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It’s Easter weekend and it’s spring, so what better way to spend the Easter weekend than out and about enjoying the countryside? So, I travelled up to London and joined 30 other walkers on the second coach of the train to Robertsbridge, a little nowhere town in Sussex. The ticket office at Charring Cross clearly had very fragile windows.

It took forever to get down there. It was a slow service that seemed to stop everywhere, and we didn’t arrive until 11.30. The going was pretty good before lunch. We walked for an hour and a half through fairly firm around, up and down hills and across farmland where the crops - oilseed rape - were still low enough to brush your knees and get no higher. As we ate, though, having all taken off our shoes and left them outside the pub on the pavement, the rain started to come down.

It was just spitting at first, but within the hour it had turned into proper rain, and we had to pad out on the wet street in our socks to retrieve our shoes and slip into our coats. It kept that up for the rest of the day.

That really didn’t matter, though. We were all well wrapped up, and the rain kept us cool, but it did make the ground very slippery. You could feel the mud sucking at your boots as you walked through the wetter bits, and it got precarious as we walked along a sleep, sloping bank along the edge of a river, but apart from some slipping here and there nobody fell in.

The ultimate goal was Bodiam Castle, which we got to the long way round for a 12-mile round trip, and although the route we were following was well described, there was a certain amount of dithering on top of a hill when it looked like we’d taken a wrong turn somewhere a way back. Fortunately someone struck out ahead, and like the sheep all around us (and the lambs they’d all recently spawned), we followed on through a vineyard and the moated castle opened up below us.

We scooted down the hill and took refuge in the coffee shop, sheltering from the rain, eating scones and drinking tea, but after half an hour had to head back out into the rain and walk along a treacherous riverbank towards the station. We all made it, eventually, although there was one dodgy moment when someone almost slid down into the muddy river, and we had to pass by the skeleton of what looked like a sheep, picked totally clean by some scavenger or other.

We just missed the train, though, and being that far out of London it was an hour until the next one; time we spent in a pub, stroking the cat that slept on the bar, and the dogs that ran around our feet.

The weather really didn’t matter, all things considered. We all seemed to have enjoyed ourselves, and the chatty journey home seemed to pass much quicker than the stop-stop-stop route down.

I wonder what they’re trying to tell you with this sign on the train. Are they worried you might get some piercings trapped?

Tomorrow, I suspect, my stiff legs will have rusted into position.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.