Oh, Chute!
I am sitting on one of the benches under a tree in the village of Linkenholt in North Wessex Downs, UK, around 2 am on Christmas Eve. Sitting on this bench, I aggressively press buttons on my Garmin Navigation device to find the path to the next village, Lower Chute. There is a strange peace in Linkenholt as if time is frozen. There is no one else, no distant hum of cars, no glow of Christmas lights. Just me, the crunch of frost underfoot, and the occasional faint light of someone’s driveway as I’d walk past their house. These lights is how I know I am walking past some neighbourhood. For the last six hours, I have been navigating village to village, climbing hills, descending into valleys, walking across a farm and climbing again. The farms I passed are silent, cloaked in a dense layer of mist.
The thick layer of mist is wrapped around me like a second skin. I can only see my breath, the edges of my shoes, and faint glimpses of the trail ahead. Every other minute, I adjust my headlamp, tilting it lower to try and cut through the haze, but the light only makes things worse. The mist snatches at the beam and scatters it into blinding reflections that obliterate the trail ahead. I may as well have been walking blindfolded.
Navigating has become an act of faith. And me, a pilgrim. In a bid to reach here, I focused on the faintest outlines of hedgerows and the occasional glimmer of fence posts that marked the boundaries of fields. The ground was uneven, forcing me to slow, to read the bumps and grooves underfoot like Braille. At one point, I found myself ankle-deep in the mud in someone’s farm with no way to escape. On the other hand, when I’m on the road, startling groups of pheasants and pigeons hiding in the bushes has become a ritual. Hearing my footsteps, they burst into flight, flapping their wings in a chaotic rhythm, startling me enough to stop dead in my tracks.
As the cold rain bites through my gloves again, I lace up my shoes, pack my bags, pop in the last bite of dill pickle, and walk through the faint orange glow of Christmas lights disappearing behind me. As others prepare for warmth and family in their sleep, I am chasing something different – The Stonehenge.
Chasing the Stones
As the legend stands, every year on my birthday, I run for as many hours as my age. If I can’t run, I must hike. I turned 36 this year, so I am running/hiking for 36 hours to celebrate. Actually, I tried that earlier this year in August. The original Big Birthday Bash, as I call it, was the hike of 194 km on the Thames Path from Oxford to London, or 36 hours, whichever was earlier. However, I was caught in a perfect storm and had to withdraw in Reading after 15 hours and 36 minutes at the 74th kilometre. That means I still had 20 hours and 24 minutes due on me before the year ended.
Every year, in November, I also run or hike for 56 kilometres, celebrating the life of my mother. Since Thames Path remained flooded in November and December, I couldn’t get that done either. Thus, in total, I had 20:24 hours and 56 km due. Adding hours to kilometres is impossible, so I decided to run for 176 km, 120 km, estimated 20 hours, and 56 km. And thus originated part 2 of the Big Birthday Bash. A hike from Reading to the Stonehenge and back. Stonehenge is 88 km from my home. Out and back is precisely 176 km. There couldn’t be a bigger coincidence. Thus, the message was clear. Stonehenge was calling, I answered, and here I am, limping my way down from Linkenholt to Lower Chute to find my way towards Ludgershall.
I started from Reading just before noon on December 23rd and followed River Kennet Path after crossing the city. However, the trail was wet, slippery and flooded in many sections. The river and the path were nearly at the same level for most of the stretch, separated by a dike. On many sections, the river had overflown on the trail, making it impossible to traverse. Rain was supposed to start at 6 pm, and that promised to make the trail unusable. Thus, after 15 km, I got off the trail and started hiking on the sidewalk of the A4 motorway to Newbury, the 35 km checkpoint. After stopping in Newbury for dinner, I followed the trail to Kintbury again. However, following two falls on the trail, where I injured my right knee and nearly ended up in the river, I dropped the trail again in the rain.
As I broke away from the river, I hit the first set of muddy trails. The rain had turned the ground into a slick, unforgiving mess. Each step felt like it could betray me, shoes sinking into the mud, making a soft squelch. I tried to re-route, but Garmin kept putting me back on the trails as I navigated from village to village. By midnight, the rain had stopped. But by then, the countryside was engulfed in mist, adding more layers to the challenge.
The new route, which was being updated on the go, was not straightforward. It weaved through country roads, paths, bridleways, and more trails that cut across farmlands and rolling hills. I pressed on, reaching the outskirts of the North Wessex Downs, which I am now navigating to Lower Chute. My legs are cold and tired, and the mud clung to my shoes, which was heavy and relentless. After all this, I am still about 50 km away.
After struggling for three hours on the countryside roads, climbing from one hill to the other, hugging the hedgerows rightly on my left, I get to Lower Chute at the break of dawn. I can hear the birds, and I’m under 10 km away from the town of Ludgershall. As I get out of the Downs to the Salisbury Plains, the mist lifted after the sunrise, and I marched on to Bulford military camps. Shapes of buildings and trees emerged and faded as I moved like ghosts deciding whether to show themselves. By now, I was sleeping on my walk. It felt like I had the whole place to myself—just me and the mist—perhaps, a bed. My right knee flared up from the fall around the river at night, and Bulford slowed me down further as I crested the final hill.
The thought of stones emerging through the mist, faint but unmistakable, under the pre-dawn quiet, fueled me hereon. Every inch of my body below my shoulders is screaming against the hours of exertion, but I push forward to Durrington, where `I am sleeping tonight. I checked into the hotel and marched to Stonehenge in the afternoon as the ancient stones waited ahead.
27 hours 49 minutes later, I stand there, in tears, as a pilgrim in front of Stonehenge, who has given his all in the last 102 km to witness the stuff of his childhood textbooks with a silhouette of the ancient monoliths. Celebrating my birthday as a pagan agnostic on Christmas Eve at the endearing symbol of the unknown is what dreams are made of. I soak in the weathered edges, slight moss growth, cracks, centuries-old etchings, history, stories, myths and more as the sun set for the second time on part 2 of the Big Birthday Bash as I sat on the grass, rubbing my soles.
The Lond Road Home
The job was only half done. I was still to hike back on the same mind-bending trails and navigate back home. I had shipped my food from Reading to Stonehenge a week before as I was to hike back on the day of Christmas and there was going to be no open stores. I slept in Durrington at night, and left the city by noon of the Christmas morning. I was once again the only one on the country roads. As I walked quietly, the gravel crunching under my wet shoes was the only noise cutting through the stillness besides the church bells from far distance and roaring winds until I made it to Ludgershall, past the sunset. The headlamp, now, was on, the mist was back, the vision of trail was once again gone, as I hiked up rolling hills on the bridleway that was a mud-fest.
Little did I know, the worst was yet to come. Out of curiosity, I decided to follow the path I had previously planned to check how bad my night could have been had I followed the overflown trails on the mist Monday night. And it didn’t disappoint. As soon as I left the bridleway to country roads, I found myself on a 3 mile stretch on a ridge, that aged me 10 years, or maybe more. The jeep trail was about 6 feet wide slippery mess with sporadic grass covering in the centre, two one-foot deep tire tracks choked with water on the either side with a hedgerow of some thorny plant that made it a perfect hell. The visibility was compromised in the mist, and all I could see was the tire tracks and my shoes’ lining. There was no escape, there was no possible detour. After fighting against it for a minutes, I accepted my fate, put my head down and started to focus on just the one step on the hand at a time. I would glide, I would fall, I would slip downhill and roll. It had all.
90 minutes later, I made it to the other side. I was out of water and could now see the lights of Newbury in far distance. I made it to the city just before midnight and magically found a pizzeria still open in the city centre to a very pleasant surprise. While I was able to secure a pizza for myself just before they closed the store, they refused to provide me any water, citing their business to meet the orders. Apparently they had time to bake me a fresh pizza at the midnight, but not enough to fill my two soft flasks with water from the tap that was clearly in the plain sight. After waiting for half an hour, heartbroken, I left the premise in search of water in Newbury on the Christmas night.
It was then a couple of Emergency Responders guided me to an open M&S Store at a gas station where they had just bought coffee. I ran to the store and the staff kindly refilled both of my flasks and I was good to go for the remaining 19 miles. My feet were swollen, knee was sore, blisters had flared up and I was further slowed down as I inched closer to home.
Around 5 in the morning, as I was limping on this extremely dark sidewalk of A4 motorway past the town of Woolhampton, a pickup truck pulls over, stops in front of me, rolls down the window and an old man, about the age of my father, from the wheel says “Hi”. Startled, I pause for a seconds, and reply, “Hi”. “Where are you walking?” he asked. “Reading.”
His smile converts to confusion, he thinks for a couple of seconds, and goes, “come over. I will drop you.” Perhaps he was not going that far. Before I could respond, he continues (this time in Urdu), “baith jao, main paise nahi loonga (come sit, i won’t charge)” and he smiles again. And we both break into laughter. Then we chat for a minute about the stupid undertaking I was on, and he left, and I continued into the city onwards to my home.
69 hours 58 minutes later, I make it to Caversham in Reading, my home. Out of these 69:57 hours, I was on my feet for 48 hours 57 minutes 34 seconds and covered this distance of 186 km. While the official Big Birthday Bash 2024 will forever remain a DNF at 73 km in 15.36 hours on the Thames Path, the part 2 was nothing short of an unfolding nightmare. As I write this, I am still processing the countless little victories I had on the way. I was 6 hours too slow against the plan. However, I covered 10 km extra on top of the trail and weather conditions that would have made me quit on any other day. Stay tuned for Big Birthday Bash 2025. It’s going to be ever bigger.
(Feature image: Nick Bull/Stonehenge Dronsescapes)
[…] encountered it, in the mist, in the silence, on the Stonehenge hike. No distractions. No music. Just me and my thoughts. And that was a mistake. That was when Room 101 […]