Read the Signs

When you receive a map from the pub that shows a walking trail, you would think it would be a marked trail, right?!? Well it turns out, we were given a map that has theoretical trails and some roads. After not being able to find a trailhead, we decided to ask some locals. Below is the map we had. We wanted to take that mystery trail SW to Faulkland.

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Sign 1 (if the locals don’t know the route, there’s probably not a route):

1st bloke was a construction dude. He told his helper at least 7 times to turn of the concrete saw so that he could hear us. Finally, he was able to come down off the scaffolding and let us know to go the opposite direction. See, we wanted to go to Faulkland first, then Wellow, then back to Norton. He said, no, go to Wellow.

Since we didn’t like his answer, we decided to ask a second local. A lady with a terrier. She was lovely and said the same thing as the 1st bloke. Go to Wellow. So we took the road to Wellow. It wasn’t the “walking trails” we were promised, but it was nice and flat and easy and took about 1.75 hrs for 3.7 miles.

Sign 2 (dead animals might mean go back):

Once we got to Wellow (an adorable small town with only 1 restaurant), we stumbled upon a field day for the local schools.

We had a little picnic and then decided to follow a road to Faulkland. We could have walked back to Norton but decided against it. On the way to Faulkland we saw our dead rabbit friend.

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Sign 3 (no sidewalk):

Finally we arrived in Faulkland and reviewed our Google Map. The only way back to Norton St. Philip was with a bus (didn’t see any info for that), taxi (didn’t see any of those), or walking. We felt pretty confident with walking until we got about 15 min away from the town. There were no longer any walkways, and we should have just turned around and found a bus or taxi.

This was quite a treacherous path. It was 3 miles and took us about 2 hours. Due to the lack of walkways, we had to push ourselves against the sides of the bushes to allow cars to pass. As we continued to walk, we concluded this was like a highway for this baby town. We ended up detouring on a rando farm that had been recently tilled. This was a great idea until we had to leave the farm….

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There were intentionally-planted thorny bushes, a deep gully and some sort of venomous sticky bush that stung like hell if you even slightly grazed it. We went through 2 attempts. First was unsuccessful due to the gully being too deep. The second was successful but put us back on hell highway.

Jeff led the way and made sure oncoming traffic saw us walking. Drivers were overall polite, but the number of blind spots on the road were unnerving. We started sprinting from spot to spot. Spot meaning patches of grasses we could stand on that were off the road so cars could easily pass.

After roughly 7-10 looks from locals assessing us accurately as complete idiots, we finally saw Norton St. Philip. After the most intense game of frogger of my life, we rushed to the pub and had celebratory drinks while the children played football with the local boys. This time, a game of 3 on 3.

Exhausted for the day, we retired to our room and watched old ass videos of Stonehenge. Also, Jeff has opened an Instagram account if you would like to follow: tenkeytrips.