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

Bard Bracy! bard Bracy! your horses are fleet,

Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet,

More loud than your horses’ echoing feet!

And loud and loud to Lord Roland call,

‘Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall!’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Christabel

Ok I have a guilty admission which makes me feel a bit of a fraud.

Due to a heinous miscalculation today’s walk was only about 8km from La Bastide-de-Virac to Salavas. Even after bimbling around for 3 hours in the nearby town of Vallon Pont d’Arc and attempting a fruitless endeavour to reach the Ardèche Gorges by a busy main road, I barely covered 15km!

The day started well. Au Vieux Porche served up possibly the best breakfast I’ve enjoyed in France during the last five years of long distance walks. Two yoghurts, a croissant and a pain au chocolat, bread and jam, orange juice, coffee and a bowl of fruit. What not to like!

After yesterday’s lengthy yomp, today’s walk to Salavas was a cake walk and I felt somewhat of a fraud!

The last time I felt so much of a fraud was at school nearly 50 years ago.  An A level English master called Runty Clark had asked us to compose a poem about insects in irregular tetrameters during the half term exeat.

Why irregular tetrameters? I dimly seem to remember it relating to a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Christabel that we were studying for English A level.

A classic elegiac couplet alternates a dactylic hexameter line with a dactylic pentameter line (common in classical Latin or Greek poetry and specific English adaptations), which differs entirely from the free-flowing, four-stress Gothic ballad measures of Christabel, the majority of which are written in rhyming iambic tetrameters.

At the end of the half term exeat, despite tearing my hair out, I’d made no progress in penning a poem in iambic tetrameters about insects. So I wandered into my father’s study and asked if he could help out.

Shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke he nodded absently. Five minutes later he proffered a scrap of notepaper with a a ten verse poem in iambic tetrameters that he had rattled off.

Back at school I duly handed in ‘my’ poem and awaited the consequences with some trepidation.

A week later, Runty Clark had marked all the poems and returned them to us in ascending order of merit. I waited with bated breath as various offerings from other pupils were frisbeed across the classroom accompanied with caustic criticism.

Eventually only one poem had yet to be returned and it was ‘mine’. At this point Runty paused for dramatic effect before embarking on a lengthy accolade:

‘There were some decent efforts here, but nothing came close to the poem submitted by Dutton. In the last 25 years, I can’t remember reading a poem that was so erudite and witty. Absolutely brilliant what can be achieved with half a bit of talent”

He then proceeded, much to my intense embarrassment, to read out my father’s poem to the entire class. I still remember hoping the world would swallow me up in shame as he enunciated the phrase ‘crepuscular ephemeridae’ which left the rest of the class gawking!

The poem was subsequently entered for the school poetry prize which it duly won! To my eternal shame I never admitted my fraudulent offering to the school or my father. Such was the gulf between being a Scholar (my father) and a Commoner (myself) at the same school!

In winter we would then retire to the sitting room huddled around the two bar electric fire in ( the decrepit air convection heating system had given up the ghost in the mid 70s  but my father was too mean to ever get it repaired!) watching classic Saturday night TV shows of the era such as ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’, ‘Hinge and Bracket’  or ‘The Good Old Days’.

My father was unique. If you have ever watched the 1980s Granada TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, them you will have no difficulty in recognising my father in the shape of Charles Ryder’s eccentric father, brilliantly portrayed by John Gielgud.

At home, evening meals were invariably conducted in complete silence apart from the tinkling of cutlery. On Saturday evenings a bottle of red wine would be produced which would lead my father to quote lengthy chunks of latin poetry (Virgil’s Eclogues or extracts from The Iliad) which he had memorised by heart. After the third glass of wine he would transition to quoting Scottish Border ballads in an exaggerated Highland accent, while myself and my mother looked on in bemused silence!

Not a huge amount happened on the 8km walk to Salavas other than meeting a chap in a high vis jacket with a double barreled shotgun slung nonchalantly over his shoulder and passing an abandoned caravan in the woods.

I reached Salavas shortly after 11am. It was still too early to check into the Hotel des Sites so I headed up the road to see what the town of Vallon Pont d’Arc had to offer.

As it turned out Vallon Pont d’Arc had everything any holiday maker could want, and a lot more besides!

Situated at the head of the Ardèche gorges, Vallon Pont d’Arc was clearly something of a tourist mecca. Think Wookey Hole meets Margate.

There were more kayak and canoe hire outlets in Vallon Pont d’Arc than you could shake a stick at. Tempting though it was to hire a canoe for the afternoon and drift 32km down the Ardèche back to Aiguèze, I decided it would be a fruitless endeavour, partly because the river was jam packed with canoeists and partly because the river was so low that I risked getting marooned on a rock somewhere!

In the end I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and it was worth checking in early to the Hotel des Sites, if only to do some long overdue laundry.

It was a bit of a mystery how the hotel had been awarded the second of it’s two stars. There was no discernible difference in the temperature of the water which dribbled out of either of the bathroom taps nor was it clear why a dog was barking manically in an adjoining bedroom! There wasn’t any sign that any other guests were staying in the hotel so I guessed I could kiss goodbye to any hopes of practicing my French on the locals.

Ah well I thought to myself let’s hope the hotel’s pizzas live up to expectations and the dog in the next bedroom doesn’t keep me up all night. Tomorrow is another day!