A Homecoming of Sorts
Five days healing in the Cheviots
By Trevor H. Smith
August 2023
Part two: Origins.
I was never really supposed to be here. Not now, anyway. I was always supposed to be here, among these hills, saddles, crags, and bogs onto which my name was etched as my father dragged me across them in the summer of 1990. Having recently turned 40, he had been keen to fulfil one of his life’s ambitions. That’s how we would have phrased it, back then, a ‘lifetime ambition’, before bucket-listing became a thing.
That walk with my dad, 33 years earlier, was my first multi-day hike and turned out to be his last. His only one, in fact. I have now reached a point in life where having been a parent for the last 11 years and having recently completed a four-day hike with my eldest, I have gained some insight into why he still refers to those four days in Northumberland as the best of his life.
I had turned thirteen a few weeks before our hike, and although we could not have known it at the time, it would be another 25 years before he and I would again spend so long in one another’s exclusive company. It would be easy to apply some retrospective hallucination to that trip in which he understood that he was saying goodbye to the child in his son. He did not. In fact, I am certain that every single realisation that has occurred to my dad throughout his life has arrived both suddenly and late, and each has without exception knocked him sideways.
Having had a scheduled thru-hike of the Cleveland Way with my regular long-distance walking partner, Derek, postponed at short notice, I found myself with a week in the top right-hand corner of the map, left completely to my own devices. I say ‘The Map’ as if it is everything, but of course the map to which I refer may look the same as yours but this one is mine and mine alone, it is everything to me.
I considered a solo thru-hike. St. Cuthbert’s Way, perhaps, which runs from Melrose near Kirk Yetholm, the border town at the northern terminus of the Pennine Way, to Lindesfarne, or Holy Island, as I knew it in my youth. But the coastal plain is never really where I want to be. Perhaps I might have forced an art project out of the shoreline’s liminality, but I was never one for artspeak buzzwords, and that particular one – liminality – had long outstayed its welcome with me some years prior to this excursion. I looked at the coastal walk, north from Tynemouth, but it would be days before I would reach the more rugged stretches of the Northumberland coast and I have no stomach at all for the industrial preamble required to deliver me there.
The answer, of course, was already inside me. I had always known where I needed to be. Northumberland, yes, but inland, circumnavigating ruined castles in the swirling mists of the Cheviots, with the spring of peat beneath my feet.