Tales from the Big Trails by Martyn Howe

Author:Martyn Howe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

COTSWOLD WAY

Distance: 102 miles

Days to complete: 5 days

Mileage so far: 1,663 miles

SPRING DASH

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.

– Abraham Lincoln

I have a week to spare and check through the National Trail possibilities. The Cotswold Way fits perfectly at 102 miles in length, and is close to home. By way of a train to Stratford-upon-Avon and a bus to Chipping Campden, I am standing beside a stone pillar which marks ‘COTSWOLD WAY – THE BEGINNING AND THE END’. My pedantic mind wonders how it can be both at the same time. Is this a Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, the answer unknown until the presence of an observer? A new marker stone was installed in 2016; its inscription offers one explanation:

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls

Across the open field, leaving the deep lane

Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,

And the deep lane insists on the direction

Into the village, in the electric heat

Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light

Is absorbed, not reflected, by grey stone.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.

Wait for the early owl.

– T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets (1943)7

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