In his book of memoirs the poet Laurie Lee recounts that it took him a good two years of ‘footslogging and scheming’ before he finally got out of his domestic inertia and into a journey he saw as a kind of necessary rights of passage.

It took me just under two weeks to respond positively to an email from some friends asking me whether I might consider joining them on an 80 mile walk along the Ridgeway,in Southern England-Europe’s oldest road.

The invitation was as unexpected as it was timely. The e-mail arrived just as I was writing the final lines of a book that I had laboured over for close on five years. It is the moment every author dreads, that sudden realisation that the awkward but intimate companion that has dominated your thoughts and habits for much too long , is about to cut loose, and leave you suffering from severe withdrawal symptoms.

The email that brought me to a point of decision interrupted days of imagined itineraries ranging from a motor bike ride to the southern limits of South America to yoga in the Himalayas. Neither itinerary seemed to have developed much beyond a momentary flight of internet induced indulgence.

 By contrast the alternative journey that had landed on me as a proposal drew enthusiastic emails froma variety of people offering me sponsorship so that I could raise money for two charities. It also had the attraction of immediacy, simplicity, and low cost both in monetary and carbon footprint terms while involving a part of England that was relatively isolated from the pressures of modern life, and by all accounts, aesthetically pleasing and steeped in history.

The plan involved taking a fourty minute train ride out to the Buckinghamshire village of Wendover from where we would set out on our 80 mile treck, following the route of Europe’s oldest road, to Avebury in Wiltshire. It would be our only form of public transport over four and a half days during which we would be following the same route used since prehistoric times by huntsmen, herdsmen, soldiers, and travellers.

 We would stop off at a pub for lunch and at a bed and breakfast for the night, but otherwise we would try and keep a rough average of three miles an hour. It was a task for which I foolishly thought I had adequately prepared myself for with last minute work-outs at the Gym and marches around Battersea Park, in the heavy soled walking boots I had invested in for an expedition such as this.

I arrived early at Marylebone  station, dressed in army-surplus fatigues , and an all weather proof jacket-with the kit and enthusiasm I had abandoned since the days of cadet corps some thirty years ago. The Monday morning rush-hour of suited office workers was full-on but going in the opposite direction to me.  I felt an extraordinary surge of exhilaration as I held my ground, with my ruck-sack on my back, and turned into a side street with all  the time in the world to eat a full English breakfast at Mario’s, the nearby Italian café and read the sports pages.

My energy levels suitably re-enforced with a double expresso, I joined my friends-Coleman and Deidre and their two teenage sons, Theo and Oscar, and from Wendover headed towards the open country, encountering almost immediately our first test of endurance.

The trail rose steeply through the trees and wild flowers that covers part of Coombe Hill. A needle monument to those killed in the Boer War pinpoints the highest viewpoint along the Chilterns, although I was struck more by the nearby ‘barrow’ marking the burial ground of some stone-age man-a solitary, but moving site, where the spirit was not laid to rest, but encouraged to touch the sky, and through it eternity. The  first of several such srrategically picked mounds that we were to encounter along the way, this site provided commanding views of some of Britain’s finest chalk downlands, a sweeping patchwork of mint green and white fields absorbing within their contours the occasional hamlet or post-card sized village.

We descended through fine wooded country, and followed the trail though the outer  grounds of Chequers, the privileged  weekend ’third’ home of the serving prime-minister. There wasn’t a policeman or security guard in sight; despite a large sign warning that anyone caught approaching the house without permission would be prosecuted. There was nonetheless a network of CCTV cameras that extended across the fields, an unsettling counterpoint to the liberated and carefree mood that had taken hold of us from the outset of our treck. We moved, following another winding trail upwards, and left Big Brother to snoop on some magpies and rooks.

The first pit stop, like most of the ones along the trail, was actually slightly off it, requiring a small diversion down from the higher ground along a minor road and into a village. We walked down into the quant village of Whitelea-all perfectly formed thatched stone cottages with pretty front-gardens-and found the Red Lion, an old 17^th century pub with 21^st century gastro food.

 I had read somewhere that one of the reasons Roman officers had chosen to avoid the Ridgeway altogether as they marched across southern England, was that it was not near enough to water and too exposed to the elements. It set a good precedent to tuck into a warm baguette of brie and camberry jelly and a pint while giving one’s feet and legs a much needed rest.

Much of what remained of the of the day and the next was taken up following the Icknield Way , as it made it way through the downland of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, the going partly beach wooded, partly open fields along  which a rider and racing horse would appear from nowhere and gallop past, like a highwayman on the run. Beyond the pubs and the B& B’s, we were rarely disturbed by mankind or his machines. There was the occasional farmer herding his sheep, and  two other walkers at most during any eight  hour period . Across the Chilterns, our attention was drawn instead  by an increasing variety of wild flowers and blossom, and the growing presence of the Red Kite.

Long-ago driven to extinction in England by human persecution, Red Kites were imported from Spain in the early 1990’s and re-introduced alond the Ridgeway. The bird now dominates the sky across this part of England. With its impressive coloured wing span, and marauding flight, it cuts an impressive figure, with great surges on the upwind, and a lighting dive on its prey. To the walker beginning to tire, the Red Kite is inspirational. Once it disappeared, as we walked further into the west country,  our energy levels flagged.

For me the aching set in as the sun fell on a gloriously warm day, its beams illuminating the white blossom of the hawthorn, and the yellow clusters of primrose and cowslip scattered across the woodland , while  casting long shadows over the hills that  met the sky in a rolling contour of dark green, brown, and blue. Only once did the cooling towers of the Didcot power station impose its own modernistic outline on the horizon. I thought the towers a hideous blight on the landscape which shoud nevr have been tolerated.  Coleman, a sculptor, photographed them in the fading light and proclaimed them as harmononious as any work by  Barbara Hepworth.

In truth while Coleman and the others-seemingly quite fit -seemed absorbed by the moment-I was struggling with myself.  My left back had developed sores, I had a blister on one hand, and an in-grown toe nail in my foot-but worst of all was the excruciating pain of both my hamstrings. At one point I hallicuniated that I was car and my fan belt had broken,

And yet over the next few days I devised a number of ways of assimilating the hardship and so better enjoying the walk.  I would see how many birds and flowers I could identify (dozens), calculate my speed as it varied over hills and valleys,  think up the plot of another book. Now and then I would imagine what it must have been like to come across some of the wilder earlier users of the Ridgeway and found myself reciting a short prayer as a sense of self-preservation kicked in.

Half-way into the route, I felt myself, amidst the long silences, and absence of strangers, recalling episodes and people that had marked my recent life with their death, among them my mother and one of my best friends. It proved cathartic, my grieving and sense of loss drifting out into a universe I felt benign and comforting.

Over the five odd days we walked together, the others endured each in their own way. Six foot four Oscar, simply stripped off and walked bear foot and in short trousers, his long blond hair catching the wind so that at times he resembled a stone-age ghost. His brother Theo, walked with his head phones, playing games on a small computer, while miraculously managing to keep a coat draped around him like a poncho. Their father Coleman discovered a large twisted branch, called it Gandalf’s stick, and took to imaging mystical battles in the dark woods. As for Deidre, she took to reciting Chaucer’s Canterbury tales, each verse serving as a reminder that a long walk that starts in Spring is like a good pilgrimage, bringing out the sheer diversity that is human kind, as well as its optimism.

‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote….

Rhan longen folk to goon on pilgramages,

And palmers for to seken straunge strondes…’

We must have cut an eccentric crew, but then for miles and miles, we were on our own, and in fellowship, as if on a ship adrift in a vast ocean, buffeted by the elements, and with no other aim than that of reaching the next port, according to the time and distance we can calculated but over which we had no real control over. Indeed I had not felt as physically vulnerable and yet so much in solidarity with my companions as when I had sailed, with four friends, across an ocean once.

I kept thinking that what made the Ridgeway so special was how it had retained its basic form and  direction , like an open  sea with  its tidal flows, when so much else in the country had lost both. Sure there were bits of our trek that brought us brutally into close contact, however brief, with the frenzied noise and pace of an A road or motorway.

 Across four  counties-Buckinghamshire,Oxfordshire,Berkshire, and Wiltshire-the quality of the path ranges from soft even sandstone to deep ribbed tracks formed by the wheels of 4-wheel drives and tractors so that exhausted walkers are forced to assume  the delicate steps of trapeze artists. Large swathes of grass land have been ploughed and sown since the days when Defoe glowingly remarked that Britain’s human population was vastly outnumbered by its sheep, and ancient stones have been broken up to make castles, cottages, and motorways..

But neither farmers nor urban planners, nor armies had managed to destroy the Ridgeway itself, as it cuts across the vast open, still largely under populated spaces of Southern England-providing a unique perspective on a geology of pleasing variety and colour that one rarely has time to apperciate south of the border, when travelling by car or public transport.

By the fourth day we had left the sheltered woods and neatly bordered paths behind us, and were once again walking across the steep high ground that gives the way its name. We had been drawn into the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex where old sarsen stones worked on by earlier civilisations lie scattered across fields or drawn together in circles, the exact meaning and purpose of which remain a subject of unresolved historical enquiry to this day.

Most walkers on the Ridgeway-inexplicably in my view- start at Avebury and end up in Buckinghamshire. But we had deliberately set ourselves a course that took us into wilder country as we progressed. We had begun our journey at the heart of a commuter belt, and were ending it among the giant stones of sand and chalk whose known prehistory, about a mile to the northwest of the circle itself, dates back to Neolithic times.

We descended the high ground towards Avebury, round lunch time on the Friday. A gusty wind and hard rain had broken an otherwise uninterrupted week of fairly mild, periodically sunny weather. We were damp, we were tired, and we ached from head to toe. We each stumbled along the final agonising three miles or so. And yet it was hard not to feel a strange energy drawing us to a place where one’s enduring sense was one of oneness with the past and with people who raised this Avalon millennia ago, having, no doubt before doing so, walked many miles.