It has been quite the profile today, with the same total elevation as yesterday but with a whole extra kilometre to enjoy it over.

Well, as the saying goes, what goes up…….

….must come down.

That makes perfect sense.

The rest of the day has made us smile a lot more than the hills though. The muck spreading in the early morning light, which you’ll be thankful you can’t smell,

the village where the sheep run free,

and the bus stop that is also a library.

The paths we’ve been walking on have been glorious, out of Newent

and through the Forest of Dean especially:

But then at the end of walk, without strictly hallucinating, in Mark’s words Strava was “definitely having a laugh”.

We fought through bracken, brambles and nettles all on a very steep hill, swearing at Strava, which, despite having the most accurate data on how many people have fought through the undergrowth on the path before, is somewhat hazy on what an actual path looks like.

Eventually we arrived at St Briavels (pronounced Brevilles) which has its own castle and a church, not dedicated to the patron saint of toasters, but rather the Virgin Mary. Go figure.

Finally we reached The George and the very eclectic manager who does a lot of talking and zero listening, where we found some actual home cooked food.

It tasted ok, but it was also genuinely lovely to have a menu that wasn’t identical to every other pub.

The other feature of the pub is that it is quiet at 9pm so perhaps we will sleep well tonight as well. It’s all good.

Distance – 37.2km, meaning we have walked just over 100km in 3 days. Tomorrow is “just” 26km with a hop into Wales. I can’t wait.