Introduction.

So… a new year, a new challenge. And new walkers to accompany us too. Justin had finally returned to walking with us again fifteen months after we’d put him through living hell in the ascent of Craig y Llyn. He’d bought along his significant other, Cat, who disappointingly failed to live up to her name by displaying neither whiskers nor a predilection for small fish-flavoured biscuits. For both of them it was their first bit of “serious” long distance walking – the furthest they’d walked before had been about 8 miles.

The Ridgeway National Trail starts in the most unprepossessing of locations – a layby on the A4. Given how close it is to the marvellous ancient monuments of Avebury, Silbury Hill and West Kennet, we decided to extend the start of the walk a little. To be quite honest, given that the modern day trail doesn’t always follow the exact route of the ancient pathway anyway, I’m surprised that the trail designers didn’t add on this extension themselves.

Jim and I met Justin & Cat in the village of Ogbourne St George, where we left Justin’s car – I then drove everyone to the car park at Avebury. Unfortunately, public transport around the Ridgeway is so restricted that the two-car solution is the only realistic one. It had been foggy for the whole drive down, but as we headed out of Marlborough it was so thick that I had to slow down. The swirling mist had a surreal and gloomy light quality, and reminded one of the sort of weather that always seems to accompany robberies by highwaymen in period dramas. I was quite relieved to emerge into slightly clearer (though still misty) air at the Avebury car park, but also slightly worried to see that the car park closed at 4.30pm – this would add a certain degree of urgency to my walking! As the pay and display machines were out of order we could park for free – I felt slightly miffed at this because as an English Heritage member I was deprived of my £2 saving on the car parking fees!

Avebury

Before starting walking properly, we headed off into the mist on the standard circuit of the Avebury stone circle. This is one of the greatest prehistoric monuments in Britain, and in scale at least eclipses its more famous cousin at Stonehenge. The stone circle is thought to have been built round about 2,500 BC. It’s surrounded by an enormous ditch and embankment – the ditch may originally have been nearly 10 metres deep. The ditch encloses an area over a quarter of a mile in diameter, within which resides much of the modern-day village of Avebury. Unfortunately, some of the stones from the main stone circle were used in the construction of the village, and two smaller stone circles within the main ring have been almost completely lost.

Reaching the circle at the western entrance, we decided to circle it in an anti-clockwise direction. The south-western quadrant of the circle is one of the most complete parts, and has the tallest stones. As a former denizen of Wiltshire I had visited the site frequently in my childhood, and the stones weren’t as large as I remembered – it must be because I’ve grown and the stones haven’t! They also weren’t quite as tranquil – but this was mainly because Jim was trying out one of the walking poles I’d given him for Christmas, and the silence was shattered by the constant “toink, toink, toink” as the tip of his pole hit the ground.

Due to erosion control areas we were forced to cut back towards the village slightly to move into the south-east quadrant. In this quadrant few of the stones in the large outer circle remain, but there are quite a few stones remaining of one of the two inner circles – from ground level it’s difficult to make out the circular shape though. The ditch and embankment are especially prominent here, and we headed across to them. Jim, Cat & Justin crossed the ditch at the shallow part by the road, whilst I tried a direct high speed traverse of the steepest section. The descent went okay but the re-ascent was rather trickier, and after slipping and sliding to a standstill I was forced to use my hands to reach the summit. From here we could see some of the stones of the West Kennet Avenue, two parallel lines of standing stones leading south-east from Avebury to another prehistoric site called The Sanctuary (which we planned to visit later on our walk). We walked on around the top of the embankment, only to find (as we entered the north-eastern quadrant) that parts of the embankment were again sealed off for erosion control.

There wasn’t a lot to see in the north-eastern part of the circle – few stones are left in the main circle, and just a couple of rocks from the former inner circles remain. There weren’t even any of the sheep that normally haunt the place. We moved swiftly on to the final quarter of the circle, the north-western part. Here the outer circle is a lot more complete, but you are very close to the village and it feels strangely claustrophobic after the open expanses of the other sections. There’s a lot more to see in the village, but we were eager to get properly started on the walk and we returned to the car park (why oh why didn’t we leave our bags there whilst we went round Avebury!).

I’d enjoyed revisiting Avebury – even though it was smaller and less complete than I remembered it’s still built on an awesome scale. I had hoped it would look spookier in the mist, but it still looked like a Sunday-afternoon-tea-and-biscuits kind of place. I much prefer it to Stonehenge – possibly because it’s that bit quieter. As we crossed the A4361 and headed down the muddy bridleway opposite the car park I was looking forward to all the other historical sites we would be seeing today. At least the mud quietened Jim’s “toink”-ing, and reduced my desire to smash his pole over his head (I had been debating whether his skull or the pole would crack first – either one would have stopped the “toink”).

Silbury Hill

The next site wasn’t long coming – we could see Silbury Hill looming out of the mist ahead. A 130-foot high conical mound, estimated to have been built around the same time as Avebury, it dominates the landscape around it, looking for all the world like a giant green Christmas pudding. It’s the largest prehistoric mound in Europe, and its purpose is a complete mystery – boreholes have revealed nothing at the centre. One thing that may be relevant is that – apparently – from the top of the hill you could have seen the top of obelisk stone, formerly (before it’s demise) the highest stone at Avebury. Although I climbed it in my youth, it is now closed to the public for fear of erosion damage. The path we were on passed a few hundred metres away, with the mound at times only faintly visible through the mist, yet it was still awesome.

I had a degree of trouble as the path passed Silbury. A cattle wade had wiped out a short section of the path and stiles took you on a brief diversion into neighbouring fields to avoid it. Having something of an aversion to climbing over stiles, I opted to take the lower route along the stream edge – and promptly slipped into the stream. Fortunately the water didn’t come over the top of my boots! Jim, who had followed me, supported himself skillfully above the water on his new walking pole.

West Kennet Long Barrow

Crossing the A4 it was a short shallow ascent (certainly shorter and shallow than I remember it from my youth – I’m obviously fitter now!) to our next historical site, West Kennet Long Barrow. The fog got a lot thicker as we climbed, and we didn’t see the barrow until we were almost upon it. A long row of standing stones loomed suddenly out of the mist, with a long, low, irregularly shaped mound stretching away behind them to the west, over a hundred metres in length.

The entrance, between the overlapping largest pair of standing stones is surprisingly well disguised from the angle of approach, but allows easy access when found. A pleasant open air atrium leads you into the chambered tomb itself. We had bought a torch to explore it, but a glass skylight at the end of the tomb (surely not part of the original design?!) afforded ample light. The tomb is kind of a reverse Tardis – much smaller on the inside than the outside, with the rooms inside only accounting for about an eighth of the length of the mound. One wonders what the rest of the mound was for…!

The interior of the tomb consists of a short stone-lined corridor, with a pair of chambers off to each side. At the end of the corridor is a fifth, larger chamber. When the tomb was excavated, the remains of 46 bodies were found inside. It was pretty amazing to stand inside a building a thousand years older even than Avebury or Silbury Hill. And at least this one had a roof!

Leaving the tomb we realised how lucky we were to have had the place to ourselves – several other groups of walkers were already appearing out of the mist. We left the barrow feeling very satisfied – we’d probably enjoyed visiting this more than either Avebury or Silbury Hill today. The only disappointment was due to the fog – there’s a great view of Silbury Hill from up here, which we were of course unable to see.

The Sanctuary

So, on to the final historical site of our pre-Ridgeway ramble, and there was more disappointment for Jim as he realised he’d forgotten to eat the muesli bar he’d planned on having at the long barrow. The rest of us decided that he could jolly well wait until we reached The Sanctuary. We returned from whence we had come but took a footpath eastwards before reaching the A4. This footpath seemed to be much longer than it looked on the map (perhaps we did need a muesli bar after all…) but eventually we turned left onto a track in woodland and emerged onto a minor road. Here we turned left, crossed a stream, and then turned right onto a bridleway. We soon turned left again and started to head uphill towards The Sanctuary and the start of the Ridgeway. This was a “Byway open to all traffic”, and the surface had been muddied a little by the passage of motorised vehicles. Justin seemed very badly affected by this and, struggling to stay upright soon dropped behind the rest of us. He blamed the worn treads on his boots, but seeing as Cat was wearing trainers with very shallow treads this wasn’t very convincing. We were too polite to mock him though.

To the right of the path were a couple of impressive burial mounds. Anywhere else these would probably have merited a brief stop, a photo and some florid prose, but after the wonders we’d seen already they only earned themselves a couple of sentences. Instead we marched straight on past them and on up to The Sanctuary, beside the M4 where Jim finally got to eat his muesli bar.

The Sanctuary is, as stated earlier, linked to Avebury by the West Kennet Stone Avenue, but oh, what a difference between here and the other end. There’s a big difference between Avebury and The Sanctuary though – at The Sanctuary no trace whatsoever remains of the original structure. Instead there are circles of modern concrete blocks, representing the positions at which intensive forensic archaeology has calculated – or conjectured – stones or wooden posts once stood. Apparently some of the wooden post holes that were discovered may once have supported a wooden building. It is all distinctly underwhelming though – the sort of site where there’s so little physical evidence that Tony Robinson’s Time Team might actually be allowed a look! It is certainly disappointing compared to the sites we’d seen earlier today, and we hurried across the A4 to the start of the Ridgeway.

The Ridgeway – The beginning to Barbury Castle

So… nearly four-and-a-half miles into our walk we finally hit the start of the trail. Unlike the South West Coast Path, there were no fancy sculptures to mark this auspicious location, but there was a signpost pointing to Ivinghoe Beacon at the far end of the trail. Justin managed to look exceptionally camp in the obligatory photo.

Unfortunately this monumental occasion was marred somewhat by Cat’s watch spontaneously disintegrating. We searched about for the missing pin out of the strap without any hope of finding it in the rutted surface of the Ridgeway, but were eventually forced to set off with the remaining pieces of watch in her pocket, stopping only briefly to comment on the three large burial mounds in the field behind the signpost.

As Jim and I used to live in Wiltshire we had walked bits of the Ridgeway quite regularly in our youth. Our over-riding memory was one of mud. Knee-dip, liquid brown welly-eating stuff, turned into a quagmire by the passage of 4x4 vehicles that (quite legitimately, as it is a “Byway open to all traffic”) used it for recreation. One does wonder why people want to enjoy the tranquillity and fresh air of the countryside in a noisy, fume-belching behemoth, but each to their own and all that. Anyway, in order to try to stop the Ridgeway disintegrating beyond repair under this wheeled onslaught, Wiltshire County Council have introduced a number of measures, probably the most significant of which is to introduce a ban on motorised vehicles using the Ridgeway during winter months. The first part of the Ridgeway seemed to testify to their success – whilst heavily rutted, it was dry and gravely underfoot rather than squelchy.

This first part of the trail looks rather ominous from the map – a continual and unrelenting hill for two-and-a-half miles. The gradient was very gentle, and we stomped off at a great old pace, declaring it the ideal hill for walking – just steep enough to warm you up slightly on this cold winters day. We passed another impressive burial mound – Overton Down is actually yet another part of the Avebury World Heritage site. The ascent eventually took us clear of the fog, and we had fine views back to the south-west to the monument on Cherhill. It actually appeared that it was just the area around Avebury that was shrouded in the grey stuff.

As we neared the top of Overton Down there was a view off to the right of a field full of rocks (and sheep). These were more significant than your usual boulders. They are sarsen stones, lumps of sandstone revealed by erosion, and it’s likely that the stones of Avebury were sourced from here. Wethers is an Olde English word for sheep, and the rocks have been named the Grey Wethers because they’re supposed to look like a flock. All I can say is that the person who invented this moniker must have been myopic. They were grey, hard and flat, whereas sheep are generally none of these (unless you’re in a very dodgy butcher's)!

Eventually the novelty of having clear air and views wore off and we started to realise that it was a very long and tiring hill after all. The problem was exacerbated when we found that the summit was muddy – not the swamp that we remembered from our childhood, but a nasty slippery surface which made walking very difficult. I managed to save myself from what would have been a humiliating somersault into the mud by dint of frantic running on the spot accompanied by much flailing of arms. Eventually Cath called a halt for some brief sustenance, and whilst Justin repacked his rucksack to prevent his lunchbox jabbing him in the back we watched with amusement and sympathy as a passing cyclist hit the mud and performed a spectacular headfirst dive into a nearby rut.

With energy levels replenished, it was a quick and easy march along the now fairly level trail to reach a car park at a minor road. Below the car park lies one of Wiltshire’s many white horses, carved into the chalk hillside. It’s not visible from the Ridgeway itself, but bearing in mind that we had to get back and pick my car up from Avebury before the car park shut at 4.30pm, we decided not to make the diversion down the hill to see it. We had been thinking that we might stop for lunch here, but given that there were no benches and the car park was unpleasantly full of noisy modern camper vans we decided to push on. Cat assured us that she knew of a picnic site at Barbury Castle (a huge Iron Age hill fort, one of many on the Ridgeway).

Barbury Castle was an easy level mile-and-a-half stroll away along a pleasant if unspectacular stretch of path. All the way along there were wide views to the north-west, but as these included Swindon this was not necessarily a good thing! Eventually the earthen double ramparts of Barbury Castle itself came into view on the next hillside ahead – Justin & Cat had visited the castle before, and both said that the views of it from here were much more impressive than from within the castle itself. As we got closer to the castle (and therefore the car park) the number of walkers inevitably increased, and there were even a couple of illiterate motorcyclist who had obviously been unable to read the signs stating that motorised vehicles weren’t allowed on the trail in winter.

To reach the castle we descended to a minor road, where the original route of the Ridgeway branched off on a track to the north-east. The National Trail bears off up into the Barbury Castle itself, in search of better views, and we would not rejoin the “true” route of the Ridgeway until the next section.

From the map it looked like a steep path up into the hill fort, but in reality it was a pretty minor climb, even with stomachs now growling for lunch, only made difficult by it being slippery underfoot (two steps forward, one slide back). After Cat’s assurances, we were disappointed to find no benches inside the fort. She gave us a further assurance that it was “just a little bit further on”. This sounded suspiciously like when our parents used to promise that things were “just around the corner”. We trusted her anyway (what choice did we have) and plodded onwards past hordes of screaming kids throwing themselves down the steep earth ramparts with all the hesitancy and high regard for safety of lemmings. Although we were more interested in lunch I can report that I did spare a brief glance for Barbury Castle and the ramparts were large and impressive ones. There’s not much else to see though.

The picnic area was next to a car park a little way on from the fort. There were a couple of benches at the edge of the escarpment with grand views, but we opted to sit at one of two benches in an area enclosed by earth banks, in an attempt to keep out of the icy (if mercifully light) breeze). It didn’t work – we were all chilly by the time we’d eaten, although Jim and I were feeling smug about having a flask of hot chocolate. Cat went off to warm herself under the hairdryer in the loos, and came back filled with joy and wonder at this miraculous device. Nevertheless we were all stiff-legged and slow moving as we recommenced our walk.

Barbury Castle to Ogbourne St George

The route onwards bore right down a muddy track, where a couple in completely inappropriate footwear were hovering nervously at the edge, trying not to get mud on their pretty little shoes (why oh why do these probable townies always assume that the whole countryside has been tarmac’d over?). We tried to turn our post-lunch stagger into an experienced swagger as we stomped through the mud past them.

The trail soon turned left onto Smeathe’s Ridge. This is an unusual part of the Ridgeway in that it actually lives up to its name by running along the top of a ridge, albeit a broad and grassy one. Whereas so far today we’d generally only had views to the north and west, now views opened out on both sides, with a rather nice deep valley visible to the south-east. Unfortunately the cloud had closed back in and it was all rather cold and grey – on a sunny day I think that Smeathe’s Ridge could be quite spectacular. Justin & Cat were starting to lag slightly – I think that their first long distance walk was finally starting to take its toll (Jim and I had been pleasantly surprised with how well they had kept up with us until now).

You have to be a little careful when you come off Smeathe’s Ridge. Up until now the heavily worn and rutted route of the Ridgeway had been so obvious that there had really been no need for the signposts liberally scattered along it. However, at the col between Smeathe’s Ridge and Coombe Down, the obvious route is an unmapped track going straight on up the down (is that an oxymoron?). The actual route of the trail bears off to the left down the side of the Down, heading towards the distant houses of Ogbourne St George, and the end of today’s walk.

The civilisation-decrying Ridgeway does not deign to enter the village, but instead executes a semi-circular route to the south. To reduce this somewhat demoralising start to our next day’s walking, we decided that we would do part of the semi-circle today and enter Ogbourne from the south. It was an easy stroll for Jim and I, although Justin was hobbling somewhat and bemoaning the state of his feet. We headed half a mile or so south on a track, took a left turn, and a few hundred metres or so later left the Ridgeway by turning left onto a faint (read: non-existent) footpath to the village across pastoral farmland.

The first field contained horses. Jim and I, who have a somewhat tarnished image of these beasts after one tried to mount us on the London LOOP, veered around them and rapidly stomped across to the stile on the far side of the field. Cat, however, loves animals, and clicked her tongue at them. However, as they approached her she got a bit worried and also made tracks for the stile leaving Justin to face them on his own. Fortunately these horses were more interested in food than sex and merely tried to eat his rucksack. Aside from a light covering of equine saliva I’m pleased to report he survived.

The path crossed a rather over-engineered footbridge over a dried-up river bed and took us back to Ogbourne. We left Jim and Cat in the bar of the Parklands Hotel whilst Justin drove me back to Avebury to pick up my car. Despite all the jokes about the tendency of his MG to disintegrate, it did the job. On returning to the Parklands Hotel we were devastated to find that the bar had closed and neither Jim nor Cat had bothered to get us a drink. We were just considering whether we should leave them there as a punishment when a friendly hotel employee appeared and satiated our thirst with welcome glasses of orange and lemonade.

As we drank we debated the days walking. Cat and especially Justin looked pretty tired but were justifiably proud of not only having completed their first proper bit of trail walking, but also of having kept up with Jim and I. They both said they would join us again for the next section but threw in a “decent weather only” caveat. For Jim and I, the Ridgeway had been a welcome return to trail walking – we had got a bit tired of hill-bagging over the previous year. We’d found the Ridgeway to be (so far!) one of the easiest trails we’d walked, but also one of the least interesting – there was none of the variety of the LOOP, or the spectacular scenery of the South West Coast Path. Despite this it had still provided a pleasant day’s walking – and of course there was nothing that was going to stop us finishing it now we’d started! We’d be back…

As a postscript, I’d like to add that at work the next day Justin had stiffened up a lot, and was being compared to John Wayne or the Tin Man out of the Wizard of Oz! But fair play to him, he’s still said he’s up for the next section.

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