A few weeks ago, I did a post on my DofE practice expedition and this is the real thing.
The expedition is both the most dreaded and the best known of all the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award components. As a general rule, I think it’s the last thing to get done. The typical vision of the expedition is several days in the wilderness, soaking wet and covered in blisters and absolutely miserable. Mine took place in the Purbecks and it remained warm and sunny throughout. There needs to be a purpose – I probably mentioned in the practice expedition post that my purpose was photography but these days it would probably be to make a scrapbook of some kind. Actually, I have the diary with the photos and I also have a couple of plastic bags of stuff under my bed… No. Not going to make a scrapbook.
Day one: 28th June 2003
We were nearly half an hour late starting by the time Chris had packed, but at least we could find the start point, which was a car park near Corfe Castle.
We got a little bit lost by the time we reached the first field but it didn’t take long for us to realise we were supposed to go up towards the road. We went down the road for a few minutes and turned onto a bridleway.
We went a bit too far along the bridleway and we could see the top of the path we were meant to be on, so instead of going back and around, we climbed over the barbed wire fence and cut across the field.
We walked through some woods where we acquired sticks called Bertha and Ber-2. There was a patch of mud which Catherine, Charlie & Steven walked around but Chris went across and as I had Bertha and there were pieces of wood across it, I decided to go through. The wood ran out halfway across, so I thought maybe if I went quickly enough I could get across without sinking, which didn’t quite work.
After our first checkpoint, we had to climb up a hill, where Chris nearly killed himself running up trying to push me and Vicky up. Our next checkpoint was near the bottom of the hill, on a windy country lane near Church Knowle.
After nearly three hours and an enormous hill, we were back almost exactly where we had started.
We stopped for lunch in a field by a stream, which two Alsations kept splashing in. We ate sandwiches, crisps, nuts, Mars bars & Skittles. We got lost on the other side of the stream because the path seemed to go through a thick bush. We went around the bush instead and ended up in a field of cabbages which had a path in it somewhere but it was impossible to see. We got to the edge of it, climbed over or under the electric fence and followed the edge of the field instead.
After a long and difficult walk up a hill, we reached our checkpoint in Kingston and had a rest on a grassy verge. We crossed some fields and then we reached a track going uphill for a long way.
This time it was me, Vicky & Catherine who got left behind, although Catherine soon caught up again. Me and Vicky took so long that after a while Chris came back and carried my bag up for me. At the top we had another checkpoint and a rest before we crossed the road and went down a path. We walked through a jungly bit where the plants were taller than me and the ground was so overgrown that I couldn’t see where I was walking and kept falling into holes.
Along the path, we reached a stile so Chris lay down to take a photo and couldn’t get up again. On the other side of the stile were some steps leading to another stile and then a track which we followed for quite a long way before we discovered that we’d taken the wrong turning and would have to go back again.
We came back down, over the double stile and back along the path until we got to the next turning on the left. We still weren’t in exactly the right place, so Chris asked a woman walking her dog which was the quickest way to Worth Matravers. She told us it was straight up the hill, as we thought.
We had a quick stop at the top because we were almost at the campsite. When we got there, we abandoned everything and just lay on the grass because it was too much effort to put the tents up straight away.
It took Chris and Steven a lot longer to put their tent up than us, partly because we had an easier tent and partly because they didn’t have Stewart to help this time. We sat around in the sun for a while. Then eventually we had to start cooking. We made pasta with tomato and basil sauce and the swiss rolls I had forgotten last time, which were fine inside but a bit sticky outside.
Jack and Sam camped with us and played with scary long knives. Catherine showed them Two Hairs Fighting so they tipped a bucket of water over her. We played Uno on the grass and Steven and Miss Dudfield played a very complicated game where every card did something different.
When it started getting dark, we put everything away and took the Uno cards into our tent to play by torchlight. It was hard to tell the difference between blue and green in there and Chris was depending completely on the pictures. After a while we got bored with that so we just sat talking and trying to find a way so all six of us could stretch our legs out. Chris went to bed at 10.30 and the others stayed for another half an hour, eating Mars bars.
When they’d gone and we’d turned off the torch, Catherine heard rustling and thought there was a hedgehog in the porch. We unzipped it to see but it was silent, so we decided it must have been a mouse which had run away. We went back in and zipped up the door and Catherine found a Mars bar wrapper under her head.
Day two: 29th June 2003
I got up at about 6.40, having dressed as quietly as I could so as not to wake Catherine. The sun had just come up and Jack and Sam were cooking and burning bacon and eggs. One of my hot pads was still warm so I stood by the tent with it, waiting for someone else to get up. Just after 7, I decided it was much warmer in the tent so I crawled back in and stayed in until Miss Dudfield came round to get us up because it was 7.20. We made soup and hot chocolate and pasta for breakfast and then I packed my bag and we took the tents down. I washed the pegs in the fire bucket but we couldn’t find the peg bag so we put them in a plastic bag for now. We were a few minutes late leaving but we had a long stop early on.
We walked down into Worth Matravers but we couldn’t find the green phone box which had apparently been painted red. We walked down the lane and went to the shop and bought a tub of bacon, a jar of Marmite, a packet of Skittles, the sea, a house, a polar bear, a blown-up school, a knife, a tree, Vicky’s shoes and a gorse bush and then played I Spy.
We had a long stop at Winspit to go down on the rocks and into the caves with my torch. We could hear boats but we couldn’t see any.
We walked along the coast path, past a big hole in the ground and past Seacombe. When we got to Dancing Ledge we had to walk up the hill.
At the top of the hill we stopped to change sock, eat Mars bars, drink and put on sun cream. We walked up the field alongside a stone wall and stopped to debate where we were meant to go. We crossed Tom’s Field into Langton Matravers, where we had lunch a bit late.
All we had to do now was go round in a loop to the pub in the village. We went through a school and down to a farm.
At the farm, the path went through a field of calves. Steven decided that to avoid them, he would go around the field, in the gate at the bottom and run to the footpath gate. By the time we go onto the path, the calves were hiding in the corner. We stopped for a break in the next field.
We went through a farm, where there were geese, a ride-on lawnmower and a tractor. We walked down a lane, saw the stream train and reached our last checkpoint.
There was only half a mile to Langton Matravers so we followed the path through the woods. It came out in a graveyard and then stopped, so we followed the road which seemed to go in more or less the right direction. We met Miss Dudfield at the King’s Arms and had to go down the hill and up the other side to get to the Ship Inn.
There’s one more paragraph in my scrapbook/diary but it’s about Vicky’s dad taking us home and I’ll spare you the description of how to get to my house from Langton Matravers.
There’s also one more short chapter in this story. This was at the end of year 13. We’d finished school at this point. We returned the next weekend for the final Summer Ball. Vicky moved to Australia shortly afterwards. And by the time the certificates and badges arrived to commemorate us completely the Bronze Level of our Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, we were long gone. Things changed. The stuff went from our DofE leader to our head of year. She moved offices to the other end of the school. People retired and left and moved. By the time I went back to claim it, it had vanished, never to be seen again.
In April 2017 – nearly fourteen years after this expedition – I decided I wanted to have a go at getting that badge and certificate and by magic, our county outdoors education department happened to have records going back that far, even with my sparse information of the name of the school we did it at, the name of the teacher that ran it and the year. They found my records and immediately sent me a replacement certificate and badge, warning me that they’d look different to my original. Did I care? No. I had no idea what the originals looked like. I’d never seen them. The certificate lives with the rest of my Record of Achievement (no, not in the red leather folder. The plastic pockets lift ink. It’s in an ordinary slip-in presentation book and yes, I have taken it to interviews occasionally) but the badge is on my Girlguiding badge tab and I wear it with pride, especially after how long it took to get.
If you’d like to buy me a pack of blister plasters after all that walking, I have a Ko-fi here.
I blog every Monday & Thursday – Thursday’s blog finally brings us back to the almost-present day. It’s about my bouldering induction session so come back and find out about bouldering with me.