I have left my walking boots at home, and receive no sympathy from my children as we climb up the stony gorge, up over the craggy uneven path. It is steep, strewn with small sharp rocks, thrown down onto the narrow track by the wind, rain and gravity.
Every time I step onto a sharp shard of stone it pierces the sole and a slow drubbing pain enters the feet and shudders up the knees towards my hips. This walk may turn out to be gentle torture, in a pulverisation of the feet, but I am remaining optimistic as I look at the sun drenching the other side of the gorge. For as we climb up in the shaded protection of the cliff, we look across at the other side of this small canyon, at the rock face opposite that is pitted with shallow caves and bathed in a beautiful shallow January sun.
Pitched as it is, the low yet powerful glow creates an intricacy of pattern and wear that would be completely obliterated say, by the midday Summer sun with its fierce downward glare. Now the Winter sun plays across the surface of the landscape with a gentler more revealing eye, cutting into the surface of stone and creating shadows and reliefs that astonish the eye with their variety.
The air is fresh and the atmosphere feels clean and crisp. I soon forget the ache in my legs and the jarring of the feet. It has taken us barely twenty minutes to reach the top of the steep ravine. We now turn onto a rain scarred track hemmed in by scrubby woodland, made up of small evergreen growth. My feet have become somewhat numb to the pounding, and it does appear that the ground leveling out has become less jagged, more dusty and flat.
After a short distance we seem to be walking on a plateau, and as the trees thin, we can see views opening out onto the Monts de Vaucluse and across the Valley of Calavon. Here I can finally rest up, as we eat our sandwiches in the early afternoon, sitting on the concrete edge of a cistern, bathed in a glowing sun. London and its wintery skies seem far away.
