I started the day plunging into concrete wilderness of Gatwick Airport – functional, ugly. It does cater for walkers though, remarkably. I picked my way around the South and North Terminals on the paths provided and then in the midst of the soullessness came upon a rustic wooden signpost saying “Public footpath”. Intrigued, I followed.
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It took me into a wooded glade – almost another world. I followed it, beside a little stream that should have been familiar: it was the infant River Mole, a river whose lower stretches ran by my childhood home (and whose mouth I will reach in the last days of this walk). Maybe it is a manmade diversion of the river, but the trees and thickets have taken to it. I thought that I would be trudging though the industrial landscape, but this was a delight.
Now, keen readers may have noticed that I walked the north edge, when surely the whole airport is within the historic borders of Surrey and I should have gone south of the airport to follow the border. That is true, and Gatwick was my biggest diversion off the border, but the paths to the south around Tinsley Green and Lowfield Heath are unhelpful and stop in the middle of nowhere, so the diversion around the north is the practical solution.
This is all part of the Sussex Border Path, which was to be my companion for the whole day. Departing from the young Mole, the route led west to Charlwood. In the 1970s, this was envisaged as part of the ‘Gatwick-land’ doomed to engulf the area but it remains a pretty Surrey village, if loud under the flightpath. It has a charming church, whose bells were insistently rebuking me for not being in the pews.
The soil hereabouts is Wealden clay, and those paths which should have been softer than the roads on my punished feet had been baked in the summer’s relentless heat, and the kiln-fired clay was rock-hard.
South-west of Russ Hill, the path runs upon the county border for a while. I could indeed have stayed on the line for longer, where the path and a lane follow the border. the Sussex Border Path is well laid out though, so I took it, dipping into Sussex, and after a quiet lunch sitting on a stump in the woods I emerged in Rusper – a lovely-looking place.
Had I known that the path in the woods beyond here was the closed due to collapses, I might have reassessed my decision to follow the waymarked route rather than tramp the lane along the border-line, but they don’t flag these in advance. Anyway, a spur north, back into Surrey, and a last westward one-click charge over level fields (practically running, as I had called a cab to pick me up to get me to the station, and he was faster getting there than expected). At the pick-up point on the road I had to climb an iron gate, and that was the only actually barred piece of the path I had come across, excusing natural brambles. There I called it a day at the A24, ready to resume the next weekend.
I will resume. In the meantime, please donate for the Stroke Association.