I awoke the next morning to a call for an interview on BBC Radio Northampton. It was live, and a good one, although I was so tired I can't remember a word of what I said. I fell back aslep, and missed the train I needed, so Debbie drove me to Long Buckby station, where I sat feeling a little zonked waiting for the 10 minute ride into Northampton:
I got into town at the same time as everyone else, and with a bit of life in it, the place looked a lot better than the previous evening. Just beyond the station is another ancient church called St Peter's, which was covered in images that come from some very dark parts of the human psyche:
...ok, they'd been renewed, but I had to take a photo, because I love stuff like this. When I was there, I got another call from Radio Northampton, and we agreed that I would meet for another interview at 12.15pm at the sign for a village called Great Houghton, about three miles along the road. I passed into the town, past Hazelrigg House, reputedly where Cromwell slept the night before the Battle of Naseby:
I tried to do some promo in the market place, but was again becoming conscious of the miles ahead of me, and that time was getting on:
So I left, passing this cafe which was overly-covered in symbols of patriotism:
..especially when you take a closer look at its name, and see it's called 'Cafe Continental'.
I found my way to the Civic Hall:
and left flyers there, but I was itching to go. Nobody was behind the desk, and I was alone except for this statue of a famous Northampton man, Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated:
..who was shot in the lobby of the Houses of Parliament in 1812 by John Bellingham, a merchant who thought the government owed him some compensation money. On the road out of town, I passed this house -the only house in England to have been designed by the famous Glaswegian architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh:
It looked pretty ordinary from the outside, but I guessed that the interior was where all the good stuff lay. I had no time to look, and hurried out of town, past my first sign for Bedford:
and under this huge roundabout, over which I would be driven about 8 hours later:
If there was any confusion about which road was mine, it was nice of them to let me know which one was certainly not for me:
I took a break in an awful 'Fun Factory' pub just past here, and walked over the Nene, where someone ha decided to leave an 'inexplicable bag by the side of the road' on the bridge:
A kick showed it to be empty, and I walked on, to reach Great Houghton in good time. I had a spare 25 minutes, but although I was going to cross the road anyay, I found myself being hailed over by a guy standing next to a car. Now this guy could see I had the words' 300 miles' below a massive pack on my back, but it looked like he hadn't formed the connection, as he begged me to give his car a push-start. My legs were hurting permanently, but he was a nice guy, so I had to help:
His name was Brian, and as you can see, he's holding a flyer in his hand. Anyway, he clashed the bonnet down, and shoved at a door while I did the same at the bumper. It worked, and here you have a very happy Brian driving off:
I was still early, and took a walk into Great Houghton, a village which boasts this path:
...never has a truer word been said. I wanted something to eat, so I headed towards the post office, only to find that it seemed to have been a victim to the same cuts which have recently done the same for so many similar places all over the country:
Also similar to many other places, there was a great worry here about expansion - which as many people call preservation as others do nimbyism:
Another thing I've noticed on this walk is the way that everyone who lives in the countryside wants their place of habitation to be a 'village'. Long Buckby had been the best example of this - the place is so blatantly a town, because of its size, but Clive told me not to let anyone there hear me say anything like that: it was a 'village' . It seems that 'town' means all the bad things, and apparently opens the door for more bad things to come in. I'd have never realised something like that - how a change of word can change people's perceptions of where they live.
I went back to the village sign:
..which stood next to the least-visible street sign I've ever (not) seen:
I sat on these gas supply markers:
at this T-junction:
until the interviewer turned up:
His name was Martin Heath, and he had his own programme on Sunday radio. This is him setting up:
There were two interviews - a long one, and one not so long. I played my guitar, and let all of Northamptonshire know about the walk -again. At the end though, he flung in an unexpected one: 'His listeners..' he said '..were very concerned about the proliferation of dog mess in Northamptonshire, and did I have an opinion on that?'
Well, it's a subject close to my feet, if not my heart, so I said something about noticing a lot of 'mess bins' over the past two days, so the councils must be doing something about it..etc.. This seemed to do the job, and he drove off after abut 20 minutes, leaving me to really start the big walk.
The road was bad - all grass verges again, and I soon passed the entrance to Great Ashby Hall:
then a very chocolate-box village called Yardley Hastings:
...where it started to rain. Somehow amongst this, I managed to cross over into...
...at a sign that told me this really wasn't a safe place to hang around...and the road just became worse:
Somewhere around here, a guy drove from behind to offer me a lift, which I had to refuse, of course. It was neither the road, nor weather to walk where I was walking, and I stuck out like either a madman or a lost man. I told Twitter that it was like walking on a moor, and it was: drizzle, with just an endless road through it. I was dying to get to the half-way point, a village called Lavendon - so much that I had to take a photo of my first view of it:
I'd been told to watch out for the place, because it was where my cousin's husband Darren -who -along with my cousin - I'd be staying with that night - had been brought up. This, and the fact that I was going to have a break there, were my only planned moments of interest in this nice, typical village; I was very wrong though..
As soon as I walked into Lavendon, something struck me about the houses on the right. As I walked further I saw the church, high on a bend in the road, and above a stone wall. Stuck into the wall was a plaque detailing the church's history, and - as I did before every old building with a plaque - I went over to take a photo in case I forgot the facts. The rain obscured the words, but I ran my hand over it, and instead, saw this:
I'd walked 250 miles along the route, and this was the first reference to the March I'd seen. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Immediately, I clicked that there must be some reason why this plaque was here - I looked around, and even quicker, knew. Look at the centre of the plaque, and you can see there's an image there: forget the one outside Harrogate; THIS is the most famous image of the March - the one that always comes up first when you do a google search. The plaque doesn't show it clearly, but I could see that this was the spot where that photo had been taken.
The trouble was, I didn't have the photo on me to confirm it. I ran around the corner, and into this pub to sit down and calm down:
Inside, a guy immediately clocked my T-shirt, and started talking in glazed amazement at what I was doing. I was sitting garbling things about what I'd just discovered, and together, although we were talking about two completely separate things, our mutual astonishment made for a perfect understanding. This was THE best moment of the walk, followed by one of the best interactions. He was there with his family, and he was another guy called Brian - or 'Browser' to his mates. He bought me a coke, listened to me while I told him all about the bid, and signed the book - underlining what I mean about the book turning into a record of the 'quality' moments of this walk. I tried to get a reception on my laptop, but eventually I gave up, and used my phone instead - finally downloading the image in a tiny format, and asking Browser if he recognised where it was.
'Of course' He said' It's where the road turns just below the church.'
I stayed for 45 minutes, wallowing in the welcome I got from the Green Man pub, and what I'd discovered. Before I left, I had to take this photo of Browser, his daughter and...son, I think, and me:
..and then I was out, back up the road to the church; through the gate and over to the wall, to find the exact spot that this photo - one of the most distinctive British images of the 20th Century, was taken, on the 27th of October, 1936. Here it is:
..and here's the same spot, today:
JB Priestley, whose book 'An English Journey' described the Jarrow of the 1930s as a 'penniless bleak sabbath' saw three different Englands at that time, and the original photo is so distinctive because it shows two of those Englands, with two completely separate histories, so graphically. These men from the soot of the north, walking through such a 'timeless and merrie' English landscape, can't help but make the viewer ask big questions. This fact, in a nutshell, is the reason why the March caught the national imagination so visibly.
If you look closely at the plaque, you can see that it has the 'Jarrow 1986' logo on it - the same one as is on the plaque celebrating 50 years since the March, that's stuck outside the entrance to Jarrow Town Hall. So, this plaque must have been organised back in the North-East, and put here - just as had been done with the Guildford Jarrow Stone. So, in a way, this place is for the March what the Stone is for the Surrey Fund, because there's certainly no plaque on Marble Arch. I've never heard anyone say that this photo was taken here, but someone must know - or at least did know in 1986. I was only 14 at the time, so I can't remember, but it's another story to investigate when I get back...
..and so I pressed on, in pain, but never more proud to be wearing the word Jarrow on my T-shirt. Next village was Turvey -possibly the best-looking place I'd seen so far, and after this, I changed my wet t-shirt in this woody clearing:
..for a one that smelt worse, but was drier. The feet were snarling again, but I just wanted to be in Bedford. I passed this sign:
..and was in the outskirts of Bedford at about 7ish. I'd kept my cousin, Laura, up on my progess, and Darren and her picked me up about one mile outside the town centre. Without stopping for breath, I was whisked right back up the road I'd walked on for the past 7 hours, past the plaque in Lavendon, Great Houghton, and over the big roundabout, to their home on the outskirts of Northampton. I'd walked 22 miles, and looked a sorry sight, but they knew what I needed:
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