Last weekend, I jumped on the train to Pembroke. From there, I walked to Haverfordwest.
According to Google Maps, my route was around 10.5 miles and took me around six hours; maybe five and a half if I exclude a stop en route, which I’ll talk about a bit later.
The trip was to fill in a gap in my itinerary for the book I’m researching, which is about the route taken by Sir Gawain in the 14th-century Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Much of the book will be about Wales at the time when the poem was written – not just events, but also the way people thought and experienced the world.
I expected my research to focus more on north Wales, but Pembrokeshire has become surprisingly important, not least because it turns out to have strong connections with Gawain himself. The main focus of this most recent walk was to visit the church in the village of Rosemarket where, in medieval times, Gawain was thought to have been buried.
With this done, I’ve now walked pretty much the whole way from the south Pembrokeshire coast to the foot of Pumlumon in mid-Wales, and I can finally turn my attention to north Wales!
This particular trip sparked a number of trains of thought.
One is a heightened sense of impermanence. More than anywhere else I know, Pembrokeshire shows that ebb and flow of cultures and peoples over time. It’s reflected in the names of the villages I walked through. There’s Rosemarket itself, which has nothing to do with roses! The name actually comes from the Welsh word “Rhos” or ‘heath’ – so it’s a composite Cambro-English word signifying a heath where a market was held. There’s Troopers Inn (no idea of its origin), and the Norse-sounding Freystrop, surely a throwback to Viking settlement. English, Flemings, Normans, Northmen, Welsh, all the way back to the neolithic stone-circle builders, all have come and settled, building their communities and leaving traces. All of them thinking that this world of theirs would last forever; all of them eventually facing the end of their world in one way or another.
This melancholy train of thought was already present when I left Carmarthen, where the streets are strewn with rubbish. Carmarthen, though, still has a relatively vibrant town centre. In Haverfordwest, the county town of Pembrokeshire, the centre is dead. Even one of the charity shops had a sign in the window announcing its closing-down sale. The broken castle, once beloved by Edward I’s queen, Eleanor of Castile, now overlooks a dying town. In the hotel where I stayed overnight, staff and locals described how there’s no work, nothing to anchor the young people where they grew up.
It’s a topic for another day, but it seems that this sense of malaise now affects not just Wales or even the UK, but Europe and much of the western world. And it’s true that our current way of life was built on a flow of cheap energy and cheap resources which is now rapidly drying up. That’s partly because of depletion and partly because the countries where we got these things now insist on keeping more for themselves.
It seems inevitable, then, that what can’t go on won’t go on. We’re on the brink of a transition to a new way of life that can’t sustain supermarket shopping or office jobs for life, which can’t maintain roads or provide the levels of healthcare we’ve come to take for granted.
And that leads me to consider myself.
My spirit may be young, but my body is becoming “middle-aged” with all that that entails.
People I met were surprised that I’d walked from Pembroke to Haverfordwest; they seem to think that 10+ miles is a long way. When I started on this project, I struggled to walk seven miles in a day, so ten is definitely an improvement – and, presently, I’m consistently doing 10-12. I’m aiming for 15 on my next trip, which should be manageable with care, and I’d like that to be my norm.
Ageing doesn’t have to lead to deterioration – but it needs more and more effort to make sure of that! Once I was super-fit and thin, but I’ve lived a sedentary life for too long. I don’t know why, but this last walk was a real struggle; I never felt like I loosened up, and it felt like I was struggling through mud the whole way.
Getting out on the road, following in Gawain’s footsteps on his quest to find the Green Knight has involved a lot of reading about medieval knights, yeomen, bards and seers. One thing that I’ve learned is that knights frequently remained physically strong – including going into battle – into their sixties or even seventies, and often remained intellectually active, including serving in Parliament, even beyond that. Of course, they were the nobility – but our modern society makes resources available to ordinary people that go far beyond those available to the aristocracy of the middle ages. What they did, we can do – if we are prepared to put the work in.
And that’s really important as we move into a period of social and economic decline. If our way of life were to continue as it’s been for decades, I could expect to depend more and more on medicines to prop up my health. The signs are already appearing that this won’t be true in the future, and I now expect this trend to accelerate.
So this means I need to put together a program for ageing well. It’ll have to build strength and cardio, of course, but also flexibility, balance, and the ability to fall safely.
But that’s not enough. It would ideally also include mental training, to keep my mind active and strong.
And there’s more. It should include the other things we need to stay healthy – social contacts, emotional resilience… and something to give life meaning.
Fortunately, I have just the thing in mind. I’ve already started writing that book too. I just need to start living it.
Well, like the walks on Gawain’s path: it’s a matter of sticking to it and putting one foot in front of the other…
Photo by Buddika Gunathilaka on Unsplash
Traethiad 