High Price Paid

The walk to Snowdonia did not go well at all.

It took me all day to walk from Hastings to Pevensey, and by that time I could barely stand. The night was not so bad, and there had been a few entertaining events during the day; but come morning I was unwilling to go on if I could not get any lifts.

What a shame that motorists appear to be unanimously ignoring hitch hikers now. Every vehicle that was going my way was populated with a driver determined not to see me and my desperately up-turned thumb.

My shoulders, feet, back, and knees protested with every step home, and in the end I had to call in a favour from a friend so that I would be spared the ten-mile trudge.

However, since I was not in Wales this weekend, I was able to go to the re-enactment at Battle (most of my blisters had gone down by Friday). We were not there to commemorate the battle of Hastings, 1066, but there were plenty of references made to it during the course of the day.

There was a lot more living history camp-life than is usually found at a Vikings re-enactment (we were Normans for the most part), and the battle re-enactments that we did do were light-hearted to say the least. It was fun, if exhausting.

What exhausted me was training with the might warrior Cornelius. He is renown in the group for being a terrific fighter; he knows all the tricks and has the strength of arm to utilise every single one. I picked up a lot of pointers, but had to be drowned in cold water afterwards to help stave off dehydration. I have more than a couple of bruises to show for it.

Since the fighting had put him in such a jovial mood, Cornelius made a visit to our camp and told us about a wargame he attended in Denmark. This was the kind of re-enactment that the public are not invited to - there is no show fighting. There were some three-hundred re-enacters taking part, and the stories that Cornelius was coming up with impressed us all to a man. It seems they really know how to re-enact on the continent.