Day 20: a difficult walk from Cheddar to Timsbury

Distance: 17.4 miles
Time till our day off: 16 hours

Today we walked through my favorite named nature reserve of all time: Velvet Bottom. And speaking of great English names, we promised we'd tell you about the boobery that we saw on a map of Sampson Peverell a couple of days ago. We spent a good part of the day discussing just what a boobery might be, but we were completely on the wrong track. It's not a thing at all, it's simply the name of a neighbourhood. So the way a normal person might name a neighbourhood "Walnut Park" or "The East Side", somebody decided to name this place "Boobery". So you might hear: "Where you from?". "Boobery. It's just up from Velvet Bottom".


(sadly, Velvet Bottom and Boobery are not really anywhere near each other)

Both Dawn and I found today's walk really draining. It wasn't anything in particular. It wasn't our longest walk so far (though it was close). It wasn't the most climbing (though at 3200 feet it wasn't exactly flat). It wasn't the weather (misty, a damp cold, but no rain). I think it's mostly just a day that had nothing easy about it, combined with the strain of walking 20 days in a row.

To top it off, in the last two days I've managed to leave behind two different things. Yesterday, it was my stainless steel water flask (isn't "flask" a much better word than "bottle"? - some things the english just have right). I left it on a table in the Rodney Stoke Inn. A drag, but I can get a new one tomorrow in Bath. Today was much worse. Before we left on this trip, Dawn spent hours carefully putting together a small packet that had all of our logistics: where we stay, addresses, phone numbers, etc. This little packet has been our brains for the trip. Today, on a bench outside the Ring o' Bells pub in Hinton Blewett, I used it to look up the phone number for today's B&B. Then I put the packet down on the bench ... and left it there. They ought to rename the place alv blewett. This is bad, but not tragic: we should be able to reconstruct most everything using emails and the web. But it's bad enough. Here is a cool picture of graffiti under a bridge from a few days back to make me feel better.


The day started really well. We walked to the bottom of the Cheddar Gorge, where cliffs tower hundreds of feet overhead. People have lived in the gorge's caves for tens of thousands of years, and they've used the caves to age and store their delicious cheese for centuries.


Scientists even found a cheddar man in one of the caves! I thought he was a dude made of cheese, but it turns out that's wrong. The truth is even more cool:


As you might guess from the poster there are a few tourist places in Cheddar - like Niagara Falls on a much smaller scale. In true tourist town tradition, they charge you a few pounds to get to the stairs that go up onto the cliffs - where we needed to go. But since it was early, and no one was around, I encouraged Dawn to hop the fence. As I'm sure her siblings and our kids would agree, this kind of rule breaking is a good character building exercise for her.


It was a foggy day, but even so, the views from the top were stunning. I can't imagine what it's like on a clear day. We were happy the fog wasn't dense, so we could at least have a taste of what it's like.


From the top of the gorge, we made our way east through the Mendip Hills. It's lovely country, but somehow we just weren't feeling it today. I was struggling with some nerve pain in my toes throughout the day. The morning was fine for Dawn, but by the time afternoon rolled around, she was feeling pretty tired - with many miles still to go.



Once we made it to Timsbury, we were a little unclear on exactly where to find our B&B. I looked in the back pocket of Dawn's pack for our trip info, which would give the address ... and that's when I realized all of our information was on a bench five miles back. The low point of our trip so far. A hot shower and some tea helped, but I still feel like an idiot.

Tomorrow we have a thankfully short and potentially very nice walk into Bath. We're staying at the Apsley House, which looks great. And we're staying two nights. It will be our first day off since we started - we are looking forward to it.

Location:Almost to Bath