Distance: 6.12km
Accessibility: Tight paths, with spikes on all sides. Proceed with caution.
Landscape: Brambles.
Nervous this morning. Like the first day of a school play. The point with a few minutes to go before lights up, with no option to back out.
The temperature had dropped too. Outside the air was cold enough to bite your fingers. An icy wind pleaded with me to whack up the heating, and remain indoors with a paperback.
But you must be the priority dear reader. We have to finish, and plough on through the dark.
We have to face our fea
Still. The wonderful route planned for today made the chill worthwhile.
A free lunch, you might say.
Huf Dael's blackberries are another glorious secret of the area. The hedges are similar to many of the strange side paths I have visited this year. But these are different. Rather than neat hedges, or wild branches poking your eyes, fat blackberries grow between twisted brambles. Kilometres of them leading round overgrown fields and hidden estates.
I thought the season was over, but even from outside juicy berries hung on display. Each bush was thick with fruit the size of swollen cherries. The thorns were fingernail length, clawing from every angle in the hunt for denim and waterproof fabric.
I walked down a well used but maze-like path. Any successful attack from a thorn caused white scratches down my jacket. After half an hour, the defences seemed suitable enough. I sat on a patch of ground where the mud was still powdery. A few blackberries stained my jeans.
Closing my eyes was important.
I have had a few breaks on this journey, but this is the first one that felt like a real rest. An actual chance to think.
All that anger of recent weeks was not as sharp. Instead I thought about how I got to this exact moment. How stupid to work on a draft when a baby was on the way. How I had hovered near that post box. How I had almost not put the envelope in.
Two hours later, and that submission may have got lost in the post. Found another reader at the agency, who tossed my work aside.
One movement of cowardice, and I do not end up here. You don’t get your book of walks, and all these tales. The Butter Mouse perishes during creation.
But then what about Archie?
Perhaps I should have walked awa
I thought the noise was the brambles in the wind at first. Then the noise came closer. A tearing and crunching that made the hedgerows creak. When I open my eyes, the source was already racing towards me.
::A misjudgment here Barbara. I thought I had more time.::
