It is probably definitely a possibility - maybe. Tail end of August and the weather just can't seem to be able to make its mind up: the sun stands in front of a mirror trying on its hat - umming and ahhing. Are we gonna make a dash for it - a hopeful sortie beneath the sun? Or follow a deluge - the one I see out of my window, the pavement knee deep in cats and dogs.
Just get across that wee bit of channel and you're into a hotch-potch of countries and languages waiting there to be explored.
There is something every teenager or young adult should do - visit the war graves of Flanders and northern France. I have left it late. So I have my mission.
Getting to France
You can be a twerp and pay £55 each way London to Calais, or, you can be canny and pay just £14.00.That's right: just £14.00...and arrive in Dunkirk instead - the perfect place to start a Belgian sojourn. That's 3.75 on Southern Trains and a tenner on Norfolk Lines. This keen price also allows you to cycle from Hastings and still having the bike with you at the port is very handy as, for that tenner, no walking is allowed from the check-in to the boat.
There it is. With a few a privations, you can get from London To Dunkirk and back for 28.50.
There it is. With a few a privations, you can get from London To Dunkirk and back for 28.50.
New Gear
Out with the single skin Jamet shelter.The Jamet is light - no flysheet; it takes .01 milliseconds to erect; yet it is too small for me: every time I made any kind of movement inside I did the unforgivable - I touched the side - and the tent's interior became a water feature.
So I opted, after some research and counting pennies, on the fantabulous Banshee 300 from Vango - Van the Man's outdoor pursuit sideline for when the royalties run out.
Roomy and with a flysheet and only 1 week's intensive training on how to put it up the tent was just £72 from Gaynors of Ambleside - not Gaynors of Carshalton, as they sell used cars. I went for the three-man model, weighing in at a kilo more than the Jamet aat2.5kg. And, to get full value for my money, I resisted having a practice run - I'd leave the excitement until the first night.
Having had to throw my Sunngas stove into a bin at Bordeaux airport as it was deemed a lethal weapon, I went minimal for a new stove - an MSR pocket rocket £20, also from Gaynors.
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| Is that a stove in your pocket or do you need to see a doctor? |
Let us away.
I'm a cheapskate. Everything I do, I do on the cheap: cut corners, low budget; leather-look, metal-look, veneers, polyester-mix, value-for-money. I'll scour the intrawebnet for the best deal. I'll calculate the consequential and opportunity costs. I'll ask for refunds on staples that jam.
So, why turn your back on a gift horse in the mouth! Southern Trains, 20 quid a pop to Hastings 90% of the day except for the extremely convenient 05:32 hundred O'Hours am clock for a three-seventy five.
On board the train there were hundreds of people enjoying the early start. Many were just going to Hastings to wait for another cheap train to take them back to Victoria a few hours later - a few hours they'd spend soaking up the great atmosphere in the waiting room with their sandwiches and flask - the very same waiting room William the Conker sat in for his train to London once upon a time.
At 8am we leave Hastings station. 50 miles to Dover; five hours in which to do it. Ideal cycling weather: cold rain with a blustery head wind. When you go to proper hills - mountain passes in the Alps etc - you are in awe of the steep gradients; you relish the challenge and pain. The hills are a big deal - there is a website - www.climbbybike.com - devoted to gradients - you can see all the hills' ranking. They all have exotic names with Du or De between the words. The hills have cafes at the top with coachloads of tourists. There is often a plaque lauding the unwholesome gradient and in front of which lycra-clad cyclists pose for pictures. However, the hill out of Hastings - a normal road with normal traffic with normal ordinary people going about their ordinary, everyday lives, their grim-faced grim faces contoured by the harsh winds of life; their backs bent under the weight of the burden of years; their pants itchy with angst - is horrendous: the going is so slow time goes backwards; buses pass and all the passengers have tumbled into the back. Yet, there is no mention at the hill groupie's site, climbybybike. It is well known that William the Conker brought his boats inshore at the beach in Hastings in the morning gloom. When he saw the hill rising up he is purported to have said, 'Zut, alors! I'm not going up that. Let's go up the coast a bit. There's a likely looking place here on the map called Battle.'
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| The 05:32 to Hastings |
On board the train there were hundreds of people enjoying the early start. Many were just going to Hastings to wait for another cheap train to take them back to Victoria a few hours later - a few hours they'd spend soaking up the great atmosphere in the waiting room with their sandwiches and flask - the very same waiting room William the Conker sat in for his train to London once upon a time.
At 8am we leave Hastings station. 50 miles to Dover; five hours in which to do it. Ideal cycling weather: cold rain with a blustery head wind. When you go to proper hills - mountain passes in the Alps etc - you are in awe of the steep gradients; you relish the challenge and pain. The hills are a big deal - there is a website - www.climbbybike.com - devoted to gradients - you can see all the hills' ranking. They all have exotic names with Du or De between the words. The hills have cafes at the top with coachloads of tourists. There is often a plaque lauding the unwholesome gradient and in front of which lycra-clad cyclists pose for pictures. However, the hill out of Hastings - a normal road with normal traffic with normal ordinary people going about their ordinary, everyday lives, their grim-faced grim faces contoured by the harsh winds of life; their backs bent under the weight of the burden of years; their pants itchy with angst - is horrendous: the going is so slow time goes backwards; buses pass and all the passengers have tumbled into the back. Yet, there is no mention at the hill groupie's site, climbybybike. It is well known that William the Conker brought his boats inshore at the beach in Hastings in the morning gloom. When he saw the hill rising up he is purported to have said, 'Zut, alors! I'm not going up that. Let's go up the coast a bit. There's a likely looking place here on the map called Battle.'
The A259 does most of this for you. The trip is 35 miles of flat ride bookended by two big seven mile hill arrangements at Hastings and Folkestone. The road takes in four of the Cinque ports - Hastings, New Romney, Hythe and Dover. Winchelsea and Rye are associated antient towns while Folkestone is a Limb of Dover. The towns all provided defence for England, and, as the south coast gets nearer to France, defence becomes more visible: Martello Towers, pill boxes, WW2 airstrips, M.O.D. rifle ranges and the Swingate Radar Masts.
With the wind in our faces we struggled to keep up 12 an hour - then D had to get a broken spoke on his rear wheel repaired in New Romney. The broad expanse of Romney Marsh extends from Winchelsea, which looked like a film set or a tidily preserved museum piece, to Hythe. The A259 is boring. We reached the coast - the playground of the poor - and its promenade. The English coast on a grey wet and windy day - what a sight to behold. The weather has been a defence but it kills the coast - the chalk cliffs slipping into the English Channel. The ten-mile promenade attempts to hold back the sea and is good for cycling except on this kind of day when it provided less shelter than the road.
Out the other side of Folkestone there is Dover Hill on the New Dover Road - the B2011 - which rears up like a roller at Bondi. This had to be one of the steepest hills I'd ever been on. No fanfare, no big signs - just a horror story of hilliness.
I discovered something about bike design half way up.As you go up a hill the weight is no longer distributed evenly between both wheels - it concentrates on the rear and as the gradient increases so does the pressure on the rear rubber. Add to that a big fat butt moving about in the saddle and the back tyre blows up. I waved at a taxi that was on hire. He called in another that took me to Halfords in Dover as D went on ahead. The driver waited as I picked out a Continental tyre and tube. We made a dash to the Eastern Docks where I caught up with D but I was told I couldn't get on the ferry on foot - I had to cycle. Despite rapidly replacing the rubbers on the back we missed the desired crossing - more to do with trying to get on the boat without any tickets than lateness.
We made the 4pm crossing and arrived 19:20 hundred hours O'clock pm in Dunkirk.
With the wind in our faces we struggled to keep up 12 an hour - then D had to get a broken spoke on his rear wheel repaired in New Romney. The broad expanse of Romney Marsh extends from Winchelsea, which looked like a film set or a tidily preserved museum piece, to Hythe. The A259 is boring. We reached the coast - the playground of the poor - and its promenade. The English coast on a grey wet and windy day - what a sight to behold. The weather has been a defence but it kills the coast - the chalk cliffs slipping into the English Channel. The ten-mile promenade attempts to hold back the sea and is good for cycling except on this kind of day when it provided less shelter than the road.
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| Dover Hill - so steep we passed this car that had started up the hill in 1925. |
I discovered something about bike design half way up.As you go up a hill the weight is no longer distributed evenly between both wheels - it concentrates on the rear and as the gradient increases so does the pressure on the rear rubber. Add to that a big fat butt moving about in the saddle and the back tyre blows up. I waved at a taxi that was on hire. He called in another that took me to Halfords in Dover as D went on ahead. The driver waited as I picked out a Continental tyre and tube. We made a dash to the Eastern Docks where I caught up with D but I was told I couldn't get on the ferry on foot - I had to cycle. Despite rapidly replacing the rubbers on the back we missed the desired crossing - more to do with trying to get on the boat without any tickets than lateness.
We made the 4pm crossing and arrived 19:20 hundred hours O'clock pm in Dunkirk.
We had to find a site in Dunkerque - the kerque (church) in the dune - due to the hold up with by my bike; it was entirely my bike's fault and nothing to do with me. If you have never been to Dunkirk, the ferry does not drop you off at the bottom of the lane as it doesn't park in Dunkirk at all but 10 miles west. By the time we made it to the municipal campsite, behind the dunes two miles east of the town centre on the Rue De Europe, it was well into dusk. The wind blew big gusty swirls as if it was having a good old laugh at us as we unwrapped our brand new, untried tents.
D was bursting with confidence as he unfolded his fabric. D was bursting with confidence as he was about to erect a bungalow with three bedrooms, open plan kitchen/living room and patio. He bubbled with gusto as he quoted the glowing testimonials he'd read on the world wide webonet about his Gelert Solo (24.99 from all good toy shops). Meanwhile I was faced with a bagfull of eyelets, elasticated hair grips, clips, zips, other clips and acres of fly-sheet that covered my pitch and half of the next. D laughed at my head scratching and the fly sheet flapping in the wind. I thought for a moment my order with Gaynors had been mixed up with one for a wedding marquee. As I finally managed to get the flysheet up, D's bravado began to falter as he began to realise the true extent of his nylon. Once I'd attached my inner tent the true extent of mine was revealed: D could have put his tent up inside mine.
The pissing competition over, we knocked up our camping standard of the tuna-pesto-pasta combo and washed it down with just the two bottles of wine.
The following morning leapt at us like a loud, excited barking dog called Toomuchtodrinklastnight that needed to go out to do do-doos. D saw my tent for the first time in the true light of day, then looked at his and never mentioned the subject of tents again.
The Dunkerque streets were quiet as we headed south east towards Poperinge and Ypres, after crossing into Belgium.
Nothing new can be said about this area of Europe. It is pleasant - corn, beet, potatoes growing in rich, well drained soils; the occasional village with obligatory spire, a beacon visible for miles in this flat landscape.We passed through Ypres stopping for lunch the Menin Gate and the Lille Gate Ramparts cemetery. The Menin gate lists British and Commonwealth soldiers of WW1 whose remains have not been found - over 35,000 of them. It lists them by regiment, then in order of rank, which made me quite angry.
We then headed south to Messines, stopping at the Bedford House Cemetery on the N365 with just over 5100 graves - including one of a 'Shot at Dawn'.
http://www.ww1cemeteries.com/ww1cemeteries/indexpageab.htm
We continued to Messines and passed the Peace Park. This is a youth hostel type facility built by the Irish Government a few years ago to advocate peace and is now run by the Belgian government. All Belgian secondary school children have to visit Ypres. Eighty-percent of the people who stay in the Peace Park are British. The guy who was on the desk gave me directions to a gruesome spot upon a ridge.
This pond is the crater formed from the explosion of a mine placed beneath German positions on the Messines Ridge. The mine and eighteen others detonated in June 1917, instantly killing 10,000 men. Kids fish and swim in the pond now.
We zoomed off south to get to the campsite at Beuvry. It was 7.15 and a beautiful evening - just right for pitching your tent, having a shower and relaxing with another tuna-tomato sauce-pasta combo. The campsite seemed very discreet as there were no signs. The reason there were no signs was because, you've guessed it, there was no campsite. It had shut two years before. We stopped by a pub to figure a new plan when we surrounded by inquisitive boys. A man, came over and told us there was a campsite at Violaines - 6 miles away.
We eventually found the place an hour later with the aid of one road sign and by asking for directions of everyone we passed, including a bemused woman in her kitchen.
The campsite was bedside a small lake and many guests were there for the fishing. The amenities were very basic and the site catered for financially challenged - no fancy 4xwds with satellite dishes. There was a lot of rust and mildew and a few domestics kicked off during the evening. You get what you pay for, the saying goes: 4 euros, 16 cents for two - less then two quid each. Great omelete and chips with cheap beer.
It was another blustery day with the wind seemingly determined to blow in our faces whichever direction we took. To avoid Lens we went through the redundant coalfields in its western suburbs and on towards Arras.
The area's fighting was dominated by the battles for Vimy Ridge to the east of our route. Instead we headed south to Souchez on the D937 and stopped at the CWGC Cabaret Rouge cemetery . Named after a house that was nearby during the war, the cemetery contains the remains of over 7600 soldiers, less than half of which are identified.
The grim weather suited this grim spot. We trundled on slowly, up long hills in the wind and rain passing fields upon which the slaughter took place, the cemeteries often where the most soldiers had fallen.
Only a mile on is La Targette with both BCWGC and French sites next to each other, the latter containing 11000 remains.
It was not a pleasant ride into Arras at all - the D937 is a road lined with death. Another mile on lay a German cemetery. Whilst there CWGC sites are almost grandiose, this Soldatenfriedhof, the biggest in France, was very understated. No gleaming white Portland stone or 20-foot crucifix. The entrance is set back from the road - you have to look twice to spot it - and an avenue of trees hides the site from the road. Instead of the simple white but dignified headstones of the CWGC there are cold, blue grey crosses, each with five soldiers beneath and no flower beds. In all there are 44,000 buried here. People will say: 'They started it: tough.'
And they did, I guess, so the German cemeteries are deliberately understated.
We finally got to Arras and visited the Faubourg-d'Amiens cemetery. The memorial has 35,000 names of soldiers who were never found and 2600 graves.
Onto Bapaume, passing through Saginies to find that the advertised campsite no longer exists there either. I called ahead to Péronne - just to make sure they were open. We also passed through Favreuil - scene of a British counter attack after their retreat in 1918 following the last German offensive of the war. We were now in the Somme - a département as well as a river. The Western front was a straight-ish line from the Belgian coast down through Ypres, Arras, Bapaume across the Somme River and onto Champagne where it it went eastwards. The Somme Valley represented an opportunity to breach the German lines.
We arrived in Peronne at the municipal site - there is another one in the town as well - as it started to rain. The office had shut and we were unable to get tokens for the showers. It tipped down in the night but the sooper dooper flysheets made all the difference. We'd gotten the food in the day before, as, by now, D and I are accustomed to French ways - the country virtually shuts down on a Sunday. Two bottles of wine etc.
The area's fighting was dominated by the battles for Vimy Ridge to the east of our route. Instead we headed south to Souchez on the D937 and stopped at the CWGC Cabaret Rouge cemetery . Named after a house that was nearby during the war, the cemetery contains the remains of over 7600 soldiers, less than half of which are identified.
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| Cabaret Rouge cemetery |
Only a mile on is La Targette with both BCWGC and French sites next to each other, the latter containing 11000 remains.
It was not a pleasant ride into Arras at all - the D937 is a road lined with death. Another mile on lay a German cemetery. Whilst there CWGC sites are almost grandiose, this Soldatenfriedhof, the biggest in France, was very understated. No gleaming white Portland stone or 20-foot crucifix. The entrance is set back from the road - you have to look twice to spot it - and an avenue of trees hides the site from the road. Instead of the simple white but dignified headstones of the CWGC there are cold, blue grey crosses, each with five soldiers beneath and no flower beds. In all there are 44,000 buried here. People will say: 'They started it: tough.'
And they did, I guess, so the German cemeteries are deliberately understated.We finally got to Arras and visited the Faubourg-d'Amiens cemetery. The memorial has 35,000 names of soldiers who were never found and 2600 graves.
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| Ex Tottenham FC star, Walter Tul,l remembered in Arras |
We arrived in Peronne at the municipal site - there is another one in the town as well - as it started to rain. The office had shut and we were unable to get tokens for the showers. It tipped down in the night but the sooper dooper flysheets made all the difference. We'd gotten the food in the day before, as, by now, D and I are accustomed to French ways - the country virtually shuts down on a Sunday. Two bottles of wine etc.
I have never seen a colour photo of WW1. Cycling towards the Somme River at Cappy, I imagine the churned up battlefields to be grey - along with the grey sky and grey uniforms. In fact the sky is never sky in those pictures - grey or otherwise. It is the void, the kind of stuff of which the universe is contructed. It gives the battlefield an unworldly, ungodly, un-ness. It is the edge of humanity.
The Somme (from Celtic for tranquility) is a small river but it has somehow managed to acquire a wide apron of marshy lakes that are liable to flooding. My grandfather was involved at Ypres and the Somme. He died before I was born. My mother only ever heard him say one thing about the war. All down the Western Front, duckboards were laid for men to get across the quagmires that spread out across the trench systems and battlefields. Record rains fell during the war and often the seemingly firm terrain had just been a crust above murderous swamp and, as drainage systems had been destroyed by artillery, the thin meniscus dissolved. The mud beneath the duckboards was lethal. My grandfather was told that if a soldier fell into the mud you were expected to hit him on the head with your rifle butt so that he would not suffer during the grisly end of drowning.
We left Péronne and headed towards Cappy across the the exposed fields south of the river. Another head wind slowed us up. Cappy's most notorious guest in the war was the Red Baron who, after 80 'kills' was finally shot down a few miles to the west of the small village. The account of his death was a precursor to Who Shot JFK? Any one of three men may have fired the lethal shot. But, the account of his funeral reveals much about the times and class. Commonwealth airmen carried his coffin and laid wreathes.
Our final cemetery was Bray Hill, on the road to Albert. This small site overlooked another cemetery down in a valley - again, soldiers buried pretty much where they fell.
Albert was a British base during most of the war. The town and the church got a pasting from the Germans who eventually took it in 1918. The town has a good museum that runs in tunnels beneath the town centre. It contain all sorts of bric-a-brac, personal belongings and uniforms and the macabre weapons and shells. There are also mock-ups of trench life with mannequins, one of which is a Sikh. That was the first representation of a British and Commonwealth soldier who was not white that I'd ever seen. The whole business of the British Army's use of soldiers of non-European descent is whole story in itself. There were also the contributions made by Africans in the French Army-Algerians and the Senegalese, who were noted for their fearlessness.
The wind was incessant and in our faces so we opted for a train back to Lille from Albert's quaint station.
We cycled the twenty miles to Kemmel, just south of Ypres. This was another battleground, the hill there being of strategic use to whoever occupied it. However, I just wanted to put my tent up. It was late and the sky was clear and we got through the usual rations.
After a lengthy period of watching what I thought to be the International Space Station glide imperceptibly over, I welcomed slumber. The next morning the sky was cloudless. We headed north into Ypres.
Ypres old town, within the walls, was shelled to bits in WW1 and was entirely rebuilt over a period of nearly fifty years. The Cloth Hall was raised to the ground and finally fully restored in 1967. The building contains a handy Tourist Information office and shop and, at one end, houses the impressive Flanders Field museum that presents the WW1 events in and around Ypres, particularly the action on the Salient.
The Salient was an area to the east of Ypres that pushed back the German front in a roughly triangular shape, such as Dungeness. At the eastern tip, pushing furthest into German occupied Belgium, was the village of Passchendaele. The fact the front was interrupted in such a way was testament to the underestimation by the Germans of the Belgian resistance they would face when they deployed the Schliffen Plan on August 4th, 1914.
The Germans did eventually encroach into the Salient and tried to push the front westwards to enclose Ypres but the allies attempted to stop them. These various attempts to push forward by either side ended in three battles, one of which was Passendaele. Poperinghe, to the west of Ypres was a base for the British et al, as was Ypres until the Germans, realising they weren't going to get it themselves, shelled the town.
By now D and I had been in cemeteries containing a total of almost 100,000 bodies. The Salient itself with many more sites, including the massive Tyn Cot cemetery, would have added another 50,000. We went west, instead, to follow a canal back to Dunkerque. We passed through lots of quiet villages and some CWGC employees tending a cemetery. By and large, the 500,000 Commonwealth soldiers who died in Europe are buried in a CGWC in Belgium or France or just haven't been found and their names are inscribed at The Menin Gate or Arras.
We were back at the Licorne Campsite on a beautiful evening.
The Somme (from Celtic for tranquility) is a small river but it has somehow managed to acquire a wide apron of marshy lakes that are liable to flooding. My grandfather was involved at Ypres and the Somme. He died before I was born. My mother only ever heard him say one thing about the war. All down the Western Front, duckboards were laid for men to get across the quagmires that spread out across the trench systems and battlefields. Record rains fell during the war and often the seemingly firm terrain had just been a crust above murderous swamp and, as drainage systems had been destroyed by artillery, the thin meniscus dissolved. The mud beneath the duckboards was lethal. My grandfather was told that if a soldier fell into the mud you were expected to hit him on the head with your rifle butt so that he would not suffer during the grisly end of drowning.
We left Péronne and headed towards Cappy across the the exposed fields south of the river. Another head wind slowed us up. Cappy's most notorious guest in the war was the Red Baron who, after 80 'kills' was finally shot down a few miles to the west of the small village. The account of his death was a precursor to Who Shot JFK? Any one of three men may have fired the lethal shot. But, the account of his funeral reveals much about the times and class. Commonwealth airmen carried his coffin and laid wreathes.
Our final cemetery was Bray Hill, on the road to Albert. This small site overlooked another cemetery down in a valley - again, soldiers buried pretty much where they fell.
Albert was a British base during most of the war. The town and the church got a pasting from the Germans who eventually took it in 1918. The town has a good museum that runs in tunnels beneath the town centre. It contain all sorts of bric-a-brac, personal belongings and uniforms and the macabre weapons and shells. There are also mock-ups of trench life with mannequins, one of which is a Sikh. That was the first representation of a British and Commonwealth soldier who was not white that I'd ever seen. The whole business of the British Army's use of soldiers of non-European descent is whole story in itself. There were also the contributions made by Africans in the French Army-Algerians and the Senegalese, who were noted for their fearlessness.
The wind was incessant and in our faces so we opted for a train back to Lille from Albert's quaint station.
We cycled the twenty miles to Kemmel, just south of Ypres. This was another battleground, the hill there being of strategic use to whoever occupied it. However, I just wanted to put my tent up. It was late and the sky was clear and we got through the usual rations.
After a lengthy period of watching what I thought to be the International Space Station glide imperceptibly over, I welcomed slumber. The next morning the sky was cloudless. We headed north into Ypres.
Ypres old town, within the walls, was shelled to bits in WW1 and was entirely rebuilt over a period of nearly fifty years. The Cloth Hall was raised to the ground and finally fully restored in 1967. The building contains a handy Tourist Information office and shop and, at one end, houses the impressive Flanders Field museum that presents the WW1 events in and around Ypres, particularly the action on the Salient.
The Salient was an area to the east of Ypres that pushed back the German front in a roughly triangular shape, such as Dungeness. At the eastern tip, pushing furthest into German occupied Belgium, was the village of Passchendaele. The fact the front was interrupted in such a way was testament to the underestimation by the Germans of the Belgian resistance they would face when they deployed the Schliffen Plan on August 4th, 1914.
The Germans did eventually encroach into the Salient and tried to push the front westwards to enclose Ypres but the allies attempted to stop them. These various attempts to push forward by either side ended in three battles, one of which was Passendaele. Poperinghe, to the west of Ypres was a base for the British et al, as was Ypres until the Germans, realising they weren't going to get it themselves, shelled the town.
By now D and I had been in cemeteries containing a total of almost 100,000 bodies. The Salient itself with many more sites, including the massive Tyn Cot cemetery, would have added another 50,000. We went west, instead, to follow a canal back to Dunkerque. We passed through lots of quiet villages and some CWGC employees tending a cemetery. By and large, the 500,000 Commonwealth soldiers who died in Europe are buried in a CGWC in Belgium or France or just haven't been found and their names are inscribed at The Menin Gate or Arras.
We were back at the Licorne Campsite on a beautiful evening.
We took the cycle route 2 from Dover to Folkestone. This was shared with a few B roads then became a gravelled track as it reached the disused airfield atop the 350ft peak above Samphire Hoe. In getting there we'd passed a mysterious looking tunnel that went down through the cliffs. This takes you down to the Hoe, a raised platform built with the marl dug out of the Kent chalk during the excavation of the Channel Tunnel.
Also on the plateau, there is a Battle of Britain memorial. Then, the bit I'd been waiting for - the descent into Folkestone down Dover hill - passing the spot where my tyre blew up a few days before. I hit 35, while D raced on at 40.
From then on we took the promenade westwards and, with the wind behind us, we cruised through Hythe until St. Mary's where we rejoined the road at headed back to Hastings. Romney Marsh looked a whole load better than it did on the dank, windy outward journey. We passed several farms devoted to growing turf - huge fields of immaculate grass destined for football clubs and gold courses - and maybe cemeteries as well. Instead of following the A259 all the way back, from Winchelsea we took a backroad through Petts to get some punishment from some short but severe hills. My legs had had enough and I walked up a couple of them. We stopped at a grassy junction to finish of the last of the dodgy budget food we duped ourselves into consuming over the last six days. We got to Hastings at 6.30, having left Dover at 2pm - 50 miles in 4.5 hours.
