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All images in the photo sections are courtesy of the author with the following exceptions;

here (Seagull Rising I) © Jason Gathorne-Hardy
here (Bowderdale Valley) © Jasper Winn
here (Amanda and Clive Owen) © Amanda and Clive Owen
here (Hugo Hildyard) © Florencia Clifford
here (Steampunks and Goths) © Bryan Ledgard
here (‘Still talking after 200 miles’) © Jasper Winn

Introduction

THOSE WHO HAVE travelled with me before – along The Green Road into the Trees or through any of the South American books – know what to expect. But others might require a health warning on the packet.

This book is unashamedly personal. It is more interested in people than landscape, and in farmers than animals. Those wanting a pure bit of ‘nature writing’ should look elsewhere – and without great difficulty, as there has been a plethora of such books over the last few years.

Writers’ courses always tell you that you should make a ‘contract’ with the reader. While I won’t bother you with all my clauses, one is significant – that I will try to avoid bedazzling you with rare botanical names or birds you’ve never heard of.

There is always a sort of reader who needs to join up the dots: to know exactly how you get from A to B, where you spent the night, what you had for breakfast and the price of a coffee in Kirkby Stephen. They should not buy this book just to get from coast to coast. There are plenty of suitable guidebooks which will do that job for you. Indeed, I would go further – this book might actually get you lost.

It is perfectly possible to drive across the north of England very fast – say, on the A66 past Barnard Castle, as long as the Appleby Horse Fair isn’t taking place. Even on a bike it can be done in two days, as my friend Jeff Ford has done. But this is a more discursive journey that goes at mule pace, chats over gates to farmers and takes in byways as well as highways. I have tried to unpick the threads of what is really happening in the rapidly changing countryside, far from London and the metropolitan conversation.

Nothing beats walking for taking the temperature of a country. I was inspired to make this journey by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. As Stevenson wrote:

The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

There is a song I found useful to sing while travelling and the reader might like to hum it too if at any point they need accompaniment. For some reason, Jethro never seemed to appreciate it.

Oh I got plenty o’ nothing,

An’ nothing’s plenty fo’ me.

I got no car, got no mule,

I got no misery.

‘I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’, as sung
by Frank Sinatra

A visitor to the British Isles usually disembarks in lowland England. He is charmed by its orderly arrangement and by its open landscapes, tamed and formed by man and mellowed by 1,000 years of human history.

There is another Britain, to many of us the better half, a land of mountains and moorlands and of sun and cloud, and it is with this upland Britain that these pages are concerned.

It is equal in area to lowland Britain, but its population is less than that of a single large town. It lies now, as always, beyond the margins of our industrial and urban civilisations, fading into the western mists and washed by northern seas, its needs forgotten and its possibilities almost unknown.

Chapter 1

The North Crossing

Of all pack animals the mule is the favourite, and although frequently employed as a draught or riding animal, it is as a pack carrier that he is known best.

The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)

Jimmy Richardson gave me a hard look. He was a big man but had small eyes like currants, set in a broad white face. I had arrived while he was still on the phone. He had plenty of time to assess me as he sat on a sofa surrounded by the spillage from a multi-pack bag of crisps; nor had he been in any hurry to finish the call.

We were in the end house of a terraced street south of Newcastle, close to where they filmed Billy Elliot. An area where shops were shuttered with security blinds, and both men and boys wore their hair shaved to the bone.

Maybe that was the first problem about me. I needed a haircut. But I could tell that Jimmy also liked to weigh up a man and disconcert him a little – both useful tactics for a horse dealer. Or in this case, mule dealer.

He had heard I wanted one. I had put word out along the very small network of mule fanciers in England, and soon learned there were only a handful of the animals in each county. This was the first I had been offered.

Jimmy was a few years older than me. He had established his seniority before I arrived, when we had spoken on the phone. Jimmy always carried two mobiles, for backup, and was seldom not talking on one of them. The phrase ‘if I can give you a little bit of advice’ was a favourite.

‘So what is it exactly you want to do?’ As if he already knew, but could not quite compute it.

I had explained when I rang that I was looking for a mule to take right across England; that I’d worked with mules in Peru and fancied the idea of doing the same in a country in which muleteering had almost died out. And that the north of England, where the tradition of pack animals had lasted longest, was the obvious place to do it. Even if, as he quickly surmised, I was a soft southerner.

What Jimmy was interested in was my route – ‘I know all the bridleways between here and Appleby’ – and how much I knew about mules. ‘Like I always say, you can make a horse, you can ask a donkey. And you can let a mule do whatever it wants.’

We drove over to see his mule; or rather, I drove and Jimmy gave directions around the desolate mini-roundabouts that led to Seaham where, as Jimmy was quick to remind me, Michael Caine had ended up dead on the beach in Get Carter.

Jimmy told me he had ridden right across the same route I was going to take. More impressively, when he arrived at one coast from the other, he had turned straight around and ridden all the way back. But he had done it in the conventional way, on a horse not a mule; he also had a friend to help him, mainly to get down and open gates, as ‘I’m getting a bit heavy to be jumping on and off a saddle.’

‘I’m not being funny,’ said Jimmy, ‘but I need to know what level of horsemanship you have. Particularly if you’re on your own. That’s two grand’s worth of mule you’ll be dealing with, if I lend or sell you mine.’ So a marker for the price had been put down. We had not yet discussed money.

I murmured that I’d worked a lot with mules in Peru – which was true. Although to be fair, I’d also worked a lot with muleteers in Peru helping me.

The mule was in a field off a roundabout, with a couple of horses for company. She was a big raw-boned grey brute, at over sixteen hands: big, even if she had been a horse. Jimmy led her out from the field on a length of scraggy rope. The mule looked down at me like a haughty Russian model who’d been asked out on a date by a man wearing trainers.

I eyed up the mule. I wanted one as a pack animal to carry my gear, not to ride across England. But Jimmy wasn’t going to let that stop him. This was a test of that horsemanship he had been concerned about.

There were no stirrups, let alone a saddle. I felt I could do with a crane to hoist me aboard. And Jimmy had been unclear as to whether anyone had ever ridden this mule before.

But needs must. He gave me a leg-up, complaining I didn’t angle my knee in precisely the right way. Then I was riding bareback on the grey mule over a great deal of concrete near a mini-roundabout. A couple passing in their Skoda looked on askance and gave us a wide berth.

Jimmy paused, as if this was a question he had never considered. Or expected to be asked.

If Diamond was strong enough to carry eleven stone of human – a charitable estimate – she could carry any pack a considerable distance. The problem would be getting that pack on her, particularly single-handed. The mules I had worked with in the Andes were around fourteen hands, so on the borderline between pony and horse. Manageable.

Whether I wanted to deal with sixteen hands’ worth of mule clattering around me for weeks was another matter. It would be like going out with a woman who was taller.

‘I can see you’re intimidated,’ said Jimmy. There was a hint in his voice that he was pleased about this. ‘Let me give you a little bit of advice. If the mule doesn’t think you’re the master from the off, you never will be.’

‘Get down and I’ll show you how she leads. That’s what you want her for anyways.’

We led the mule along a desolate bit of edgeland that skirted the roundabout. Given there were cars passing, the mule seemed calm and well behaved. Until one of the horses we’d left in the field gave a whinny, and she bolted hard enough to leave me with rope burn.

The mule ran onto the centre of the mini-roundabout. It was midday and there weren’t many cars about. But there were some.

Jimmy sent me one way and he took the other, so we came at her in a pincer manoeuvre. We tried this several times without success. A mule running around at speed on concrete or tarmac is a hard thing to stop. She was using the small central island of the roundabout to give her jumps extra spring.

A man approaching on the dual carriageway pulled his car up dead to come and help – which we needed. Someone had to hold the gate to the adjoining field open so we could herd the mule inside without letting the other horses out.

‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ said Jimmy. He was sweating. Rounding up a mule that refuses to follow the Highway Code is hard work. I could tell he was struggling also with a rare emotion. He was embarrassed.

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry. I don’t feel I’ve been much help at all. But at least this happened here, not on a Yorkshire moor twenty miles from Whitby when it was pissing down with rain.

‘Jack donkey. Might need a little shoeing. And my lads can give him some training. Been standing in a field for years so he’s a little out of condition. Just a little. But he would carry your gear, easy. There’s even a packsaddle I could throw in as well.’

We drove to see the donkey in another of Jimmy’s pocket fields, which were scattered around the edgelands of Seaham like an archipelago of lost meadows amidst a sea of light industrial waste. He had lovely markings of a dappled grey. Even though a jack donkey, he was also very small.

Jimmy looked vague again. I was beginning to get used to this look. The light in his small eyes went out.

That was the same age he’d said the mule had been. A default age. I remember trying to buy a used car once from salesmen in Texas, and having much the same experience with Chevrolets and their mileage.

After the mule, the donkey came as a welcome bit of docility. But I wasn’t sure if I saw myself leading a dwarf donkey across England. It felt like a nativity play. And would One Man and a Donkey have quite the same ring on the cover of a book? Or would people think it was a comedy special, like that guy taking his fridge around Ireland?

Donkeys needed more shelter than mules, as their coats weren’t so weatherproof. That much I knew. And I worried that if the donkey wasn’t accustomed to walking, he could get sores.

‘It’s not that he could get sores or that he might get sores. I can absolutely guarantee you – he will get sores.

‘You’ll have to change donkeys along the way. But that’s not a problem. We can get a new donkey over to you regular like, for a bit of petrol money.’

While negotiating the mini-roundabouts in the car, we had established that ‘a bit of petrol money’ for other services – like a van to drop the mule off – would be fifty quid a trip. So a constant relay of donkey reinforcements was an expensive and complicated proposition. Since Jimmy only had one donkey, it would also be a tricky one to fulfil.

‘OK, let me give you a little bit of advice. Why don’t you go to Scarborough and see if they have any donkeys they’d be willing to sell at the end of the season? They’ll be used to walking up and down the beach, an’ that.’

I felt my quest for a mule was spiralling out of control. The last thing a beach donkey needed was to walk hundreds of miles from one coast of England to the other. Come the end of the season, they would be looking forward to a winter spent in comfortable lodgings, far from pesky kids feeding them Pringles. With their feet up.

‘I’m just trying to help, mind. Although I don’t feel I’ve been any help at all.’

‘Good luck,’ said Jimmy, when I said goodbye. He paused for a beat, to re-establish control.

I travelled all over the north of England from Lancaster to Hartlepool looking for a mule, with no success. My search led me to the annual Appleby Horse Fair. In the Hare and Hounds, one of the pubs on the hill, a tall saturnine man started talking to me over a drink. He was a traveller.

‘I’ve a mule with the horses I’m selling,’ he told me. ‘But you’ll have to walk down to see it. They won’t let us bring the horses into town any more.’

A short journey later and I was presented with the animal, standing by the side of the road. He was a fine, sturdy beast who looked like he could carry a good load. He was also, incontrovertibly, not a mule but a pack pony.

I made this point to the tall man, who waved it off as an irrelevance. Indeed, as something of an impertinence.

‘Same difference. He’ll carry just as good a weight. He’ll do the same job of work as a mule. So what’s the problem?’

And it was true that pack ponies had carried the bulk of the ore and the provisions in the north for centuries. But that wasn’t the point. I wanted a mule.

The tall man looked disappointed, as if a child had wilfully refused an arranged marriage.

‘You’re making a mistake. Mules are hard to come by. And finding a good mule is even harder. Almost impossible. Whereas there are plenty of these. And they’re cheaper. Just tell me how much you’d be willing to pay?’

But I wasn’t about to play that game. Not only because I wasn’t very good at the rules, but also because, in a suitably stubborn way, I had set my sights on a mule.

I had my reasons. Darwin had eulogised the mule as being a perfect example of the energy of a hybrid: that it took the best qualities of both its parents, the donkey and the horse, to produce an animal with greater vitality and strength than either. They can easily grow taller than both parents. As Lorraine Travis put it in her excellent little handbook, The Mule, ‘Weight for weight they are stronger than horses, and much longer lived with longer working lives, although maturing slightly later. They rarely become ill or lame or suffer wounds, can withstand extremes of temperature, can live on frugal rations, have tremendous stamina and resilience and are exceptionally surefooted.’

I knew all the arguments against mules as well. Particularly the old chestnut about them being stubborn. A good deal of that came from the mule’s intelligence and talent for self-preservation. You can’t fool a mule into doing anything, as you can sometimes with a horse, and they are less likely to do anything stupid. There’s a reason they use mules, not horses, to lead tourists down into the Grand Canyon. A mule will look after itself and therefore your cargo – or indeed you, if you are riding it.

There was another attractive element to this reputation that mules had for being stubborn. They were sensitive animals. They were also animals that needed to trust you before they would cooperate, so you needed to win that trust. Not least because there was a very physical manifestation of one not trusting you. The phrase ‘a kick like a mule’, often applied to cocktails of dubious alcoholic provenance, doesn’t come from nowhere. They could lash out with incredible accuracy, as I remembered from Peru, where an entire expedition had disintegrated into chaos after one of its leaders had been kicked by his mule.

The idea of taking a mule across England had come about in the same focused way as so many of my projects: some long-entertained half-thought (like trying to find an Inca ruin, or running a black-market car from Texas to Central America) crystallising into action, without at any stage being examined for plausibility, possibility or sheer bloody stupidity.

As my wife Irena pointed out, ‘You haven’t really thought how you’re going to do this, have you?’

This was rhetorical, as married conversations often are. We both knew I hadn’t.

But then if you don’t occasionally jump out of planes, you never land. For some reason, I’ve often found this argument appeals more to the masculine than to the feminine mind. Women are equally adventurous – often more so – but they like to see where they are putting their feet. Or in this case, where they are putting their animal’s hooves.

I had started with the assumption that I would easily find a mule. Perhaps not quite as easily as in Peru – where you can turn up in a village and book a mule like a taxi – but surely there were plenty around?

No, there weren’t. A few chance and choice encounters – as with Jimmy near Newcastle – had put me right on that one.

Unlike Peru, the rest of South America, the United States, France, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe, there were, for complicated reasons, very few mules in England. Plenty of horses, of course – and a surprising number of donkeys – but no mules.

Would I have to import one? Sure to be time-consuming, expensive and complicated. I had heard horror stories about the difficulty of bringing a mule over from Spain. Or buy an American riding mule at several thousand quid?

I did discover there was a British Mule Society. One thing about this country is that it has a specialist society for just about everything even if, in this case, one with an extremely small membership.

By happy chance, the society was holding a ‘Mule Fair’, their annual big get-together, in Kent a week or so after I discovered its existence. It promised to be an ideal opportunity to meet some of the members who, I imagined, often brought their mules with them. I pictured a scene in which dozens of mules flocked into fields under the North Downs.

This didn’t seem a lot to choose from; moreover, those three would already be taken. Was there not some great mule trading market, the equivalent of Appleby Horse Fair, where mules were bought and sold?

‘No, there isn’t. Not unless you go to Morocco,’ one of the ladies at the Kent gathering told me. She was, like everybody else, wearing a cowboy hat. The Mule Fair that year was billed as ‘western-themed’. Apart from some old riding boots, I felt underdressed beside the cheery display of Stetsons and fringed buckskin jackets.

Maria, the Mule Society’s publicity secretary, had outdone the others. She was got up in a rubber inflatable panto-mule that protruded in front of her. It was the sort of costume that demanded an outgoing personality, and Maria had that in spades. A Colombian who came from a family that bred mules near Medellín, she couldn’t understand why there were so few of the animals in this country.

‘If you’re looking for a mule, the first thing is not to get one from a donkey sanctuary. You’ll find it easier to adopt a baby. ¡Es una locura! It’s madness. They have so many forms to go through.’

Sarah agreed. Tanned and cheerful, she was one of the few members to have brought a mule with her, a small one, which she sometimes rode. ‘The thing about mules is that they’re intelligent. Whereas horses can be just so – bloody – stupid. As can their owners. Which is one of the things I like about mules. You don’t get all that stuck-up stuff you do with horses. All those Range Rovers and showing off. Mules are more down-to-earth. And so are we.’

And it was true that the vibe at the barbecue felt more Essex than Badminton Horse Trials. We were in the shadow of the M25 and there was a cheerful karaoke session blaring out from the local pub. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ wafted across the July night.

Some thirty members of the British Mule Society were clutching bottles of beer and chatting over a barbecue. They had a direct, straightforward quality which I liked immediately; and a willingness to help.

I was told to go and look for Yvonne, ‘who was wearing a big cowboy hat’. This didn’t narrow the search. But when I found her, she was the one who told me about Jethro.

‘He’s perfect. Very sociable, likes humans. Small, with lovely colouring. And he’s not at a donkey sanctuary. He’s at an RSPCA rescue centre, who are much easier to deal with.’

‘Jethro has been with us for three years. He’s eight. Before he came to us he had been badly treated, so he’s needed a lot of patience to get to the point he is at now. And he could still need a lot more patience.’

This was a warning of sorts, which I chose to ignore. By this stage, I was ready to take any mule who was short of psychopathic.

‘Also we don’t ride any of our animals, so he’s been standing in a field for the last three years and hasn’t taken much exercise. And like donkeys, mules can be prone to, uh, “weight-gain issues”.’

As soon as I met him, I could see Jethro had a bit of a spare tyre. If anything, this made me sympathetic. Just another middle-aged mule/male. Moreover, Jethro had been gelded late in life, so retained the energies and inclinations, if not the abilities, of a stallion.

He was larger than the donkey Jimmy had once offered me, but still small – about twelve and a half hands – with striking colouring, a freckling of white and beige like an Appaloosa, and an enquiring and appraising gaze which I came to learn was characteristic.

Our first meeting in the stable yard at the RSPCA was cordial, if not effusive; so English in the best possible sense.

I noticed his eyes: dark, soulful and thoughtful. His unusual colouring was not like anything I had seen in Peru, where mules tended to come either bay or skewbald.

Anna, the lady from the RSPCA, asked if I wanted to groom and lead him around. I didn’t. For I knew that, like Jimmy, they were asking not only so I could see what Jethro was like; they wanted to know if I would make a suitable foster parent. It was a test, which was fair enough. But I deferred it for two good reasons: I wanted to take things slowly and not rush Jethro on our first date; I hadn’t a clue how to groom a mule.

This was not because I hadn’t spent many hours with them. It was just that in Peru there had always been a muleteer to do all the grooming and feeding. I either rode the larger mules or walked with the smaller ones as pack animals.

My teenage step-daughter Pippa gave me a crash course at our local stables. The girls mucking out were amused to see a man in his fifties going back to Pony Club – or in my case, going for the first time. I had been more into motorbikes than horses as a teenager, like many an English boy; only later had I learned to enjoy Western-style riding in South America, where the best way to get to many places was on a saddle.

There were no mules at the stables, of course, but plenty of horses on which to practise. Pippa taught me to use a dandy brush, a curry comb and a hoof-pick. This last was the trickiest. Getting a large cob to lift his hooves took a certain nerve.

In Peru, I had led mules in the simplest possible way: with a lead rope, often only draped over my shoulder. Most were so well trained they stayed together in a pack as we trudged over the Andes. ‘You can’t do that for the RSPCA,’ Pippa told me. ‘You need to stand on the mule’s left, with the lead in your right hand and the rest of the rope coiled in the other.’ It sounded like a barn dance.

After a couple of sessions, I was ready to go back and take Jethro for a walk. Pippa came for support and lent me her horse-grooming kit so that, together with my riding-boots and gloves, I looked the part. A well-brushed Jethro behaved beautifully when escorted by me around the RSPCA yard with a carefully coiled lead-rope, although less well with Pippa; as she led him past some other horses, he bolted, spooked (as he often would be later) by equine interest or competition. But that was clearly his fault, not ours.

They got out the fostering forms for me to sign. I arranged to borrow Jethro for enough time to train him and do the journey, although I did not have the stabling facilities to keep him more permanently.

‘The thing about Jethro,’ said Alice, one of his RSPCA carers, ‘is that he either likes you or he doesn’t.’

This seemed straightforward, and Jethro had showed no sign of taking against me.

‘The other thing is … he’s very intelligent. He’ll only do something if he wants to.’

We had 200 miles ahead of us to test this. Alice’s tone implied that Jethro’s intelligence was not always a helpful quality.

And now, with the shock of all departures, we are on the far north-west coast of England, at the small town of St Bees in Cumbria – ‘we’ being my friend Jasper Winn, Jethro, and me. The seafront has a windswept, municipal feel of bollards and concrete. To the south lie the towers of the nuclear plant at Sellafield, which glitter in the autumnal sun. And I’m looking out at the wide Atlantic Ocean from a beach which, being October, is almost deserted. Although not quite.

A brave family are pretending it is still summer and have spent the morning building an epic sandcastle: a sandcastle that looks like a Maya temple, with steep sides, square-cut ditches and a turret, the whole elaborate ensemble decorated with feathers. It’s a surreal, surprising but also auspicious sight, given how many of my journeys have been in South America.

They in turn are surprised to see a mule suddenly appear on the beach. The children ask whether they can stroke his head. Is he friendly? I say they can stroke anything except Jethro’s ears, which I have already learned are sensitive.

Their parents tell me they are on honeymoon, which I take in my stride without asking any complicated or intrusive family questions. But anyway, it’s time to get Jethro’s feet – and indeed, our boots – wet in the traditional way before embarking on the Coast-to-Coast.

Jethro is understandably hesitant at the prospect. He is also confused. He has probably never seen the sea before. He sniffs the seaweed but then jumps back in alarm as a wave comes in.

The children come to his rescue and distract us. ‘Why are you collecting those three pebbles?’ they ask Jasper.

‘Because we’re going to take them from this coast to the east coast on the other side of the country. In Jethro’s saddlebag.’

The kids waved goodbye as we headed down the beach, and started up the headland to the south of St Bees. Jethro set off at a smart pace. I had discovered during previous training sessions near my home in Oxfordshire that he often, like a wilful teenager, began with great verve and enthusiasm which tailed off as he got bored.

We climbed fast. Jasper pointed out that we were heading the wrong way, as the headland went even further west out to sea from St Bees. I assured him this would be the first time of many, at least while I was responsible for the route, so he should get used to it. Two women we met wondered if Jethro was a donkey or a horse. I informed them that he was neither. Jasper prophesied, accurately, that this would happen a lot. He also pointed out how well Jethro was managing on the thin, winding track. A mule’s feet are closer together than a horse’s, so they can follow a narrow contouring path better.

This was a symbolic first stage of the walk with Jethro. As we were on a footpath, not a bridleway, stiles lay ahead at the top of the hill, and while you can always wrestle a mountain bike over a fence, you can’t do that with 300 kilos of mule. We would have to turn inland.

Before we did so, I looked back down on the small town of St Bees. It had the simple clarity of all good beginnings: the breakwaters dividing the beach into neat segments; the buildings clustered in radial lines; the coastline extending away to the south with lucidity and enticement.

I felt that familiar tingle of excitement at the onset of a new project, almost as if I had dived off the headland and the water was rushing up to meet me. A new journey is always a birthing of sorts.

Planning the trip – and finding Jethro – had been complicated. But an extraordinary piece of good luck, or rather of kindness, had also come my way. I had managed to persuade my Irish friend Jasper Winn to accompany us.

This was providential. After collecting Jethro from the RSPCA, it soon became clear that trying to get a mule across the country was not going to be easy, with either carrot or stick. During training sessions before we left for the North, he had proved a handful, to say the least, bolting off and chasing local mares. The patience of my kind sister Katie had been considerably tested while hosting him in her Oxfordshire field.

So to have someone like Jasper, who had ridden horses all over the world from Kyrgyzstan to Andalusia to Argentina – and had once bought a mule at a market in Morocco – was a gift from heaven. He had grown up with horses in County Cork and learned the Irish way of managing them, a combination of straight-talking and sweet-talking.

Not only that, but he was delightful company: a rover and a traveller, whose home was wherever he set his hat (a beret, usually at a rakish angle). Jasper had somehow managed to get through life without any of the usual responsibilities – family, property or job – and could live free as a bird, writing and playing music. A true bohemian.

I had met him when he was house-sitting for some friends of mine, something which he enjoyed doing. I had not realised quite what a demand there was for this particular service in the countryside. If you live in a large house with a lot of animals, you can’t just go away and leave them on their own. Jasper had therefore acquired a devoted following as a man trusted to walk dogs, look after horses or livestock and keep the home fires burning.

As soon as he agreed to join me on this journey, he had proved endlessly resourceful and versatile. Did we need a packsaddle? He had an old Iranian one stashed at his mother’s, which was both practical and stylish. Girths to secure it to Jethro? No need to buy them, he would sew some together from sofa-webbing fabric and the belt from an old leather trunk.

Moreover, he took a much sterner line with Jethro than I did. While liking our teenage mule – and admiring his spirit – Jasper felt he had been living too much on the fat of the land at the RSPCA and ‘getting away with it’. He thought we should, in a firm but fair way, put Jethro through ‘Mule Camp’. He would be well looked after, fed and cared for – but not allowed to behave with quite the truculence he had shown at the RSPCA, where his carers had needed a special Monty Roberts Dually halter to control him.

One reason for delaying our departure to October was that, while late in the year, so risky with the weather, it was the first time Jasper was able to join me, and I was sure the journey would be more successful – indeed, perhaps only possible – with him.

By the start of our journey, we no longer needed to use the Dually halter on Jethro unless crossing roads. While he could still be difficult – especially when it came to being caught, a tedious task at the start of each day – the pre-match training had generally gone well, and he had been a good and patient passenger in the horse lorry as we drove north.

There was plenty of petrol in his own tank as he frisked up the headland. ‘Easy, boy,’ said Jasper. ‘You’ve got 200 miles still to go.’

At the point of the St Bees coast where we turned inland, memorial headstones and flowers had been placed on a small headland that jutted out to sea. Some touching remembrances had been engraved on the stones: ‘See you again’; ‘Your favourite place’.

‘Do you think people have wanted their ashes to be scattered here because it’s the start of the Coast-to-Coast?’ I asked Jasper.

‘I think they must have. Amazing how important walking becomes to people – particularly the elderly, when it can be their only form of exercise. One of the few ways they can still enjoy themselves, get out and about.’

‘Yes, and people can become hefted to places, like sheep. Like Wainwright having his ashes scattered in the Lake District. I always find memorial benches moving, whether in a municipal park or with some fabulous view, like this one out over the Atlantic. That sense of coming back home …’

‘I think so, and some people find walking has been the best part of their life.’ Jasper paused to adjust Jethro’s head collar. ‘And something, moreover, they’ve always done. That has continuity. They may have walked a place as a child, an adult and when old. And for complicated people – and most of us are – walking has a simplicity to it that is very compelling. You just keep putting your feet in front of you.’

The thin strip of land between the coast and the Lake District is a quiet and gentle bit of countryside with a handy bridle path converted from an old railway line: an uneventful stretch before you enter the fairy-tale castellations of the Lake District, which has always been a place of enchantment for me.

But the Lakes would have to wait. There was something I had to do first a little to the north of our route – and something I needed to do on my own.

Leaving Jasper and Jethro in a snug farmhouse, I went to a quiet bit of unassuming countryside near Wigton. It was not a place I had ever visited before. Nor was it an area to attract tourists, being both remote and relatively flat compared to the neighbouring Lake District. But it had a huge emotional pull for me.

The signpost to Stoneraise Place was on a small country lane. I approached nervously down the drive, both because I had not been able to contact the current owners beforehand and because there were a lot of dogs barking. A handsome Georgian farmhouse lay up ahead, with modern agricultural buildings behind it.

A St Bernard bounded towards me, followed by a large young man in wellington boots.

‘Sorry, we’re in the middle of moving cattle. Don’t worry, he won’t bite. What can I do for you?’

I noticed a memorial stone on the front wall of the farmhouse to help me out: to William H. Bragg, my great-grandfather, who had been born here and gone on to become a successful physicist. I explained I was a descendant.

‘Oh, OK. Well, have a look round. But you’ll have to do it all on your own, I’m afraid. We’re a bit busy.’

I wandered off into the garden in front of the house; overhanging trees cast deep shadows over the long grass and there were wood pigeons cooing overhead. Half-buried in the border was a rusting old ploughshare. The letters punched out in metal across the yoking band proclaimed it to have been made by Nicholsons of Newark. It looked suitably nineteenth-century, although abandoned farm machinery ages fast.

She came bustling out of the house. ‘Sorry, I’m Lorna – we’re in the middle of everything but my son said you were here. The ploughshare. It isn’t theirs. We brought it with us as an antique. As soon as my son said you were looking round the garden, I guessed you’d find it and think it had been lying in the grass ever since the Braggs left.’

I knew from old family records that Robert Bragg had bought this house in 1858. The Bragg family is a big one in this part of Cumbria. Robert’s side of the family had a long tradition of going to sea, unsuccessfully. His father and grandfather had both drowned as merchant seamen. Notwithstanding this daunting precedent, Robert signed up as a sixteen-year-old and sailed to India. He was made First Mate within a few years. However, after a spectacular shipwreck off Calcutta, when he was one of the few survivors, he decided it was time to stick to dry ground and came home.

He was only twenty-five but had somehow acquired enough money to buy Stoneraise Place, whether through a lucky inheritance or some smart bit of trading in India. While the farmhouse was a handsome building, it only had a small amount of agricultural land attached. Since then the farm had expanded considerably: Lorna and her husband now had some 600 acres, which they either owned or rented.

Lorna was interested in the Braggs, which was lucky as I had been able to discover very little about them from family records. She had even gone to the nearby churchyard to copy out Robert’s gravestone, as she was worried that it was becoming eroded. She suggested I go over to the church to have a look for myself.

As I walked over the field in his footsteps, in the clear sunlight, the whole of what must have been Robert Bragg’s compass seemed visible: the farm, his fields, the church and the hills of the Northern Fells beyond. The grass on the long sloping hill was speckled with tufts of sheep’s wool, carded white against the green.

A story came back to me, one that my mother had told me many times when I was a child and which had always fascinated me.

Robert had often taken this route, and not only to attend services. After buying the farmhouse, he successfully courted the vicar’s daughter, Mary, who played the organ at the church. On the day of their wedding he would have taken this same path.

I could imagine him on that day in May 1861. Once he had crossed oceans, at the mercy of heavy seas and vulnerable ships. Now he was on top of the world: a master of his own destiny, walking on his own land towards the woman he was going to marry.

Yet somewhere along the way, he managed to drop the new gold wedding ring he had bought for the occasion. Bought with most of his year’s earnings, but more importantly, bought as a token of his affection and love. He had inscribed it with their interlinked initials.

Poets over the millennia have covered many acres of paper with laments over lost love. Very few have written about the pain of lost possessions. That clutching of the lungs: how could I have been so stupid? Why did I not value more something that was so precious to me and allow it to be mislaid? The overconfidence that comes when something matters to you so much that you assume it will stay connected, as if by an umbilical cord.

Perhaps he lost the ring because he was so happy. It was the sort of thing I could have done myself. I can imagine him rubbing it in his pocket, talismanic. Taking it out to feel the reassuring weight. Only for it to slip when he put it back.

One of his brothers, as best man, gamely offered his own ring as a standby. Then after the service, Robert had another one made. By that time, there was much joking and jollity about the wedding that needed three rings – although when it happened, and given the cost of the ring for a farmer who had scant resources, it was a calamity.

The first years of the marriage were happy ones. Mary was by all accounts a gentle and kind person, much loved. A letter survives that Robert sent to his wife on one of their rare separations, when he went with his brothers to attend one of the Great Exhibitions in London. The tone is teasing and affectionate: ‘I do hope you will take every care of yourself and do please be lazy, that’s just what I want you to be, at least for the present …’

Three sons quickly followed – the oldest, William, my future great-grandfather. But a fourth pregnancy proved fatal. A combination of pneumonia and pleurisy caused a dreadful protracted and premature labour, which lasted for nine days and ended in Mary’s death.

‘To be honest,’ Lorna had told me, ‘and I know this might sound funny, I’ve always sensed the ghost of Mary in the drawing room. That must be where she would have been confined. And where she passed away.’

I wondered if that was why Lorna had gone over to trace the gravestone. I found Mary’s tomb where Lorna had described, on the overgrown slope beside the path up from the fields. I was glad she had told me, as the engraved writing had worn smooth. Husband and wife had been buried together. Mary had been just thirty-seven when she died. Robert survived for another two decades, before dying at fifty-four – my age. Still young, as far as I was concerned.

When I got back to Stoneraise Place, the cattle had been put in their sheds. The cheerful sound of afternoon Radio Two mixed with the echoing hooves of heifers shunting around on the concrete. Along with the cattle, Lorna told me, she and her husband Peter took in sheep over winter to fatten them up for the fells.

Now that she had more time, she added, there was something else I should see. She sent me up to the top of the old wheelhouse. The building was full of all the detritus that accumulates in a farm – rusting machinery, canvas sacks, even an old shoe beneath layers of dust. It was dark, but using the torch application on my phone I could see up the stairs and across the rafters which, just as Lorna had warned me, were partially rotten.

Right at the end was a long roof-beam with the names of three boys carved into the wood: James Bragg, J. W. Bragg and William Addison – Robert’s two younger boys and their cousin. But not the name of my great-grandfather William.

For after his mother’s death, he was, for reasons that family history has never quite satisfactorily explained, sent away. His father ended up selling the farm and going to live on the Isle of Man, and arranged for William to go and live with an uncle hundreds of miles distant in Leicestershire. He was only seven.

Perhaps it was too much for Robert to look after all three boys – although in that case, would he not have sent away the youngest, rather than the older one who could have helped? Or it may have been thought that William, who was already showing promise, would benefit from the better schools in Leicester.

Certainly his uncle, who was a pharmacist, encouraged him in his scientific studies, to the extent that he managed to get to Cambridge, where he became a good mathematician and even better physicist, going on to win the Nobel Prize. But the emotional damage of losing both his mother and, effectively, his father (for he rarely saw Robert again) seems to have been heavy for William. His own daughter always said that he found close relationships impossible.

He inherited some of his father’s restless, seafaring streak, travelling to Australia. But he also returned to the farm at least once in later life. I know because, almost unbelievably, I discovered that there was still someone living locally who remembered him.

George Bainbridge was eighty-four and lived in a small bungalow nearby with his wife Isabel. When I went to see them, George had only recently returned from a long stay in hospital and was frail. Isabel was not sure whether he would be able to see me as he was sleeping. But he came down to join us when he heard voices in the hall.

George’s family had bought Stoneraise Place from the man Robert Bragg had sold it to, as that farmer had gone bankrupt. George had grown up in Stoneraise Place and was there when my great-grandfather returned in October 1936. William H. Bragg, who by then was very old himself, had afterwards sent a book he had written for children to the young George. George looked it out to show me.

‘I remember him well,’ George told me, ‘when he came back, as an old man. He was very reserved. And by then he was moving slowly. But he wanted to see everything. It must have been hard, that farm, back when he was born. They only had a scraggy bit of land. No wonder it made farmers bankrupt or broke their spirits. The house was big – a huge house, I always think – but they had less than a hundred acres. Quite a lot less – just eighty. Amazing, though, that people in the old days managed to make a living from so little. Some people could live off twenty acres. Don’t know how they did it, I really don’t …’

George’s family had expanded the farm over the generations they had been there. By the time he retired, they had a herd of 100 cows. But living conditions had still not been easy. As Isabel told me, mains electricity only arrived at Stoneraise Place in 1957. Up until then, they had used the cellar for refrigeration, curing pigs on one side of it and making butter on the other. George’s mother had sold her butter on market day in Wigton, as Mary Bragg had once done.

‘Not much,’ said George. ‘The high communications mast on the hill, of course. But most of this is what your great-grandfather would have seen.’ He waved out of the window.

George and Isabel, who were supposed to have retired – ‘but you’ve got to do something, haven’t you?’ – had started breeding llamas. Ten or so of them were in the paddock. This was after a brief experiment with ostriches, who had proved volatile and ‘had claws that could rip you up’, according to Isabel.

That said, the llamas brought their own concerns. When they had recently got in a stud to impregnate the females, George was worried the male had not shown himself up to the job.

‘A feller let us have him on the cheap. To be honest, I think he was just getting him going as a stud, which is why he didn’t charge too much. But the male looked a bit lost. Hadn’t a clue what he was doing, as far as I could see.’ He paused. ‘I have my doubts anything will come of it.’

I said my goodbyes and headed off down the lane. When I came to the gate that led over from Robert’s farm, I stopped again. I could see the church clearly, lying over the fields in a little dip of the valley below. My heart gave a lurch. For the part of the story about the lost ring that had always caught at me when my mother told it – the part that seemed out of a Thomas Hardy novel – was the coda.

Many years after the wedding, Robert had again taken this same route across the fields, as he did so often. Yet this time, he had seen something glinting in the mud, near a stile. It was the lost wedding ring, engraved with Mary’s and his initials. A particular angle of the sun had picked it out. Miraculously, he had found it once more – but by that time, Mary was dead.

Also by Hugh Thomson

Hugh Thomson

One Man and
a Mule

Across England with a Pack Mule

Introduction

Chapter 1

The North Crossing

Also by Hugh Thomson

Hugh Thomson

One Man anda Mule

Across England with a Pack Mule

Introduction

Chapter 1

The North Crossing

One Man and
a Mule