Great Millennium Circle
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Great Millennium Circle A walk on the mild side Robert McCaffrey PRo Publications International Elise House, 6B East Street, Epsom, Surrey, KT17 IHH Private printing - 40 copies. Copy number________ Copyright © Robert McCaffrey 2000 All rights reserved The moral right of Robert McCaffrey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted. Set in Bookman 10pt. Printed by Pat and Sue Casbon, Kall Kwik, Epsom. Without the excellent maps of the Ordnance Survey, this journey would not have been possible. This book is dedicated to lovely Sally, and to Elizabeth Daisy McCaffrey. With thanks to Lewis McCaffrey, Kevin Hannavy, Liz Ross, Kevin Wood, Simon Stewart, Richard Wakelin, Mark Oaten, Helen Ambrose, Hannah and Barrie Hughes, Paul Brown, Sandra Dowdell, Robin Ackroyd, Barrie and Margaret Crane, Mac and Val McCaffrey, Matthew Lightfoot, Gill and Dylan, Juliette Wright, Brian Hay, Adrian Glover and PC 2404 Morse. A special thanks to all the excellent people who I met on my journey. A most extra-special thanks to Sally, and latterly to Elizabeth, for putting up with me while I was away, and while I was home - respect. Prologue My circle began with a square. When I was an undergraduate geologist at Dundee University, I vaguely remember hearing about a technique for measuring the number of different types of cobble of various sorts of rock contained within another rock called a conglomerate. What you do is throw a rigid square of plastic over your shoulder, and then count the types of rock within the boundaries of the square. The randomness of the selection procedure rather appealed to me, since there should be no bias in what you find. Perhaps a single square meter might not be appropriate in all cases, especially if all the cobbles in the conglomerate are each as big as the plastic square, but it’s a good start. This is a good example of a random selection process giving you a representative ‘cross section.’ One apocryphal tale I have heard is about the Oxford Straight Line Society. This is apparently a drinking society which meets in Oxford and which, from the club’s HQ, plays a kind of ‘Pin the tale on the donkey.’ They randomly stick a pin in a map of Oxford, and from the HQ, draw a straight line to the pin. Then, as far as is practi- cable, they walk, climb, swim or skate to their objective along that line, irrespective of what they find, and dealing with whatever they come across. I haven’t looked into it, because I would rather that it didn’t turn out to be untrue. If it is true, then it is another excellent way of sampling without bias, in this case, Oxford. If the line demands that they pass through the town rubbish dump, or through the ladies’ toilets in the bus station, then that’s where they must go. And, of course, this would take some of these young gentlemen to places that they would otherwise never see. Again, the cross-section is arbitrary, but the experience is no less valid. I also rather enjoyed Graham Greene’s book ‘Journey without maps’, an erratic wander through the Belgian Congo. The idea of going into the countryside with no clue as to what you might see is rather exciting to me. Even with good maps, there is no substitute for getting off your backside and going out and having a good look for yourself. This leads me to the question ‘Are there any explorers any more?’ Well, you could reasonably argue that the olden day explorers like Drake, Burton or Livingstone were only reporting back to this society aspects of foreign lands which were already well-known by the locals. They were not perhaps discovering anything new, except for us. Of course, their ‘discoveries’ were valid since they brought a wider context to the geographical information that they collected. As for the question ‘do explor- ers still exist?’ you can state that the entirety of the Earth’s surface has been imaged 5 Great Millennium Circle from space. Whether it has been mapped is a different question. There are caves that no one has seen (or given names to), the World’s oceans are almost totally unknown, and there are literally thousands of mountain peaks that have never been trodden by human foot. And there are still people going out to other countries and bringing back information already known to the locals, and this, along with the gathering of local place names and people’s stories, still passes for exploration. I will not lay claim to that exalted position, but I have recently completed an interesting journey, which I would like to share with you. At the cold Winter Solstice in 1998, I decided to visit Stonehenge on my way back home from visiting my wife’s parents house in Wiltshire. In the dark, I could just make out candles and robes inside the sarsen stones. I heard the banging of drums, and chants carried past me on the wind. During my drive home, I wondered how I might mark the forthcoming Millennium. I had wondered if I might encourage the building of the world’s largest circular henge monument. This would have a very large sarsen stone at the cardinal points of the largest circle that it would be possible to fit within the outline of the UK. A circle like that would be constrained by bodies of water, such as the Mersey, the Severn and the Wash. As I drove home, I thought about the massive logistics of such an undertaking. It would involve getting planning permission, buying the land, finding and hauling the stones and then erecting them. I am a small person, and this vision rather daunted me. Perhaps it might be carried out one day (and if it is, remember you read it here first), but as an achievable project for me for 1999 and 2000, it was a little ambitious. Much easier (I thought) might be just to work out the course of the largest circle, and then actually walk the length of it. When I got home, I got out my road map, and with a pair of compasses drew the first version of what I came to call the Great Millennium Circle. Assuming that you must be able to walk all of the circle, you should pass over the Severn Bridge, along the M4 corridor, up through the Fens, past Lincoln and Doncaster, over the Pennines, through Manchester Warrington and Chester, and then through the wild Welsh borders and the Black Mountains, down to Abergavenny and back to the Severn Bridge. In the spirit of the Oxford Straight Line Society, I thought that I might be able to stick almost exactly to the line of the circle. However, it’s difficult to even plot the circle to within 50m on the Ordinance Survey Landranger maps I have, and in several places, for example in the Welsh borders, along the Manchester Ship Canal, going through the Fens, and when crossing several of the motorways, it is actually impossible to stick exactly to the course of the circle. 6 Great Millennium Circle In geochemistry, they often apply what is known as a fudge factor, which takes a set of scientifically meritorious data that doesn’t show anything, and transforms it into a slightly tainted dataset with crystal clear trends and associations. In the case of the GMC, and in keeping with its theme of the end of the second Millennium, I decided to try to keep to within 2000m of the centre line, giving me a 4km-wide corridor in which to walk. Through to the early spring of 1999, I refined my plan. I worked out the math- ematics of the circle and how to plot it exactly on my set of OS maps. I divided the route up into manageable parts and allocated specific weekends through the year to accomplish my goal. Various people said to me that I should do the whole thing in one go. Unfortunately, I live in the real word, and my job as a magazine editor keeps me at my desk somewhat more that I might like. My main problem was that my wife, the lovely Sally, who I had only married in July 1998, was newly pregnant. The baby growing inside her was bound to act as a sort of anchor, making it harder and harder for me to leave home. I decided to try to keep a record of my progress, writing up each day or weekend as they passed. I took a mini-disc recorder with me on every weekend, and the conversations in this book took place as they have been described, with as few embellishments as possible. As I wrote at the time, ‘Tomorrow, I will start my Great Millennium Circle in the company of my twin brother Lewis and my friend Kevin Hannavy. We’ll start from the Severn Bridge, mainly because when I am close to finishing the circle I want to be able to see my eventual goal from a long way off. I hope to be able to see the tow- ers of the Severn Bridge from deep within Wales. According to my plan, I will finish the walk by the end of September. Lewis gives me only a 50:50 chance of doing it by then. We’ll see.’ 7 Great Millennium Circle 8 Chapter 1. Severn Bridge to Chippenham We physically started the journey by driving to the service centre on the English side of the Severn Bridge on Saturday 16 April 1999, jumping over a wall, sliding down a bank and clambering over a chainlink fence, before walking out to the middle of the bridge.