THE HEREFORDSHIRE morning is suspended in mist. I can sense the river somewhere beyond the trees. It’s close. But the path leads me away from the water, up through the cool, brackened depths of Chase Wood, where dewy webs stretch between branches and my boots stumble through scatterings of fallen conkers. For a while I hear nothing but my footsteps and the harsh rasps of a jay. Then the path turns, the sun breaks through and the contours fall away to reveal what I’ve come for, glowing the colour of malachite in the early light: the Wye.
The River Wye is a right old exhibitionist. These are not the words of 18th-Century artist, cleric, schoolmaster and author William Gilpin – you’re surprised by that, I’m sure – but they do sum up his thoughts on the UK’s fifth-longest river. In 1770, Gilpin filled a 95-page book with his ponderings on what made this long, bucolic watercourse such a glorious one. Some 250 years later I’ve shouldered a backpack to come and see why it got him so excited.
“At each bend, another more distant bend beckons you on. When you hike with the flow, a river ramble feels like the most natural thing in the world.”
This is,
