Emily goes for another walk

I have walked three days from home, for the first time in a purposefully northerly direction and in only three days it feels as though I am in the Hills of the North. At my final Evensong at St Peter's we sang 'Hills of the north rejoice', because   the landscape is alive - it does breathe and sing and welcome and warn and change with light and weather and human footprint. I referred to 'The North' in an earlier chapter as it began to appear on road signs in Cambridgeshire, and it seemed a long way off, a nebulous concept, unsure of where it began and where its boundaries were. Now I feel like it's beginning to appear. And today I saw a road sign with 'The South' and 'The North' on it. So maybe this is the in between land ...  Leaving home on Thursday, KT tape on my knee, and a rucksack heavier than it's been so far due to the amount of maps and camping gas, I walked through fields of green under a heavy grey sky. The north eastern edge of Le...

I have walked 33 days now, and with 450 miles done, the daily average mileage from here will rise, as will altitude, rucksack weight, and scarcity of signal and electricity sockets. I have found my way from Cornwall to home - current home - and after resting for a day, with frozen peas on my knee, and washing in and out of the machine, I will take an almost consistent northerly direction to the border of Scotland. I have walked through 13 counties, and experienced more variations of weather than I could have imagined. I have had more funny, moving, strange and generous encounters I could have expected, and seen a multitude of views of flatlands, ridges, forests, woods, lakes, reservoirs, rivers, sea, fields, hedges, flowers, greens, yellows, rainbows, urban sprawl, rural agriculture, villages, lanes, highways, dust, mud, bog. I have seen red kites, buzzards, owls, skylarks, egrets, heron, all varieties of little birds, ducks, foxes, deer, hares, rabbits, sheep, cows, alpacas, goats, ll...

It has been a very hot couple of days, with sunscreen and sunglasses and rolled up trousers to make shorts. The morning I left Bedford, the mother and 5 year old daughter in the room next door in the little hostel/ill-equipped B&B I was staying in were getting ready for school, in their temporary one-room living space. A young couple upstairs, he in hi-vis work clothes, she heavily pregnant, were working out the day ahead of them. It was not a place for holidays.  I joined the old Cambridge to Bedford railway line, now a cycle route, alongside the Great Ouse river. It was already hot and an hour and a half in I stopped at a little riverside cafe at Danish Camp for some lemonade. The river eventually parted ways with the railway line and I followed it the rest of the day to St Neots, along dappled tree-lined paths, the birds singing and the blossom out, and boats slowly ambling in the water breeze. The Ouse Valley route, before entering St Neots, took me alongside the A1. Li...