Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

Mud, mud, glorious mud,
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me, follow, down to the hollow
And there let us wallow in glorious mud.

The Hippopotamus – Flanders and Swann

To say the weather was bad when I woke up and poked my nose out of the door would be an understatement. It was abysmal. Visibility was minimal and there was driving rain and sleet. Hardly the sort of weather I’d expected to encounter in south west France in May!

The bleak weather evoked memories of winter afternoons as a 7 year old at my prep school in Northamptonshire shivering on the wing in a drenched rugby shirt several sizes too large, waiting for the rugby ball to emerge from the scrum and be passed down the three quarters line to me!

After a lukewarm shower there was then double Latin and Greek to look forward to followed by supper of eggy bread and a mug of tepid tea before off to bed to enjoy an evening of being lashed with a belt by the ‘dorm cap’ for some minor misdemeanour that I’d committed during the day.

Several miles away, Charles Spencer was enjoying a similarly privileged education (recounted in his autobiography A Very Private School) Ah well, I suppose these things did the country proud – after all, wasn’t the Battle of Waterloo won on the playing fields of Eton? At the very least, those dismal winter afternoons in Northamptonshire in the early 1970s prepared me for a day of slogging through the mist and rain on the Chemin de St Jacques!

I managed to get in eight hours of uninterrupted slumber thanks in no small part to my foam earplugs – indispensable for sleeping in dormitories with snoring pilgrims!

Breakfast was more of a challenge. Aubrac didn’t run to a bakery so I was forced to rely on the supplies available in the communal kitchen. These were limited to a couple of stale baguettes, some dregs of raspberry jam and some tomato ketchup. The latter with bread and butter was a new experience – probably one that I’m not going to repeat in a hurry!

Driving rain mixed with sleet and limited visibility meant that I opted to take the road to Saint Chély d’Apcher rather than take the path across the moor. En route I met a bedraggled pilgrim from Quebec who told me that her daughter had persuaded her to walk the Chemin de St Jacques and had raved about the experience. The only difference being that when she had done the walk in 2022 the temperature had been as high as 32C!

I slithered around on endless forest paths, constantly having to avoid puddles while periodically accelerating my pace to overtake the constant stream of poncho’d pilgrims. It seemed like the Retreat from Mons during the Great War!

People sometimes ask me, what do you think about when you are walking? Don’t you need to listen to music or an audiobook?

For much of the day I thought about my boarding school in Northamptonshire. Maybe it was the dismal weather, maybe it was the somewhat underwhelming breakfast which triggered these childhood memories – just like those triggered by the madeleine for Swann in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

The school staff were an eclectic mix of mostly harmless well meaning eccentrics. The headmaster, who owned an old English sheepdog called Brumas which used to charge dementedly around the rugby pitch during matches. The geography master who used to greet everybody in welsh (yaki da), had a map of the world on the wall with all the bits of the British Empire coloured in red. He used to bring his fox terrier into class and if you made the slightest mistake he would make you lie down on the floor and then proceed to drop his dog onto your midriff. Oh yes, he also had a gruesome collection of shrunken heads which lined the wall in jars which he claimed he’d collected during a trip to the Amazon rainforest!

The classics master, called Bill Llewellyn, who’d taught my father in the 1930s, claimed to be a descendant of the last king of Wales (Llewellyn ap Gruffyd). The physics master (The Rev ‘Dagger’ Davies) doubled up as the school chaplain while the French master, ‘Figgy’ Irvine had a twitch, smoked like a chimney and spent most of his time buried behind a copy of the Sporting Post.

The boys were white, English and almost entirely upper middle class. One lived in Afghanistan where his father was Ambassador and used to terrorise the other boys by hurling projectiles at them from a device used by Afghan shepherds to kill marauding wolves at 50 yards. Another, whose father was a high court judge, had a brother who played county cricket for Somerset with Viv Richards and Ian Botham. Another (who held all the school athletics records) went on to compete with Seb Coe and Steve Ovett at the 1980 Moscow Olympics!

Some (including my best friend) lived in castles. A typical ‘Sunday Out’ would involve being picked up and driven at great speed in a Porsche Carrera to the Welsh borders by my friend’s father, having Sunday lunch en famille, spending the afternoon potting pigeons off the battlements into the castle moat with an airgun before being whisked back to school in time for supper and bed. It was a strange type of upbringing which gave you a completely unbalanced view of reality.

On the minus side my boarding school experiences left me emotionally scarred for 50+ years. On the positive side it left me with a love of history, a love for literature and a smattering of French that was finally coming in useful walking the pilgrim paths of France.

Thankfully I didn’t have anything like miserable experience at boarding school that Charles Spencer endured. Yes there was some brutality – one boy, whose father had been an English rugby union international, was dragged up several flights of stairs by his hair by a French master called Mr Jones who also happened to be the master in charge of rugby…. Some of the matrons seemed to take an unseemly interest in bathing boys and requiring them to peel back their foreskins – behaviour which might be frowned upon nowadays!

There was the occasional beating (once caused by an outbreak of underage smoking by 8 year olds including myself) but the beatings were relatively benign – administered with a jokari bat rather than a cane. Yes there had been tears on first arrival, us new boys sat on our tuck boxes digesting the news that we wouldn’t be seeing our parents again for two months. But when it came time to depart for public school aged 13, I had mostly forgotten the mud sweat and tears of those early years, memories which had lain dormant for the best part of half a century until awakened on a bleak May day in the Aubrac.

I reached St Côme-d’Olt shortly after 1pm. A pretty town with a 13th century church with a twisted steeple and houses decked with roses.

The Lot was in full spate when I crossed the bridge leading out of Saint Côme-d’Olt. The sun deigned to put in a brief appearance while I negotiated the 8km of muddy paths en route to my destination for the day, Espalion. 

At times it felt like I was cross country ski-ing rather than walking the Chemin de St Jacques to Compostella!

The gite I had booked for the night was just over the 13th century bridge. It was a short day to recharge my batteries ahead of tomorrow’s 47km walk to Conques. Let’s hope the weather gods are smiling rather more than they were today!