Day 19: Cheese, Grommit

Distance: 14.1 miles
Weather: foggy

Our day began with a lovely breakfast with our host, Justine, and her awesome cat, Apache. This cat is as social as Cooper and loved sitting on Al's lap, just like Cooper.


We headed out of Glastonbury in a heavy fog, walking along lanes between ditches, continuing through the Somerset Levels. We had another interesting sheep encounter not long into the day. When we were moving off the paved lanes and onto foot paths, we stopped so I could change from my running shoes to my hiking boots and gaiters. We were next to a field, luckily fenced, of a few dozen sheep. Nothing like the hoards in the field yesterday, but still a bunch. When we were shaking out the bags my boots were in, the sheep went crazy. They all turned and started moving towards us baa-ing loudly, some even ran. The din was amazing and the variety of voices was too. My favorite was a really loud, really low bass. It went well with the more frantic sopranos.

No pictures of the sheep today, it was the audio that was so memorable, but we did take some pictures of cows in the mist. They were strangely beautiful.


We also had our first major footpath disaster. We've been figuring our routes out using the totally awesome Ordnance Survey maps. Sometimes we're on obvious things like roads and lanes, sometimes we're on major waymarked trails, and sometimes we're on footpaths. These can be well traveled and obvious or less traveled and more of a challenge to find. For the most part, the foot paths in this area have been great, but you never really know for sure if it goes through to where it should, or if there's really a bridge over that ditch until you get there. Well, today we got "there" where the map showed a footpath leading from the end of a lane, across some fields and up to a town. Perfect! Except when we got "there", we came to a sturdily locked gate with a bunch of cows looking at us. We consulted the map to make sure this is where the path should be. Checked the Garmin. Yup, we were in the right place, only no path. This meant a mile backtracking and walking into the town on the A road, a busy thoroughfare with absolutely no extra room. To say we feared for our lives would not be an exaggeration, and all because a farmer didn't want people walking along one of his fences and didn't let anyone know so signs could be posted.


Eventually we made it to Cheddar. This is the one place we purposely worked our route to reach. Although we were disappointed to find that the town is not made of cheese, we are looking forward to walking along the Cheddar Gorge (England's largest gorge) on our way out of town tomorrow. Hopefully the fog will lift because I'm sure it's gorgeous!