As my companions and I paused to savour our first distant view of Stonehenge, the clouds parted and the famous trilithons took on a golden hue as they were touched by the afternoon sun. It was an almost comically filmic moment – and at the same time it felt entirely fitting, marking our final, triumphant march towards the monument.
Professor Keith Ray (Cardiff University), Professor Julian Thomas (University of Manchester), and I had set out on foot from Netheravon that morning, but for Keith the journey to Stonehenge had been rather longer. Over the course of the previous three weeks he had walked some 222 miles, beginning in the Preseli Hills, where some of the Stonehenge bluestones were quarried thousands of years ago (see CA 311, 345, and 366), and making his way to Salisbury Plain, where they stand today. Chris Catling explores this undertaking in greater detail in the preceding article (see here); Julian and I had joined Keith on the final day of his endeavours, as his route entered the Avon Valley.
I felt very lucky to be one of the 20 ‘co-walkers’ invited to take part – and luckier still to be doing so during good weather and on easy terrain. As we set out, Keith shared stories of rather more challenging stretches tackled earlier in the trip, when he traversed Wales and the Cotswolds – tales of horizontal hail, threats of hypothermia, and punishing topography. By contrast, we enjoyed a sunny Sunday taking a flattish path along roads, across fields, and through shady strips of woodland. Birdsong like bubbling water was punctuated by the occasional hoarse cry of a pheasant and, at one point, a distant staccato rattle that I badly wanted to be a woodpecker but was never able to confirm. We encountered very few other walkers during our travels, though our path was occasionally crossed by squirrels, and we did meet a pair of horses who were entirely indifferent to our presence in their field.
