7 Aug 06 Weekend of walking

This weekend we clocked at least 25 miles/40km on foot!

Saturday was lovely, not too hot, so we ventured from home near Aldgate East to Covent Garden and back. It was imperative we stop in at a hardware store to pick up some mouse poison. Yes, after all our humane efforts to stop the mouse madness in Ithaca we have been ‘forced’ to try alternative methods here. This is a new building, so it’s surprising how quickly these peskies infiltrate. The humane traps you buy here do NOT work and I’ve been trapping on my own with a combination approach: corral the mouse behind a rickety arrangement of cardboard boxes then cup it under a tupperware bowl. I’m a champion trapper! First sign, a couple of months ago, there was only one mouse traveling through the building and accessing the cupboard under the sink through holes around the piping. Then the other day I got quite worried when I spotted no less than three mice… in the bedroom. I was working at the computer and glanced down to see one sitting between my feet! My nerves were a bit shot that day :) I was convinced they had nested under the bed, but after a thorough cleanup found that wasn’t the case. They had created a spawning paradise at the back of our storage closet, behind the water heater, in a gaping hole cut to fit the pipes. So we set the humane traps, but they absolutely do not work. Since Friday night there’s been no indication of a return but we just laid out some poison anyway. Stay away rodents!

Sunday we interacted with different, cuter, and much larger animals: sheeps and cows! It was the first walk we chose to do out of Time Out’s Country Walks (near London) books, Volumes One and Two (not to be confused with 50 Walks to Country Pubs). We traveled an hour by train to Lewes, followed the guidebook out of town, up a hill and across a field, and soon discovered we picked one of the tougher walks in the book :) They may not be mountains high as Banff or BC, but there are some huge rolling hills and valleys through the south and we trekked up and down more than a few of them during that 15 miles! In the UK you can cross through farms on privately owned ‘access land‘ without fear of being shot on sight.

Under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW), the public can now walk freely on mapped areas of mountain, moor, heath, down and registered land without the need to stick to paths.

We came across a farmer and son shearing sheep, walked past them onto their fenced property, and further along met with a large herd of friendly curious cattle. We moaned through layers of sweat as we hiked from the first valley up a 700m hill. Direct sun and humidity didn’t make this experience the most pleasant, but luckily later on the clouds overcast. Before we left home we knew Lewes had a lovely castle, but seeing it up close wasn’t meant to be. This walk was pure country, and after walking the final five miles along the river Ouse, where we counted 38 white swans and passed the spot where Virginia Woolf walked into the river to her death, we had no energy left to climb the (relatively small) hill up to the castle.

Some notes on sheep doo doo and cow pies: Some sheep poop out a bundle of blueberry-sized pellets while others don’t. The contrast between the two types is confusing. Cows plop perfectly round 12-inch pies. Attempts to avoid all these hazards were futile, and I’ll just say a crunch underfoot is so much better than a squish…