A Homecoming of Sorts
Five days healing in the Cheviots
By Trevor H. Smith
August 2023
Part Eleven: Scar tissue.
Either side of my five days in The Cheviots I walked the 40-mile Limestone Link with my ten-year-old son and the 100-mile Cotswold Way with my wife. The latter was originally conceived as a walk for me and my brother-in-law, Thom, back in 2021, before Covid and cancer put paid to that ambition forever. Annemarie and I raised over £2500 for Dorothy House Hospice, where Thom spent the final week of his life. If my Lycian hiking partner had shown one tenth the application that either of those two had shown, that project may have turned out more than a little differently.
Without the opportunity to train due to the heavy workload that comes with establishing a new business, I stepped off the bus at Rothbury with only that four-day hike with my son under my feet since Turkey over a year earlier. To say I was not trail fit would be an understatement.
Three days later, I looked north from Ravens Knowe to the dotted white line of the Pennine Way. It reached out across the contours of the Cheviots like a healing wound across my broken spirit. The landscape of The Pennine Way in Northumberland speaks to me in a language like nowhere else on earth. The trail I love, through the land at which I feel most at home, runs through me as much as I walk along it.
The death of my brother-in-law had come just short of a year after the sudden death of my good friend Mike who, at the age of 37, had gone out on his bike one day only for his heart to stop beating while on a quiet country lane. By the time a pair of strangers arriced and administered cpr it was already too late. Mike had lived his short life with a spirit of adventure and fun, seeking or leaving good vibes wherever he went, with whoever he met. He, more than anyone, had been excited to hear my news about the forthcoming trip to Turkey. I never got to tell him how that went, but I imagine he would shared my justified rage before seeing something positive emerge through the blanket fog of disappointment. I think I was still processing Mike’s death when my sister told me that Thom’s treatment had reached the end of its viability, and that he had been told his life would be over within one to three months. A year earlier I had been in the pub with the pair of them when Mike joked that Thom had trumped his minor heart condition with his cancer. Now here I was in the middle of remote Northumberland, unable to share the experience with either of them.