Walking Through History

Three remarkable Victorian sisters and their dissolute brother grew up and died relatively young in a small Yorkshire village but their stellar literary success created a posthumous personality cult that still exists today. The Brontës let their imaginations run wild across the spectacular local countryside surrounding their village, real locations providing the background for great works. Tony’s circular walk will start and end in Howarth. To start he’ll follow the Rev. Brontë and his young family with their seven carts and one covered wagon on the road from Bradford to Haworth. We’ll discover what life was like in the Bronte’s home village during their lifetimes. Stepping out from Howarth we’ll head out on to the moors in the footsteps of the Brontë children and the imaginary world that drove their later writings. We’ll take in Bronte related relics and the famed moor itself before heading back to Haworth to discover how the Brontë cult grew rapidly in the decades following their deaths.

Tony tells the very personal tale of Victoria and Albert’s love of the Scottish mountains. This is also a story of the complete image makeover of an entire nation. Tony’s sets off from Pitlochry into the Cairngorms National Park to the Pass of Killiecrankie, beautiful setting of a ridiculously one sided battle in 1689. The rebellious highlanders well and truly got the better of the king’s forces, which ushered in a century of merciless state-led suppression of all things Scottish - clans, claymores... even kilts. Tony reaches Blair Castle, seat of the Duke of Atholl and the location of Victoria and Albert’s first visit to the Highlands in 1844. The royal couple were soon besotted. The area reminded Albert of his green and mountainous homeland. Tony then treks across the Cairngorm massif, a historic route through the central Highlands, a journey taken by Victoria and Albert themselves some 17 years later. By then the royals were a confirmed part of Highland life, thanks to their purchase of Balmoral Castle - Tony’s target on the far side of the mountains. Brand Scotland went into overdrive. The Queen loved to see Albert and her ghillies dressed in tartan. She and her family supported and even hosted Highland Games. They lent the royal seal to the local whisky industry, and their inevitable magnetism ultimately drew the railway age to the Highlands and led a popular Scottish resurgence right across Britain. Tony ends his walk on the shore of Loch Muick where Victoria built a lodge house after Albert’s death. The ‘widow’s house’ was also the house her husband had always wanted.

William the Conqueror was reluctant to invade Wales but frontier raids drove him to it. The Normans built castles – some 50 in Pembrokeshire alone – to dominate the local populace and provide protection for the settlers who started arriving in the wake of the military. One group of incomers who came and stayed were the Flemings – initially mercenaries in Norman armies, later refugees from a great Flanders flood in 1108. Pembrokeshire, the very western edge of south Wales remained staunchly loyal to England despite years of Welsh rebellion. As the social, cultural and language gap remained over the centuries south Pembrokeshire was given a name ‘Little England beyond Wales’ and the border between English and Welsh speakers became known as the Landsker line – a boundary which has ebbed and flowed over the years but remains clearly identifiable today. Starting at St. David Cathedral on the West Pembrokeshire coast - visited by William in 1081 – Tony’s walk will follow the stunning Pembrokeshire coastal path southwards before heading inland to discover what made the area so attractive for Norman and Flemish settlers. Tony will discover the ghost border between the two cultures and the Norman castles that sought to pacify the rebellious Welsh. As the walk heads south, we will look at the differences between the fertile land to the south of the invisible border before heading again to the coast at Manorbier Castle.

On 30th June 1940 a plane full of German soldiers touched down at Guernsey airport. It was the start of 5 years of occupation. The traditional image of the Channel Islands is sun, sea and sandy beaches. But Tony embarks on a 5 day walk to explore the darkest chapter in the Islands’ history, which 70 years on is itself becoming a tourist draw. Starting out in Guernsey to uncover memories of the German aerial attack on the port and the invasion itself, Tony voyages to Jersey which is littered with physical reminders of the Nazi presence. Although of little strategic importance, the Islands were of great propaganda value to Hitler. He ordered extraordinarily large fortifications to be built along the vulnerable coastline. Slave labour was imported and today there are still clear memories of the life and times of those slaves. Tony circumnavigates the island following the story of the Occupation – the brutality, the shock, the difficult balance between co-operation and resistance. In 1944 D Day may have taken Allied troops right past the Islands – but the Islanders and the occupying army were left to cope with few supplies, for the best part of another year before Allied troops landed to accept the German surrender.

Tony travels to Nottinghamshire to walk the ground of one of the most eventful and colourful periods of our medieval past. Legend has it that King John was probably the worst king ever, that Robin Hood defended the poor against him and his dastardly accomplice the Sheriff of Nottingham, and somehow it all ended up with John losing the Crown Jewels and signing the Magna Carta, the foundation stone of modern democracy. In 2015 is the 800th anniversary of the creation of Magna Carta, so it’s a good time for Tony to separate the fact from the fiction and uncover the events that brought this powerful document into being. Travelling through Sherwood Forest he does indeed find the King and the Sheriff extorting money at every opportunity, so becoming deeply unpopular, but not a lot of evidence of the altruistic Robin Hood. Crossing over into the Derbyshire Peak District, he discovers John becoming increasingly ineffectual and the country on the brink of civil war as the powerful landholding barons decide they have had enough of the hapless king. Magna Carta, Tony realises, is a peace Treaty but one that is only really implemented after John’s sudden death in 1216 from a surfeit of... not the eel-like lampreys, but rather more innocuous peaches!

Tony is in the ‘the most rebellious corner of England’. From Lyme Regis on the Jurassic coast, north across country to the infamous - and frequently flooded - Somerset Levels, Tony follows the fortunes of the Duke of Monmouth’s armed attempt to overthrow the British monarchy. The year is 1685... it’s 25 years after the Restoration, and the catholic James II has just ascended the throne. This is the cue for the story of Tony’s walk – one of the most remarkable and rapid rebellions in our history, and one that leads to the last pitched battle ever to take place on English soil. The famously bloody revenge exacted by Judge Jeffreys on the rebels provides a memorable finale to Tony’s west country walk. The four day walk of almost 50 miles encapsulates the growth and passage of the rebel army from the harbour and winding streets of Lyme Regis, through beautiful Dorset valleys and villages like Colyton to the key towns of Taunton and Bridgewater, before ending at the site of the Battle of Sedgemoor and the utter crushing of the rebellion. The post-script was the bloody and brutal ‘justice’ handed out by the royalists everywhere from churches and villages close to the battle site, to towns over 50 miles away. Bodies, and body parts, were strung up all around the region as a clear message to all in this ‘most rebellious corner’. But in the 1680’s England was seeing itself as intellectually progressive country – and the protestants wanted no more of the Pope and the Catholic church threatening their freedom. Hundreds of rebels may have died in battle and by the rope, but their cause won the war. In just three years Parliament had put an end to the Stuart dynasty and James II fled to France in fear of his life.