Nineteen miles to Dover, and a pint where the Channel swimmers sign

You can walk the North Downs Way all the way to the sea, and today we did the bit that gets you there: Canterbury to Dover.

The plan is to walk the path in sections, a Sunday at a time, and this was the leg that ends at the coast. Five of us set off from Canterbury just before nine: my friend Jimmy, my dad, Joe from Canterbury Harriers, Fred who worked alongside both my dad and Jimmy, and me.

It was hot. Properly hot for the middle of September, big blue sky, the fields all cut back to gold stubble. Jimmy walked a good chunk of it with his t-shirt knotted on top of his head like a legionnaire, which we gave him no end of grief for and which was, annoyingly, the sensible thing to do.

The path here has grander ideas than a Sunday stroll to the coast. This is the old Via Francigena, the pilgrim road to Rome that Archbishop Sigeric walked home along in 990, back when a trip to the Vatican and back was measured in months rather than a cheap flight. It moonlights, too, as the English end of the E2, which in theory keeps going across the Channel and down to the Mediterranean. We were going to Dover.

The first thing nobody warns you about this stretch is the A2. For the first couple of hours you are never quite out of earshot of it; the dual carriageway sits off to one side and hums away while you walk this ancient road, and the two facts refuse to reconcile. It only really lets go once you are past the Aylesham cemetery, after which the noise falls back and it starts to feel like proper countryside.

We stopped for lunch at the Bell Inn at Shepherdswell, the far side of halfway, and had the first pint of the day. You know you shouldn’t, with miles still to go. You have one anyway, and the afternoon is better for it.

The back half is field paths, the odd green lane. Then you come down into Dover proper and finish, as you should, at the White Horse.

It is the oldest pub in the town, tucked under the castle, and its walls are covered floor to ceiling in the names of people who have swum the Channel. They sign the plaster with their name, the date, and the time it took them, and you can lose a good while just reading them: the record-breakers, the ones in their seventies, the shaky signatures of people who look to have hauled themselves out of the sea, dried one hand and reached straight for the pen. We had not swum anything. We had walked nineteen miles in the sun, which felt like plenty, and we drank the second pint of the day sitting among all those names.

Nicole came and rescued us afterwards, driving out to collect five tired and slightly sunburnt men and take the lot of us back to Canterbury. I was very grateful. There is no dignified way home from the far end of a point-to-point walk, and being picked up from the pub is comfortably the best of the undignified options.

Nineteen miles, from a cathedral city to the sea, most of a bottle of sun cream between us, and another leg of the path ticked off. The plan is to keep going, section by section, in no great hurry. West next, I think.

The walk