In the last installment we left you waiting at the railway crossing for a train to pass before we left Roydon the patch of fertile land a roaming band of Saxon farmers settled into on their new found island 24 miles north of the roman ruins of Londinium and just over a third of the way along our walk to Cambridge.
Now, three months later I am home, idly turning the globe in my room to look down on this sceptered isle, a dot amongst the many great or small that are strung around the globe at this latitude, poking just far enough out of the blue to keep us Americans, Europeans and Asians dry, yet close enough to splash our coasts and steam our skies and tumble over fields and forests, keeping billions of us alive as together as we spin through our days, our busy green beads chasing each other as we burn around the neck of the world whilst up top its polar white sun cap is cracking and exposing a balding blue circle and homeless bears roaming in peril from the sun.
I spin my tilted globe to catch the sideways sun light from my window to get my head around the whole idea. Then think of millions of us like tiny bristles standing upright on the coloured territories staked out of the blue. Then it strikes me that every time we meet our feet must be slightly closer and our faces further back, leaning away from one another forced upright on the ball as we reach to shake hands. To get this in perspective the leaning tower of Pisa leans only about 4 degrees which seems a lot when you see it and when I stand up here in Cambridge I am leaning away from my London self by about a quarter of this, reflecting the degree or so we climbed up the ball this midsummers day.
This equinox week, the whole world north or south from its flat white frozen penguin feet right across the massive belly of Africa, whence we came, right up to its cracking polar cap, was equalized as we came together in the sun for the same twelve hours. The equal night and day reminding us up top of the coming long nights as we ride back deeper into shadow, or our feet down under of the sunshine to come as they emerge, or the Africans and others on the equator under the burning midday sun that their missing noon shadows would bounce back from under their feet and stretch away to the north side this time leaving them a few cooler months for the second time this year
The short warm nights we enjoyed leaving the streets of London in, just three full moons ago, have now gone south with the swallows. As each dusk gathers in, gaggles of new visitors, yearning for their eternal days of summer, but spurning the long cold nights, arrive to share our local comfort and security for the shorter warmer nights. We see them arriving in waves at our local lake splashing down in lines out of the deep rosy purple sky, rippling the surface and catching the last glinting embers of the setting sun, as it catches us all out once again by it's haste to leave us in the dark and get over to the other side.
Our less welcome new visitors this year seem set to stay. Finding a new home in our warm blooded bodies, they're becoming the nuisance neighbour wherever we are spinning around the world. Whilst the icy habitat for polar bears is shrinking fast we humans are growing 81 million people each year and building the houses for our unwelcome new neighbours faster than even they destroy them, but destroying them they still are, at least 1 million gone with COVID since we left London in June and 4 million since theis time last year. This silent tide of invisible seeds waiting to grab and penetrate us to breed and diversify into this precious habitat we have grown like no other left on the planet.
Despite almost half of us being vaccinated the bell seems to be continuing its steady toll with perhaps another million leaving us before they see the end of this year. In a normal year the world loses about fifty seven million souls so an extra four million is around a month’s worth of extra deaths from this new cause.
But back to happier thoughts of life and grand memories of our walk …
After crossing the Stort and the railway at Roydon, we followed the Hunsdon Brook rising steadily through the grey morning up the north side of the valley. With a clear steady path for hours ahead, the frantic clambering in the mud and chatter in the pitch dark chaos six hours ago has settled us into a confident groove. I sink into a comfortable rhythm of one hundred beats a minute and my mind wanders out above the harmony of my heart and feet across this valley beyond it to the whole world supporting us as we edge up around the spinning blue marble we call home.
Our path is still damp with the run off of yesterday's rain. The flush green grass on either side sprouting more sprightly than the hair on my head as our lively legs speed past, disturbing the dead grey clay with each step and throwing the occasional sod to the wind and rain, to run back down the bubbling brook and feed the deep blue sea surrounding us with the concentrated minerals of life’s decay.
Meanwhile, this apparently solid ground underfoot is racing both faster and slower than we can imagine. When we started off east out of London we were already spinning at hundreds of miles and hour out of the shadow of night towards the sun and break of day before we added the paltry three miles an hour we have kept up since. Since we turned up north we are edging closer to the middle of the spin and the ground below now whizzing us around from left to right is taking a slightly shorter and slower trip as we walk up it. By afternoon we will be spinning away from the sun even when it comes around to face us in the late afternoon and we feel we are walking towards it as it sets.
Seems hard to take that each step north is slowing us down but while we are climbing this hill we are getting further from the centre of earth and further out on the spinning ball must be speeding up again until we head back downhill towards the centre of the earth.
Stretching my imagination up, way above the spinning ball through the clouds that hide the sun today, I start thinking of the hundreds of millions of miles our whole world takes to get around it each year. Then beyond that to our spin together around the invisible black hole at the centre of our galaxy before I am lost spinning in the thought that everything is moving further and faster away from everythiing else in the rest of the unimaginable mathematical universe even as I take each slow ponderous step through our time today...
After these fleeting thoughts, the mud and long wet grass drag me back down to earth. I start to ponder the fact that this little bit of England is slowly doing its own thing. Floating nervously on the sea of molten rock below, it is still edging up north towards the top of the world at less than the speed my hair grows as it has edged north for millions of years. This little piece of southern England was spared the crushing mile or more of ice that pilled up north of London just 10,000 years ago and squashed the whole of the north further into the molten rock below it tilting the south up a bit like a see-saw. So that now since the weight has come off the top end is still groaning slowly back up and this end is settling gently back down as the ice runs into the artic seas and way down here to lap at its white cliffs as they continue to sink and collapse back into the sea where new chalk is forming in the shallows under the summer sun.
Moving too fast and too slow to get my head around what I know to be true now I start to wonder where this hill we climb came from and when. Some new dirt is growing out of the air we breathe and settling to dark carbonised soil below the blades of grass on either side, but the grey mud below lived and died in a sea somewhere else millions of years back.
Soil stuffed with dead cells, that lived brief lives crunching chemicals in the sunlight above or below water and that are still dropping dead from the grass and trees and in the rivers and ponds that we walk past today.
Looking ahead, the spire of Widford church reached up and led us on up the slope to the precipice. We had stopped here in the shadow of the church on a practice walk and admired this impressive view of the valley of the River Ash on a sunnier day in May.
The slow climb up the clay plateau before dropping into the green water meadows of the River Ash
As the earth wobbled closer to the warm sun all those centuries ago, the vast ice caps that covered all of this clay plateau started melting year by year and as the cliff of ice receded northwards the liquid water could only escape south over the clay.
This young river ash became a raging torrent each Spring cutting down through the softest clay to leave this impressive cliff edge pretty much where it is today. Torrents of mud and ice tore south and left on the picture below into the soft clay bowl of London, where, joining the Thames from the west, turned East together and out to fill the sea that still drags the boats into London on its flood tides as surely as the earth spins from dawn to dusk or the cold moon glides over silver clouds on warm summer nights.
On the edge of the valley of River Ash about to drop to the lush green water meadows taken back in May 2021
When we had plunged down this same clay bank a month earlier we stopped for lunch to admire the flowers and sun but today the sun and flowers are gone and we must press on but the river still bubbles through the meadows over flint washed out from the chalk just starting to emerge at our feet. The valley guided our way to the Bull at Much Hadham where we stopped for lunch.
Next time we report we will pick up on the afternoon leg that took us over the and home.
If you haven’t donated to our cause you still can for a few more weeks but don’t delay since Virgin Giving are shutting down their service very soon