We last left you eating breakfast sitting on a bench in a country churchyard 24 miles out through the forest from London.
Villagers emerged from their slumbering houses to walk the dog or nip to the shop before heading into town. One or two passed glances in our direction, but nobody dared approach us three strangers with shoes off and tubs of salad in their church yard.
I sat, munching and contemplating the ordinary comings and goings, struggling to comprehend that only a few hours earlier we were within the walls of London. Now, London seemed as distant as the Romans who first made and named the place 20 centuries ago. They named our months too but on this June morning I am sitting by a church built around 10 centuries later so halfway from then to now at a time when waves of restless Saxons then Normans crossed the sea to get away from the crowds on mainland europe, pushing inland up the rivers of this island to find a brighter future or fertile fields in peace and quiet or seizing control by force. Some stopped here at this split in the river, around our breakfast seat, and settled down to grow rye, until, like some others in Angle land by hills (duns) of rye (ryge), this place came to be called “Roydon”.
We are the newcomers today coming down from the ancient wooded hills through the fields to pause by the river that cut through them and made it slow and easy to carry loads of rye and people to and from this special place before the rails and roads made everywhere else fast and easy around a century ago.
Those Saxon settlers rarely strayed far from these places and the familiar earth that fed them. Churchyards like this and the others we pass today bear witness to local familiar names set in the stone marking lives of millers, coopers, weavers and smiths that eventually saw the trains then cars then planes arrive in or over their village to disperse their children's names, genes and ideas out and about and all around the world in the time it took us to get here on foot from London today.
There was a time, when the news of the world, and diseases too, arrived here at the speed of strangers by boat, horse or like us on foot. Today we went about our strangely unremarkable business unnoticed amongst more exciting stories or threats that come and go by road or flit past at the speed of light across hand held screens.
And go we must as time presses on, north across the revolutionary victorian steam railway squeezed in here at the pinch in the valley against the slow lazy river that it vanquished before it quickly fell to the motor car.
On many mornings past, I gazed sleepily helpless from the stopping train sat in the station, strangely satisfied that the versatile and ubiquitous cars were held back in time on the little stone bridge over the river. But today, pedestrians on the outside, over the river, it was our turn to mark time impatient to get past and out back into our stride across the open fields.
We were still less than halfway home.
Our next update will take you out of this valley, beyond its narrow horizon over the hills to where we stopped for lunch.