2009: Surprise encounters walking on the road south from Lincoln – retracing King Harold’s steps from Stamford Bridge, Yorkshire, to the site of the Battle of Hastings

Y Dywysoges Gwenllian, uploaded to flickr by Dafad Ddall

In his readable book, ‘And Did Those Feet – Walking through 2000 years of British and Irish History’, published this year, Charlie Connelly wrote about his fairly recent walks in the British Isles that retraced the steps of famous, seminal journeys from history.  Here is an excerpt from his extraordinary journey through Lincolnshire,  -

After an hour or so of heart-pumpingly terrifying slog, I suddenly became aware that the traffic had disappeared.  There was nothing to be seen in either direction and the sudden silence was as surprising as it was welcome – I could see for a fair distance in both directions and there was no traffic at all.  Then, to my amazement, I saw two people in the road.  The only light was from my own downward-pointing torch and the faint glow of the horizon, so I could  only see them in silhouette, but there were definitely two people walking towards me.  They were actually in the road on the same side as me, so facing any oncoming traffic that might appear; a man and a woman.  I couldn’t see their faces, but they looked quite young.  He was tall, stocky and appeared to be wearing a T-shirt, she was small, wore her hair in a ponytail and had a jacket folded over her arms.  While I was amazed to see anyone out there I was also a little relieved.  Seeing other people reassured me a little, just by the fact that I wasn’t the only pedestrian on the A15 that night.  I’d started to believe that I was the first person ever to walk this stretch, yet here were a couple apparently even worse off than me – at least I was vaguely well equipped.  It was a very cold night and I was well wrapped up; my panting, frightened breath came in big clouds.  They were just in a T-shirt and a blouse.  There must be an explanation for them being out here like this, I thought.  Their car must have broken down or something.  I expected to see it down the road somewhere, hazard lights winking.

‘All right?’ I asked as they drew level.

No reaction.  Not a flicker.  We were a good couple of miles from any kind of house or even turning in either direction; you’d have thought three people in such a similarly tricky predicament would have been pleased to see each other.  But they didn’t even acknowledge me.

‘What are you doing out here?’  Again, not a flicker of reaction.  They just carried on walking in the road as if I wasn’t there, passing within six feet of me.

In the time it took me to walk on a few paces and mutter ‘Well, bollocks to you then’ to myself, I realised that I had the advantage of a map.  I knew that there was nothing in the directin they were going for a good hour’s walk at least.  If they were going for help they wouldn’t find any that way.  I turned around to call after them.

Gone.  There was no sign of them.  It had barely been ten seconds since I’d passed them.  The road was completely flat in both directions and there were fields on either side with low hedgerows separating them from the road.  There was simply nowhere they could have gone, yet they’d totally vanished.  At that point the clouds parted and a big, fat yellow full moon appeared, heaving its way into the sky and illuminating the scene briefly before the clouds joined up again and the traffic resumed with as much ferocity as before.  I walked on as the roar of the traffic battered my eardrums, but the more I thought about it the more confused I became, particularly when I didn’t pass any kind of abandoned vehicle all the rest of the way.  It just didn’t add up.  It was a cold night, yet he was in a T-shirt and she had a jacket folded over her arms.  It was so cold you could see your breath in clouds.  Which is when I realised I hadn’t seen theirs.  Then there was the fact they didn’t acknowledge my presence, even though I’d spoken to them twice.  Out there in the dark, on the road with nothing around for miles, they’d not even nodded at me.

Much later, when I got home at the end of the journey, I looked up the A15 on the internet.  That part of it on the way to Sleaford turned out to be one of the most haunted stretches of road in Britain.  Page after page detailed ghostly experiences precisely where I’d seen those people.  In the late 1990s there had even been an entire episode of This Morning devoted to it.  None of the accounts seemed to tally with what I’d seen (there were frequent tales of motorists seeing a face suddenly looming up in their windscreens out of the darkness and disappearing just before impact, a couple of ghostly horsemen and the usual smattering of Roman soldiers) but it certainly made me wonder.  There could well be a perfectly reasonable explanation.  I may well have inadvertently embellished the tale in my memory – I was, after all, in a fairly agitated state anyway – but to this day I can’t explain what I saw out on the road that night.

It didn’t get me any closer to Sleaford either, and I still had a good couple of hours of frightened trudging ahead of me.  I was out there for so long that the torch batteries began to fail and the light that saved me from the lumps, clumps and bramble trip-wires began to dim.  Eventually, to my immense relief, the lights of a town appeared in the distance, and I can guarantee you right now that nobody, but nobody, has ever been pleased to see the Sleaford Travelodge as I was.

My route had taken me slightly east of Ermine Street, but I was still following a Roman road south when I left Sleaford the next morning.  As far as I could tell it was the most direct route to London so there was still a possibility that Harold passed that way too.  By lunchtime I was making good progress towards Bourne and on a pleasant sunny afternoon passed another big church in the middle of nowhere, this time at the convergence of some tracks rather than roads.  A man was mowing the churchyard and gave me a friendly wave, and a few hundred yards further along the track I found the most extraordinary thing.  There, in the middle of rural Lincolnshire, I found a little piece of Wales.  Just off the track, in front of a line of trees was a flat-fronted standing stone, about four feet high.  A small border in front of it was crammed with flowers and shrubs, some planted, some laid by visitors.  As I approached I could see there was an oval plaque on it and, to my surprise, most of it was in Welsh.  ‘GWENLLIAN’ it said across the centre, with ‘Merch Llywelyn Ein Llew Olaf’ in smaller letters above and the dates 12.6.1282 and 7.6.1337.  Beneath the name was an English translation, ‘Daughter of Llewelyn, Last Prince of Wales’.  In smaller letters around the edge, in English and Welsh, the inscription read, ‘Born at Garthcelyn Aber Gwynedd, at 18 months old she was abducted by Edward I and held captive here at Sempringham Abbey for the rest of her life’.  Another small plaque nearby said ‘In Everlasting Memory – daffodils planted in 1996 by Boston Welsh Society’, with another bearing the legend ‘Merched Y Wawr’, which, I would later learn, is the rough equivalent of a Welsh Women’s Institute.

I was intrigued by this small piece of Wales stuck here, far from main roads, in an apparently unremarkable backwater.  As for Sempringham Abbey, there appeared to be no sign of it as far as I could see; the OS map gave no clue that there was even a ruin here.

There was a crunching of gravel and a sleek black four-wheel-drive vehicle eased to a halt next to me.  A man and a woman got out, stretching and loosening as if they’d reached the end of a long journey.  They came and stood next to me at the stone, and for a while none of us said anything.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said the woman eventually. ‘Such a tragic story.’  Her voice was awed, her accent definitely Welsh.

I had to confess that I had no idea what the stone was for; I’d just been passing.  When she told me that she and her husband had driven all the way from Cardiff just to see it I knew that there had to be something special about this place.

‘How much do you know about Welsh history?’ she asked.  Despite having once had a fiercely patriotic Welsh girlfriend, I had to confess that I didn’t know much.  Patiently she began to explain why there was this little monument to Welshness in the east of England.

‘Llewelyn ap Gruffydd had fought hard to become Prince of Wales,’ she began.  ‘He’d had to defeat his own brothers in battle in 1255 and then set about trying to remove the English.  Henry III had invaded Gwynedd in 1247, built castles and forced the local lords to kowtow to him.  After the battle Llywelyn appointed himself sole ruler of Gwynedd and proclaimed himself Prince in 1258.  Henry was fairly amenable to this at first and praised Llewelyn for his restraint, and eventually – in 1267, I think it was – Henry acknoweldged him as Prince of Wales.  Henry was then succeeded as King of England by Edward I, who wasn’t quite as tolerant of Llywelyn’s status.  But when Llywelyn married Henry’s niece Eleanor at Worcester in 1275, Edward gave the bride away and laid on the wedding feast.

‘However, it still rankled that Llywelyn had refused to attend his coronation and on five occasions between 1274 and 1279 he had refused to pay homage to the English king when asked.  Edward eventually invaded and Llwelyn led a fierce Welsh resistance.  Eventually, though, in the winter of 1282 Llwelyn’s army suffered a defeat in battle at Builth Wells.  Llywelyn was leaving the battle with a handful of followers when they were ambushed and he was killed.  When the English realised just who they’d got they cut off Llywelyn’s head and sent it to Edward, who had it displayed on a spike at the Tower of London, where it stayed for fifteen years.  He’s known today as Llywelyn the Last as he was the last Welsh Prince of an independent Wales.’

‘But what brings you here?’ I asked. ‘Why is this place so significant?’

‘Well, five months before he died Llywelyn had fathered a daughter, Gwenllian.  Eleanor had died in childbirth, so when Llywelyn was killed the baby was orphaned.  When she was eighteen months old she was spirited away and brough here, to Sempringham Abbey, as far from Wales and her heritage as possible.  The English didn’t want her knowing about her background and didn’t want the Welsh to have a figurehead to rally behind, so they sent her here to the nuns, where she lived until she was fifty-six.  Imagine that: living your whole life not knowing who you are.

‘This is such an important place for the Welsh now.  She could have been the continuation of our royal bloodline.  It’s such a terrible thing to do to someone, to take away their birthright, their whole life, yet few people outside Wales know about it.  The history books say that the Gwynedd dynasty, the last official independent Welsh royal family, ended with Llywelyn by actually it ended right here, it’s so unfair.’

Her tone was imploring.  Her voice was filled with injustice that echoed down seven hundred years of history.  When I explained why I was walking through this part of Lincolnshire countryside she clutched my forearm, looked pleadingly into my eyes and said, ‘You have to write about this.  Please write about this.  Promise me you’ll write about this, that you’ll tell her story.’

I promised.  She released my arm, wished me luck and they both climbed into the car.  Before they pulled away she wound down the window and called out, ‘When you walk across that little bridge there, look back at the stone and you’ll see,’ and with that the car was gone, heading back to Cardiff.

I walked the few yards to the little stone bridge across the stream that ran behind the memorial.  When I looked back at the stone I saw what she meant.  From that angle it looked exactly like a nun kneeling in prayer.

pp.114-19