Wales: A walk along Offa’s Dyke Path with Bill Bryson

WELSHPOOL, WalesBill Bryson leans his walking stick outside a tiny, rough-stone church, where a hand-lettered sign invites “Dykers” — that would be us — to step inside for orange juice, barley water, tea and coffee.

Cracking open my guidebook, I note that this Welsh hamlet’s tradition of providing free refreshment to walkers and other travelers dates to a visit by King Charles II in the late 17th century.

“In that case,” said Bryson, pouring us each a cup of tea, “you might want to check the sell-by date on that milk.”

Since moving back to Britain in 2003, the author of “Notes From a Small Island,” “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” “At Home” and other bestsellers has been walking the hills and dales of his adopted country. Hiking here is nothing like the sweatily disagreeable trudge along the Appalachian Trail that Bryson recounted in his 1998 classic, “A Walk in the Woods.”

Instead of staggering under 50-pound backpacks, we’re carrying little more than rain jackets and toothbrushes. Rather than pitching tents on hard ground or sharing trail-side lean-tos with the funk-encrusted socks of other hikers, we’re looking forward to soft beds, fresh sheets and hot showers in a succession of bed-and-breakfasts and repurposed manor houses.

On this hike there will be no boiling of noodles over a temperamental camp stove, no pressing of toilet paper into service as a coffee filter. We’ll dine in convivial pubs and the occasional Indian restaurant, and start our days with a proper, full-bang English breakfast.

Our setting couldn’t be more at odds with the tangled, bear-infested mountains harboring “armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus” that Bryson described in “A Walk in the Woods.” We’re strolling the gentle (well, mostly), beckoning hills along the Anglo-Welsh border, which at the moment are alive with newborn lambs and carpets of bluebells, and punctuated every few miles by handsome steepled villages.

“Compared to the Appalachian Trail, this is hiking at its wimpiest,” said Bryson, pausing to take in the view of the plump and verdant Shropshire Hills. “But I much prefer it. On the AT, we were always stooped over, staring at our feet, like we were carrying a chest of drawers through the American wilderness. Here it’s just a pleasant stroll in the country, and we’ve got a nice pub waiting for us at the end of the day.”

I was accompanying the author and his regular hiking partners — Andrew Orme, a retired marketing executive, and Daniel Wiles, a retired television producer — on a six-day walk along part of Offa’s Dyke Path, one ofBritain’s19 official long-distance trails.

The pathway, which winds 177 miles from the River Severn in the south to the Irish Sea in the north, loosely follows an earthen “dyke,” as the Brits spell it, “dike” as Americans do — a dirt wall and ditch — built in the late eighth century by the Anglo-Saxon King Offa of Mercia to keep out the Welsh. Today the dike, the footpath and the modern border between England and Wales all traverse roughly the same ground, crisscrossing each other like strands in a braid.

We began in the Welsh market town of Hay-on-Wye, where it took some willpower to escape into the hills. Hay is home to at least 30 used and specialty bookstores, and its tangled warren of streets is lined with open-air bookcases sagging under the weight of tempting volumes. But any acquisitions would have to ride on our backs for the next 65 miles, so we followed the River Wye out of town, reluctantly unencumbered.

Our route traced a hedge-lined country lane and wandered past the tottering stone barn and outbuildings of a small farm, where the farmer, standing in mud-encrusted Wellington boots next to an ancient, mud-encrusted Range Rover, nodded a hello. At the edge of his pasture we scampered over a stile, a little stepladder to help walkers surmount fences and hedges.

Across large swaths of the bucolic British countryside, there is no such thing as trespassing. The British staunchly protect and defend their right to amble wherever their feet may take them — even across fenced-in pastures. It was enshrined in a national Right to Roam law in 2000, but the impulse dates back almost two centuries, when poet William Wordsworth described the Lake District as “a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.”

The landscape here is hardly in a league with the jaw-dropping spectacles of Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, but it’s beguiling in a quiet and homey sort of way, and Bryson, for one, is exceedingly fond of it.

“It’s certainly not a wilderness like you’d find in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s a handmade landscape, and it’s been tinkered with and improved for centuries. The hedgerows and the barns and the little humpback bridges and the steeples are all there to serve a purpose, and the result is just accidentally gorgeous.”

Since 2007, Bryson has served as president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and he’s worried that the landscape is losing its distinctive visage as its hedgerows vanish. By one count, more than a third of all the hedges in Britain — 120,000 miles of them — have been uprooted since the mid-1980s because of maintenance costs or large-scale plowing.

“Without hedgerows, this could be Iowa,” said Bryson, pointing to a distant hillside where they have been torn out. “It’s not just the way they give a pattern to the land. They’re an ecosystem all to themselves, a home to hundreds of species of birds and mice and hedgehogs. They’re our Great Barrier Reef.”

Late that afternoon, in the somnolent hamlet of Gladestry, we came upon another endangered feature of the British countryside, the village pub.

Dating to 1650, with heavy oak beams, an uneven flagstone floor and a crackling fire in the hearth, the Royal Oak Inn was a classic of the genre. Four village residents clustered around the bar, bantering in either (I couldn’t tell which) Welsh or heavily Welsh-accented English. They welcomed us into their conversation, but I couldn’t understand more than a word or two. I just smiled appreciatively and tried to chuckle when everyone else did.

It made for a more entertaining evening than what Bryson usually endured on the Appalachian Trail.

“When I was doing the hike with my friend Katz, there wasn’t much to do at night except sit on a log for a while, then crawl into a tent on hard ground,” said Bryson as he sipped a pint of Butty Bach ale. “This is so much more civilized.”

But as owner Brian Hall checked us into our upstairs bedrooms, he lamented that running a country pub was more of a challenge than he had expected when he retired and moved here from England. “If I knew what I was getting into, I’m not sure I would have done it.”

Since 2005, according to the Economist, 6,000 British pubs — about 10% of the total — have shut their doors, victims of consolidation by chains, a nationwide smoking ban and changing social habits.

“Traditionally, pubs like this have been the village’s living room,” said Bryson. “It’s where you came to meet your neighbors, swap gossip and participate in the social life of the community. But these days people would rather stay home and have a glass of wine in front of the TV.”

Over the next five days, wandering back and forth across the Anglo-Welsh border — which was rarely marked — we walked alongside Offa’s Dyke for long stretches and even atop it for a short spell.

A weathered mound of dirt 4 to 8 feet high, it’s not nearly as impressive as the Roman-built Hadrian’s Wall, which stretches imperially across northern England. King Offa appears to have constructed his dike more as a line of demarcation — a political statement — than as an actual defensive barrier.

But woe to anyone caught on the wrong side of it in Offa’s day. According to George Borrow’s “Wild Wales,” “it was customary for the English to cut off the ears of every Welshman who was found to the east of the dike, and for the Welsh to hang every Englishman whom they found to the west of it.”

It’s been called “England’s greatest surviving Anglo-Saxon monument.” It’s certainly the longest.

One afternoon, as we left the dike and descended a steep hillside above the village of Llanfair Waterdine, we heard a bleating commotion and looked down to see a roiling sea of wool surging toward us.

Llewelyn Morgan, a shepherd straight out of central casting, was moving his flock to a higher pasture. Actually, his dog Sandy, an energetic and no-nonsense taskmaster, was doing all the heavy lifting. Morgan flashed hand signals and occasionally whistled, and Sandy raced back and forth around the perimeter of the flock, herding them into a tight, orderly bunch. Once a couple of sheep made a mad dash to escape, but Sandy chased them down and coerced them back to the flock, nipping at their heels.

Elsewhere in Britain, I’ve attended formal sheep dog trials, but there’s nothing like seeing the real thing in action.

“I could have four men helping me,” said Morgan, “but they couldn’t do what Sandy does.”

As we chatted with Morgan, I tried to burn the scene into my memory. For this too was another tableau of British country life that could be gone a generation from now. The next day we came across a younger shepherd herding his flock. He had no dog, and he was riding an all-terrain vehicle.

“That’s what’s so wonderful about walking,” Bryson said later. “If we were passing by at 60 mph on the motorway, we wouldn’t have seen any of this.”

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