We set off at 4pm from the foot of the South Downs in sweltering heat, which gradually progressed to icy fog once we reached the summits. The first twenty miles were relatively calm, easy and in sunlight but when night fell things got trickier.
Map reading became more complicated and encouraged us to go quite badly wrong on several occasions, at one point down a hill and into a pond! Despite our accidental detours, we did manage to make quite good time. Everyone was in a reasonably good state until about 2am and the extent of what was to come finally dawned on us.
The next hour did seem to drag on for a long time, but a cup of tea, bacon butty and a change of socks at the breakfast station at 3am gave us quite a boost and we set off in a determined fashion with 20 miles left to go.
Boosted by breakfast and sunrise we were flying along until we reached Cranleigh, 10 miles from Charterhouse. A foot inspection revealed several horrific blisters which made for a gruelling final straight. Up until this point, the biggest problem had been boredom along the 20 something miles of abandoned railway we had been walking on.
The last four hours of the walk were by far the longest and full of quite a few stumbles and falls. To add insult to injury, the finish line was at the summit of what, certainly seemed like, one of the steepest hills of the entire walk. We marched through the school gates just before 11am, some 18 hours 59 minutes and 54 miles after we started; none of us have ever felt happier to be on school premises than at that moment!
We are all extremely moved by CRY and its work and we hope that the money we have raised will help, albeit in a small way, towards CRY’s goals. So far we have raised £1285 for CRY via Justgiving, and you can still sponsor us at www.justgiving.com/Jack-Hillcox
We were able to take some photos at the end of the walk, sadly Angus Walker [motor cycle cop] is not in them as we could not find him at the time (he was asleep).
