Twenty-five miles to Wye and back, and a pint at the Tickled Trout

The map was the first thing to go wrong today, and I only had myself to blame; I'd printed it.

Ordnance Survey do these custom maps where you pick the centre point and they post you a printed sheet. I centred mine on home, in Chartham, which felt sensible right up until I unfolded it this morning and found the very ground I’d be crossing later worn soft in the central crease. Lesson one: never centre the map on where you live.

This one was a section-hike. The North Downs Way is too long to swallow in a day, so you take it in bites, and today’s bite started from the same place the last one did, back in Canterbury, so the sections join up. Home is over in Chartham, so I drove in and left the car at my parents’ place, near the cricket ground, to set off from the right spot. The stretch out to Wye is old Pilgrims’ Way, the branch of the trail that carried the faithful into Canterbury, and it runs through the edge of Chartham on its way; somewhere in the first hour I’d be walking back past my own front door, which rather made a nonsense of driving into town to start. Jimmy and Martin were waiting; my parents’ place was where I’d set out from the last time too, when a group of us walked the North Downs Way the other way, out to Dover. Today we were pointing at Wye instead. Good on paper; in the legs it turned out to be a bigger idea than that. We set off a little after eight, the downs still holding the overnight damp.

The North Downs in October are quietly good. You don’t get the drama of Wales or the Lakes out of Kent, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. What you get instead is miles of chalk track, hedgerows going over to red, and the odd gap in the trees where the whole Stour valley drops away beneath you. We passed a deer enclosure at Petit France, over Chartham Hatch way, a cluster of them watching us through the wire without much concern, as though we were the ones on show. We walked and talked and lost track of the time, which is the entire point of a walk with mates.

Wye arrives as a proper reward. We came down off the downs into the village and more or less straight into the Tickled Trout, which sits by the river, and had lunch and a pint. You hear all the sensible advice about not drinking on a long walk. I can only report what actually happened, which is that the pint made the climb back up onto the downs the easiest bit of the whole day. Whether that was physiology or just good company, I couldn’t tell you, and I’ve no intention of testing it under laboratory conditions.

Somewhere on the way back we took a wrong turn. Not a dangerous one; just the sort that quietly costs you two or three miles you hadn’t budgeted for and can’t give back. By the time we were closing on home the old Garmin on my wrist read 25.7 miles, a good chunk more than we’d set out to do; and that was before you counted the walk across Canterbury to meet the others, which it never saw. It’s the furthest I’ve walked in a day, going by the Garmin.

The kit was nothing clever. That Garmin, a pair of black Merrell Moab GTX mids I bought not long ago, an Osprey daypack with a water bladder in it, the map in the crease, and not a lot else.

The best part came at the very end, which is not how these things normally go. We crested the road over the downs at St Augustine’s, tired and gone quiet by then, straight into a sunset that stopped all three of us where we stood. It had stopped someone else too. Annabelle, a friend from the estate, had pulled her car onto the verge just to sit and watch it. We said hello as we went past; three knackered blokes on foot and someone who’d had the good sense to arrive by car.

We got back in the near-dark. Forty-one kilometres, 738 metres of up, the best part of nine hours with the pub folded into the middle of it, and a map I’d creased straight through the one bit I needed most. It didn’t feel like a hard day, which tells you most of what you need to know about who I walked it with.

The walk