Day 1 – Offa’s Dyke Walk

Let me firstly mention the achievement to Get To the starting town of Chepstow.

We left the Orkneys by bus and ferry after dropping  our hire car. We seamlessly caught a further bus to get from John O’Groats back on the mainland down to Inverness – 7 hours later, safely ensconced at the B& B in Inverness.  We had a lovely dinner at the little Italian we’d discovered when we rode through there a couple of weeks before.  After a slow morning around Inverness we headed out  to the airport about 12.30pm.  Only to be told that there were no counter check ins with Easyjet – only on line, and as we had not done that our seats were probably gone as the plane was overbooked.  Heart in mouth we waited while the Easyjet man decided whether he could make an exception – which luckily he did!  The plane was late leaving which put us behind time when we landed in Bristol.  We caught a later bus into Bristol which took forever but was also super hot as southern England was suffering their first heat wave for the summer and nothing is air-conditioned – especially not buses.  We finally made it to the bus station and caught the last bus to Chepstow – so hot for an hour.  We arrived hot and bothered about 6pm so decided to catch a taxi to our accommodation.  Ba-boung!! No taxis available for the next hour at least.  We decided to put our back packs on and walk – luckily it ended up being no more than a 15 minute walk downhill. To top it off, our information package and my boots (which I’d posted over from OZ) weren’t there but a quick call to Celtic Tours who’d booked our accommodation and will move our big bags each day and it was all sorted.  We just had time for a cooling beer and our for a quick bite to eat before getting to bed.  Unfortunately this meant we didn’t have much time to read through our instructions for the walk the next day.

So Day 1 starts well.  We decide to post most of my riding gear back to Australia so that I have some room in my pack (now that I’m carrying my big boots) so we didn’t get away until around 10am which is very late for us. The walk out of Chepstow was wonderful.  It its forecast to be the hottest day in the heat wave today but at 30 degrees it wasn’t too bad.  We are walking the Wye valley (well actually the ridge tops most of the time) and it is so pretty and green.  Offa’s Dyke is amazing to behold.  I real feat of engineering  from around 750AD.  Offa was a big English (Mercian actually) chief who built the dyke as a show of strength against the Welsh kingdoms but there is debate about the actual time and use of the dyke. It was about 8m high with a ditch on the Welsh side – altogether about 27m across but now in a lot of places it is hard to discern.  Our route today took us above Tintern Abbey which we had stopped at during the ride.

Now I’ll tell you why I wrote “unfortunately” when mentioning that we didn’t have time to read our notes carefully the night before.  I’d read the guide book which has a walker going through to a place called Redbrook on the first day – about 24kms.  As we descended down to Redbrook about 5.30pm this afternoon, we took out our instructions of where to find our accommodation for the night and found that it was actually about 8 kms back up the ridge to a village we’d passed long ago.  Luckily our wonderfully kind B &B host drove over to pick us up and bring us to their lovely guest house.  Needless to say, we’ve had a better read of things tonight after a meal at pub in a village nearby.