If there is such a thing as a level playing field in the Mendip Hills, I have yet to find it. Not one street has “Rise” in its name, for nigh on every road has a rise (and fall). Folk here walk, run and cycle up the steepest of climbs. The former Guardian journalist Matthew Engel once interviewed an elderly yet sprightly man in a similarly vertically challenging town, who remarked” “The trouble is, people retire here to die … and then they don’t.”
A long exception to the up-down rule runs 6 miles out to the town of Radstock. Since railway engines are disinclined to tackle slopes, this line cut through. Fifty years after rolling stock rolled no more, Colliers Way is a much-used cycle and footpath. Funders were rewarded with a single inscribed brick in a grid set into a bank. Six across, two down gives me the giggles – “Yippee it’s flat!” wrote the Wheadon family on their personalised rectangle.
I feel like a walking carriage here: first the fields drop away on one side, then the other, then both. Five minutes on, we’re at the foot of a V-shaped gully, dripping with ferns. We’re under a bridge and then, a little farther along, we are the bridge, overlooking a cowpat‑spattered lane passing under our arches.
Summer brings concealment on the line. The carriage curtains are drawn, green screens of hazel, hawthorn and berried blackthorn right and left. There are gaps through which we glimpse mown hayfields and hedge banks. Down this bush-fringed tarmac strip, the growth crowding in far closer than during the heyday of steam, a pair of silver-washed fritillaries plait each other in a tangerine chase, pyramidal orchids startle in magenta.
The most predictable and unexpected feature runs alongside this cycleway, half-hidden over most of its length – one of the original railway lines, complete with its stabilising sleepers, has been left in situ. Tall plants mask the rails, whole trees have had half a century to sprout from the clinker in between. Nevertheless, the weight of history still pulls the ghosts of coal-laden trucks, and at a steady speed too, because, after all, it’s flat.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com
