As I walked out, with Laurie Lee by my
side
Jeremy Atiyah walked from La
Mancha to Andalusia
hoping to retrace the footsteps the writer left in the Thirties. He wasn't
disappointed
My Idea of a rural walking idyll did
not involve travelling with a group, nor did it involve clambering about icy
mountain-sides with big boots and survival gear. I just wanted to cross a piece
of Spain in the footsteps of Laurie Lee, whose own trek in the 1930s across
rural Spain, as described in his book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning,
was the most beautifully Bohemian piece of poetry I had ever read. If only I
too could cross, alone and on foot, the imaginary frontier between La Mancha,
the flat heartland of central Spain, and Andalusia, the mountainous borderland
between Europe and Moorish Africa. Following my mentor's footsteps wherever
possible, I dared to hope that traces of Lee's Spain
I caught a brown train to the sleepy
town of Valdapenas
Walking south, out from Valdepenas, was
not going to be easy, however. Where Lee had described endless dusty tracks,
there now ran the principal Madrid-Cadiz highway. To avoid it I aimed for the
railway line, alongside which, as it happened, ran a white, dusty track of the
prerequisite variety. In no time I was in open countryside, under an enormous
sky, walking among silver olive-trees and the budding vineyards of spring.
That first leg of the journey was
amazingly hearty. I covered 10 miles by lunch, before coming to a tumble-down
railway station in the forgotten town of Santa
Cruz
Now however I found no dusty white path
beside the railway line and this had an unsettling effect on me. Suddenly the
plain seemed 10 times larger and I seemed 10 times smaller. I watched a passing
train slowly, slowly disappear into the remote distance ahead. And unlike
Laurie Lee, I found that my feet were rapidly blistering.
Knotting a hanky on my head, I pressed
on grimly towards a village known as Las Virtudes, where I planned to reward my
hard work with dinner and a bed, or perhaps (more appropriately) a barn.
Walking through the gentlest sloping land, striped with endless olive
plantations, I eventually limped into Las Virtudes sunburnt and exhausted, only
to find that this was no village - unless a clump of shady trees and an old
bull-ring make a village. I continued on my way. The next stage was a true
wilderness, with rabbits and wildfowl scurrying off at my approach. The only
sign of human existence came at dusk with bells tinkling from the necks of a
flock of sheep. The shepherd himself, when he appeared with a new-born lamb
under his arm, was as outlandish as anyone described by Lee.
"You are walking south," the
man mumbled dreamily, as though walking was the only way to get about. "So
is this the road to Seville
Not that he'd been there himself, good
God no, but he'd heard tell...
At darkness I came to a village called
Almuradiel, but this was no place to be Bohemian. In fact it was right on top
of that confounded highway I thought I'd shaken off. I checked into a hotel
which looked like a motorway service station, washed my feet and went to bed,
where I lay in an irritable stupor, disturbed by the constant rumble of passing
lorries and trucks. Come sunrise, I was frantic for Andalusia
and my first task was to get back into the 1930s as quickly as possible. I
scurried away from the motorway, across a dewy field, and there hit upon a
south-bound track marked "mule- path". This looked promising.
The sun climbed and rapidly turned hot.
I passed a huge, white hacienda and, slowly, the path began to meander upwards
into the wooded foothills of the Sierra Morena. The only people I saw were some
tough poachers skinning a rabbit; they asked, oddly, if I was escaping national
service. Were there traces of the Spanish civil war still lingering in these
hills?
The air began to freshen and the way
grew narrow as I neared the top. Finally, scrabbling through a gorge, I emerged
on to a bright green pasture covered in buttercups, washed by a stream brimming
with dazzling lilies and croaking frogs. Rows of olives stretched away in the
distance. Laurie Lee's Andalusia
can hardly have looked better than this.
