We were already halfway across the first field when Patricia said, “This isn’t it.”
Not annoyed. Just certain.
I said it probably was. It usually is. You follow the line, you end up somewhere. That’s the arrangement.
The line on the map went straight on.
Straight on was a hedge.
Not a friendly one. Thick, damp, the kind that’s been left alone long enough to forget it was ever meant to be crossed. No gap. No stile. Nothing that suggested people had passed through recently.
Bertie had a go anyway. Nose in, tail up, optimistic. He pushed forward, stopped, reversed, and sneezed like he’d been insulted.
Patricia didn’t move.
“There’s meant to be a stile,” she said.
I walked a bit further along the hedge, as if it might appear if I committed to it. It didn’t. Just more hedge. Same hedge.
We went back to the gate.
The sign was still there. Faded arrow. Public footpath. Pointing straight through what was now solid shrubbery.
“Maybe it’s further along,” I said.
“It isn’t,” she said.
We checked the map again. Same line. Same confidence. Field, boundary, copse. Simple.
We tried anyway.
Along the hedge, boots picking up that slow mud that doesn’t look like much until it’s on you. There was a section where it thinned slightly, looked promising for about two seconds, then closed in again. A bit of old wire under the leaves, half-hidden, doing nothing helpful.
Bertie lost interest in the official route and started investigating something else entirely. Possibly a smell. Possibly nothing.
We carried on further than we should have. No reason for it. Just that feeling that it must be there if we keep going.
It wasn’t.
At some point we ended up in the corner of the field with no path at all. Just a fence line, a ditch, and the quiet realisation that we’d overshot something that didn’t exist.
We stood there a bit longer than necessary.
“Right,” Patricia said eventually.
We walked back. Not quickly. Not slowly. Just that flat sort of walking you do when you’ve decided not to discuss it.
On the way back along the hedge we saw a man in the next field over. Dog at heel. He’d been there the whole time, probably.
Patricia called over. “Is there a way through here?”
He took his time answering. Looked at the hedge, then at us.
“People go through,” he said.
“Where?” I said.
He gestured vaguely. “Down there somewhere.”
Not especially helpful.
“Is there a stile?” Patricia asked.
He shook his head once. “Was.”
That was it.
We walked in the direction he’d pointed, which turned out to be less of a direction and more of a suggestion. The ground dipped slightly. Wetter. More mud. The hedge didn’t change much.
Bertie found something that looked like a gap. Flattened grass. Just enough space to suggest other people had tried.
He went through.
I got halfway and caught my sleeve. There’s no graceful way out of that. You either commit or reverse badly. I committed.
Patricia came through after, cleaner than me, which she didn’t mention but didn’t need to.
On the other side was another field. Same as the first, just slightly worse underfoot.
We stood there for a second.
“That can’t be it,” I said.
“It probably is,” she said.
We carried on anyway, but it didn’t feel like following a path anymore. More like moving across ground that happened to line up with the map in places.
We missed the line again about ten minutes later and ended up cutting diagonally toward the copse just to get somewhere that looked definite.
The copse was real. Trees, no argument. We stopped there mostly because it gave us an excuse to stop.
No view. No moment. Just somewhere to stand that wasn’t moving under us.
Bertie sat down and watched something we couldn’t see.
On the way back we didn’t even try the original route. We skirted the edge of the field, found a gate that wasn’t on the map, and came out onto a lane we recognised straight away.
Much easier.
Back at the car, everything had a bit of mud on it that wasn’t there before. Boots, cuffs, the edge of the seat where Bertie had decided to climb in too early.
Patricia folded the map without saying much.
The sign at the start still pointed straight through the hedge.
