Can you still hike 9 ¾ miles around your teenage haunts?

 

It was a fairly simple ask. "Can you still walk a distance at your ancient age?"

I always wondered, when I was 15 and trudged the Wiltshire plains extensively, whether I'd still be able to do so when I got into my late 50s or if I'd even REACH my late 50s with the kind of self-destructive streak I had as a kid. So when I knew my birthday was coming up, I figured it'd be a good idea to shrug work off for the day, take a rare day off and address that question directly. 

Wiltshire is beautiful in a way that no other part of the country is to me. Mostly flat, but with the rolling plains and hills that remind you of the fantastic thighs of the thunder goddess, ready to swallow you up (or at least make you lose all your puff as you climb them). 

In my head I made no plans, but figured I'd start at Avebury and do the reverse of a walk I often did when I stayed at my Uncle David's place - walking to Yatesbury and back (walking from Yatesbury to Avebury was a 'thing' when I was 15, because we had an outside chance of getting served in the pub in the centre of Avebury, as the landlord didn't particularly care about proof of adulthood back then and no one was ever asked to produce ID when they asked for a pint of scrumpy). 

Avebury has changed. Though the National Trust took the place over and spruced up some of the museums and shops, a lot of the tiny little touristy shops on the main drag pointing towards Yatesbury have long gone. There's no post office, no little bake shop, just a lot of gentrification and a lot of very rich folk tooling around those narrow country lanes in their SUV behemoths. I wonder if Julian Cope still lives there...

I set out and instantly got lost, because some rather rich person had built a massive house (artificially made to look old) at the end of the main high street in Avebury, blocking off the previous thoroughfare. With a bit of aimless wandering around and the help of Google Maps (yep somehow I managed to get enough of a data signal to call it up), I found a route that looked like the one I trudged many times as a teen, and off I set. 

The recent floods had not encroached on the path, thankfully and soon I was passing the last of the houses at the low end of Avebury, and walking out into open country.

Looking back towards Avebury from near Windmill Hill

Weirdly, as a kid, I'd never actually found Windmill Hill - which is how I knew I was on the WRONG byway, and had actually ended up on one that ran parallel to the one I used to take as a teen. According to Google Maps I was in the middle of nowhere, but thankfully realised that it was still heading in vaguely the right direction. 

Soon I ended up at Windmill Hill, about a mile and ¾ from Yatesbury...

National Trust sign on the gate leading to Windmill Hill

Windmill Hill is actually an ancient earthworks with some significance, either developed as a defendable enclosure / village or some kind of temple or place of worship. Historians have never really cleared that up but what they do know about it is that it has two massive longbarrows in it.

The large longbarrow at Windmill Hill

Nestled in the top of the longbarrow was a tiny hollow, filled with dried out white roses. Spooky!

After soaking up the view for a while, I continued on my journey. Just a little way down from Windmill Hill the land dips, and the paths became a lot more muddy. I was very thankful for my big walking boots!

I passed the site of a clay pigeon range, and mused over the fact that most of the little orange disks blasted to pieces by shotguns were littering the path I was actually walking on, which made me glad the place was closed at that moment!

I took a quick look at Google Maps and realised that I was going the wrong way, so once again had to retrace my steps and take a tiny almost invisible grey path on the map which looked to be heading directly for Yatesbury. So once again I was back on track. There were no signposts (other than the utterly useless blue signs telling you that what you were walking on was a byway - Long gone are real, actual, useful signs for walkers telling you what's in the direction that you're walking in and how far it is). 

I took a moment to sit and take a sip of water before carrying on. The only company I had on this walk was a lone combine harvester spraying some crops in a nearby field. Other than that, just the traffic thundering along the A20 in the distance between Cherhill and Yatesbury. 

Finally I reached the village, and promptly discovered how gentrified it had become. Though amazingly my Uncle's old house was still standing (despite being a clapperboard POS!): 

Uncle David's old house

Back then he was a cocky bugger, who seemed to think the world would fall at his feet. I loved staying there though, mostly because my older cousins were a terrible influence on me and led me into all sorts of teenage misbehaviour. 

Now though the next door neighbours run some kind of Shasta Wellness Spa. I am fairly sure I can imagine what Uncle David would have thought of that!

The village itself is a bit of a 'blink and you'll miss it' experience. Despite seeing some very lovely houses, the only other claim to fame of Yatesbury is that it was once the site of a busy training airfield and satellite landing centre (nothing to do with space-going satellites, just a place where planes were picked up and dropped off before training runs in World War 2): 

The official memorial plaque for the No.45 Satellite Landing Ground (Townsend)

I remember as a kid we used to be able to get into the air traffic control building for this landing strip as it was still there, derelict and mostly used by local layabouts for nefarious deeds. But now the whole area has a massive steel fence around it and I couldn't get anywhere near it (I could just about see the tops of the building, so somehow it's still standing but google maps isn't much help in letting you see much of it). 

The old airfield buildings, or at least the shells of them. Note the defence bunker to the right

(This pic is from Google Maps and is woefully out of date, as it doesn't show the massive steel fence between the road and the buildings that is there now).

There wasn't an awful lot else to do, and I'd achieved my aims of walking there, so I turned back towards Avebury, this time actually finding the path I walked when I was younger - which was more or less a straight run between the two places. 

My actual route (walking anti-clockwise)

I took a couple of other interesting pics, one of a sign that outright lied - I saw no kittens!

..and one of a poor old Jag that's going to need a lot of TLC to nurse it back on the road

(Quite surprised this thing still has its windscreen intact but there's not really anyone around that would vandalise a car in such a sleepy little village like this). 

According to my phone, I walked 9 ¾ miles in total on this circular route, covering some 17,000 steps. Not bad for an old timer though I reckon I could've walked a bit further up to Cherhill if I'd pushed myself. 

BTW I did actually take a couple of photos of the stones at Avebury but so does everyone else, so they're kinda a bit boring to me tbh!