell into conversation with a gloomy man in the parking lot who had been told a certain restaurant was in the area, and still wanted my help even after my words, accent, and air of haplessness should have shown I wouldn't be much use. We enjoy a few minutes with Google Maps together, but even then the most I can do is to point him to a probable tea house. As I walk away, I hear him asking the next passerby. He may have been a spirit doomed to walk the earth until he finds the restaurant he left unfound in life. Alternatively, he may have been corporeal but really bad at finding things. There's no way to be sure.

There's a cenotaph in the park, surrounded by benches and so a good place for a long rest before tackling the fifteen minute walk to the hotel. It's a WWI memorial with a little plaque bolted on to expand coverage to WWII and, rather cleverly indemnifying the city against any further monument-building, "subsequent conflicts". There was a great boom in monuments in the years after 1918, followed by a bust that never ended. Limping further on, you come to a wedge of park full of camper vans and small motor homes, and I still don't know whether their occupants are homeless, protesting, lost, or on vacation.

My room in Carlisle is in a stretch of row houses cheaply renovated into a business hotel back in the early 2000s, or whenever people thought half-partitioned showers and touch-activated mirror lights were cool. It's on the wrong side of the river for the castle, cathedral, and downtown area, but is across the street from a fertility clinic for dogs.

Day 6: Carlisle to Bowness-on-Solway (26km)

You leave Carlisle on pleasant-enough riverside paths and come out into country roads connecting beautiful little villages. The five institutions of the English village are the medieval church, the green, the Parish hall, the notice board, and the defibrillator. The notice boards publicize minutes of the last council meeting and hold announcements about yoga, lawn bowling, movie screenings, plant sales to raise funds for gardening societies, and, in one modern Gomorrah, a bingo night. The defibrillators are colourful and prominent landmarks, if a bit dubious as a public health measure. "Meet me at the defibrillator," people say, probably.

One church has local fame as the place Henry I lay in state after dying on his way to fight the Scots. There's a memorial off the trail, but detours off the trail are unthinkable at this stage. I do talk to someone later who went to have a look, but, after walking a mile, was chased away from it by a cow. "I tried to wave it off, but it was 'aving none of it." I also run into a couple I'd walked with briefly two days before, and we exchange stories about the white horse that tries to rush through gates. Wherever that horse is now, I wish it well.

The cow story was neatly timed, because the path along the Solway gives you the choice of a high-speed road and a grassy, tree-lined embankment, but the embankment is a narrow one grazed here and there by cows. I climb down it to avoid tangling with them, and then an older woman coming the other way brushes them casually out of her path. How did she acquire this quiet authority with cows? What do I have to do to earn their respect? The herd decides, in that mysterious collective way it has, to cross the road, and I have to rush across a cattle grid to avoid being cut off, but then can turn and enjoy getting stink-eyed by each animal in turn. From then on, there are only sheep, which run from anything that moves and some things that don't. It's in the company of sheep that I feel most confident.

Bowness-on-Solway is at the mouth of the Eden, strung along some of the most impressive mud flats you will ever see. Once a fishing and smuggling town, it's now a place of pilgrimage for wall nerds and estuary enthusiasts. The whole area around and north of the wall was an unsettled no-man's-land until the 1707 union, so the oldest buildings date from just after the last time it was destroyed, and there are great fortified farmhouses in the outlying area. The town is dotted with plaques describing the raids and the drownings and suckings into mud flats that plagued men escaping across the Solway with their new cows.

The trail ends at a tiny shelter with an approving image of Hadrian, a bench, and a congratulatory message in English and Latin. Here, you can mill around with other people celebrating their completion of the walk, like attending a dusty and strikingly unsuccessful cocktail party. I take pictures of another group for them and one of those end-of-trail selfies where the sun is glaring and your mouth is hanging open stupidly. In later years, I will look at it and fondly remember what a terrible photographer I was.

The B&B is a new white building joined to a decayed stone house and a brick chicken coop. Removing the bandages from my toes is a grisly business, like unwrapping a row of mummies. In the morning, muddy chickens huddle against the building, the rooster making himself irresistible to the hens by crowing derangedly every few seconds. There's a crowd of us waiting to catch the bus back to Carlisle, and we talk about the trail and contemplate the wads of feathers in the street, evidence of a titanic overnight rooster clash, unfortunately survived by the combatants, who continue to crow triumphantly.

The bus is jammed with walkers, and when we stop at tiny places here and there for elderly villagers, each more ancient than the last, the walkers at the front rise one at a time to surrender their seats. There are two buses a day to Carlisle, and if you miss those, you have to work your passage on a coastal barge, for example, by managing its social media accounts. Raising the profile of barging, networking with other barges, inventing barge-related hashtags, it wouldn't be so bad. "If you walked on gravel today, thank a bargeman #largebarge #nokeel #bargelife." In Carlisle, I decide there's no time to see the sights, and wait instead in the train station, where I spot a trainspotter and tick "flat cap-wearing tripod-user" off my list. Then it's just a question of politely kicking an ear-gauged teen and his goth girlfriend out of my seat on the train and I'm in Glasgow.

In George Square, a stately public space beautified by statues of notable Scotsmen, Celtic fans with a boombox compete with a preacher and someone timidly picking out 'Wonderwall' on an acoustic guitar, all three oblivious to the many people trying to will them out of existence. The proper place for them is not the square but the street, where people only have to tolerate Jesus, soccer fandom, and Oasis for a few seconds before passing out of earshot. Celtic have just won the league, and increasing numbers of increasingly shirtless fans are drifting down Argyle street. A very drunk teen in lime green holding a bag of groceries has seized the mic from a busker and is gamely trying to sing Jailhouse Rock despite only knowing about 30% of the lyrics. That's the spirit that won Celtic the title. Actually, the spirit that won Celtic the title was probably more of a lyric-knowing spirit.

In the very early morning, the bus to Edinburgh airport and the trip home.