Hugh Thomson - One Man and a Mule

The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland

Nanda Devi: A Journey to the Last Sanctuary

Cochineal Red: Travels through Ancient Peru

Tequila Oil: Getting Lost in Mexico

50 Wonders of the World

The Green Road into the Trees: An Exploration of England

At The Captains Table: Life on a Luxury Liner (Kindle Single)

Two Men and a Mule: The Last City of the Incas (Kindle Single)

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Epub ISBN: 9781409052548

Version 1.0

Published by Preface Publishing 2017

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Copyright Hugh Thomson, 2017
Cover photographs: Jasper Winn

Hugh Thomson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published by Preface Publishing in 2017

Preface Publishing

The Penguin Random House Group Limited

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www.penguin.co.uk

Preface Publishing is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781848094697

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

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

Map by John Gilkes

For the dispossessed

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 wont bother you with all my clauses, one is significant that I will try to avoid bedazzling you with rare botanical names or birds youve 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 isnt 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 Stevensons Travels with a Donkey in the Cvennes. 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 nothings 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.

W. H. Pearsall, Mountains and Moorlands,
New Naturalist Series (1950)

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)

YOURE NOT WHAT I thought youd be.

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 Id 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.