Walkspace has a strong cohort of flaneurs, the “connoisseurs of the street;” urban roamers who stroll the streets and parks of the city. Who delve with delight into canalside tunnels and under brutalist bridges, who wander through suburban estates and industrial sites, who walk the concrete and tarmac ways in a quest for urban stories and strange erratics. Walkers who revel in the expression of human doing and being that a city is.
But there is a (very) tiny cohort of Walkspace members for whom urban roaming is trial rather than a joy. These are folks who delve into nettle infested woods, wander down rutted muddy tracks or stagger breathlessly up high tussocky hills. I am firmly in the second group. Having escaped 14 years of suburban and city living almost nothing could tempt me to walk its grey streets again, not even the pleasure of a Walkspace walk, with lovely Walkspace people.
(I really need to invent a name for rural flaneuring – considering all the livestock we encounter maneuring comes to mind)
So when Andy and Robson decided to host another Walkspace Erratic, I thought it would be fun to accompany the group, but at a significant distance. Herefordshire, where I live, has quite a few erratics of its own as ancient glaciers carved swathes across this landscape. I reached out to Kate Green, who I suspected is a fellow maneur and we hatched a plan to hunt down the Whetstone, a large erratic situated somewhere atop Hergest Ridge. We’d start our walk the same day and time as the Birmingham erratic walk and share pictures live on the Walkspace WhatsApp.
Hergest Ridge is the name of Mike Oldfield’s difficult second album and also a large hill, rising above the small town of Kington. It’s right on the border between Wales and England with Offa’s Dyke LDP traversing straight across its top. From the summit of the hill several barrows and hillforts can be seen on the neighbouring hills. Hergest Ridge has an elevation of 426m and if you ever fancy doing a spot of Marilyn bagging, Hergest Ridge should be on your list.
Kate drove us to Kington as I am still rather nervous of all the one-car-wide roads around here and we were joined on our quest by Dot, a small shaggy-haired bundle of irrepressible canine enthusiasm and joy. It was a steep trek from the carpark to the top of the ridge and while I laboured my arthritic joints up the slope, Kate went slightly mad and began spotting potential erratics left, right and centre. We knew the approximate location of the Whetsone (ie, it was on the hill) but we hadn’t really done any homework and just wandered erratically (ahem) over the landscape, enjoying the wind and space and the song of skylarks.
Soon Kate spotted more stones and we both began to flex our maneur muscles, tuning into the landscape of The Ancestors and divining a potential layout of tracks and stones that could be the remnants of an ancient stone circle. It actually got genuinely exciting as we discussed how the ancestors might have used the hill, imagining rituals and burials and ourselves following in the footsteps of those long dead, mysterious people who dotted the hills all around the Ridge with barrows, standing stones and hillforts.
All the while Dot bounded around, cheerfully sniffing and leaping onto the smaller stones, rushing everywhere with cheerful gusto. Despite only having six inch long legs I’m sure Dot covered more than twice the distance we did.
When we finally found the Whetstone itself I was astonished by how big it was. We wondered if it was completely natural, or if it had been carved in any way. Kate found a portion of the stone that seemed to form a perfect and comfortable seat. Maybe it had been a King's Seat once? We knew the stone had played a significant role in the history of the local people and had once been a place where food had been distributed to lepers, which seemed rather hard on the lepers, considering its elevation.
It was really nice to be walking at the same time and on the same quest as the Birmingham based cohort and I for one would really like to do something like this again. Perhaps a canal versus river walk or a rural v urban industrial walk. Although quite honestly, any walk that includes Dot (and Kate!) would be a walk worth doing.
…kruse is a neurodivergent, experimental artist and writer, whose practice includes drawing, writing, storytelling and phenomenological research. She is interested in the connections between landscape, mythmaking, magic and story. For more of her writing see her excellent Wayfaring blog.