Richard Guise - Over the Hill and Round the Bend: Misadventures on a Bike in Wales

Day 1
Keeping it Simple: East Point to Monmouth

Most cross it by car. Some by bus or train. Nineteenth-century linguist and walker George Borrow stepped down from his train to cross it on foot. I was about to cross it by bicycle.

For much of its length, the route of the English/Welsh border defies logic. Here in Monmouthshire it obediently follows the River Monnow en route to its confluence with the Wye until suddenly losing concentration, heading east, hitting the Wye at the wrong point, panicking, turning upstream instead of down, realising its mistake and then petulantly ploughing south again to disappear into the woods.

It was at this point of petulance on the left bank of the River Wye that I rested Tetley, my two-wheeled steed, against a newly erected signpost before crossing into Wales. On the riverbank a solitary robin danced among the bare branches, while the grey water below rearranged itself into a steady flow after its bristling encounter with the shallows upstream. The bank itself showed signs of recent winter floods dark-brown mud deposits, dirty, straggled weeds, once-white plastic bags while up beyond the path, early daffodils made hesitant yellow splashes amongst the dark greens of the wooded hillside. Above it all a bird of prey carved lazy patterns against the steel-grey sky.

Apart from the track, the bike and me, the signpost represented the only obvious intrusion by mankind. It said Symonds Yat 1 miles (behind me) and Monmouth 4 miles (ahead). Nothing to indicate the border and nothing to reveal that this lonely spot is the easternmost point of Wales. Since Id just spent half a day getting here, I found this a little strange and immediately wondered if the nations other three extremities would likewise go unremarked.

Cycling to the four corners the east-, north-, west- and southernmost spots of Wales was my aim, and, if this anonymous start was anything to go by, perhaps I was the first to attempt it. At that moment I felt obliged to remind myself why. Pulling a Marmite sandwich out of the big, blue bike bag, I sat with my back against the spokes and peered along the invisible border.

Although some nights Ive fallen asleep wishing I were Welsh, I wake up every morning to find that, inexplicably, Im still English. Or, as the Welsh would call me, a Saeson a Saxon. I tend to think of it as a strange land: tantalisingly familiar but inescapably strange. And yet is it that strange in reality? I cant count the number of times Ive visited the country, stayed there hell, I even lived there for three years but maybe Im out of date. Maybe twenty-first-century Wales has given up the struggle and, like so many other places, finally been swallowed up by the globalism of the times.

To find out if it really is such a strange land, I felt that I couldnt just retrace the traditional eastwest forays so typical of the English. Nor should I simply follow the Welsh coastline, fabulous though it is: with its tourists, holiday homes and caravan sites, it cant be typical and anyway, such a tour has been done before. Id always felt that the real Wales was lying there waiting to be discovered, just off the main road, behind the tea rooms, down the track, up over the hill. And that another version of it lay somewhere in the urban and industrial fingers of the south. What I needed was a route that gave me a glimpse of all these faces of Wales: a customised Cambrian cocktail. It was with this in mind that Id laid a map of the principality across the kitchen table and, with the help of my best high-tech gadgets a wooden ruler, some string and four jam jars identified the four extremities at the four compass points and connected them in a way that I hoped would take me on a satisfyingly serendipitous tour.