A traverse of Hergest Ridge: Mike Oldfield’s favourite hill walk

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about climbing tiny Little Solsbury Hill above the city of Bath, the setting for Peter Gabriel’s 70s progressive rock classic, that’s right… Solsbury Hill. Two years on, here I am writing a blog post about another small English hill that was once the subject of a classic 70s prog rock album. So I suppose you could say this is the second in my series of blog posts about mountain-themed prog rock. I can’t promise that it will be a very long series.

Hergest Ridge, on the border of rural Herefordshire, is a slightly bigger peak than Solsbury Hill, rising to a majestic 426m. This is fitting, because it was also a longer track; two 20-minute instrumental tracks, in fact, forming both sides of Mike Oldfield’s second album, yes indeed… Hergest Ridge.

I’m not going to try and critique the music. Mike Oldfield’s first and most famous work is of course Tubular Bells, an album of haunting melodies whose main theme was used in the horror movie The Exorcist, but which ends rather bizarrely with a sea shanty that would be more in keeping with the 70s children’s TV show Captain Pugwash. Shiver me timbers. Suffice to say that in my youth I was a massive fan of 70s prog rock, but even I find Hergest Ridge ‘a bit weird’.

After the success of Tubular Bells, Mike Oldfield bought a house (now a guesthouse) on a hillside above the market town of Kington, close to the Welsh border. Here he composed Hergest Ridge, named after the hill he could see from his house. The music uses an organ sound produced by running the noise of his electric guitar through a plywood box. Surprisingly, the album was nearly as successful as Tubular Bells.

I hadn’t given the album a moment’s thought since my early teens, but a couple of weeks ago (and as I mentioned in my previous post), I was thumbing the pages of a coffee table book Cicerone: Fifty Years of Adventure when I chanced upon a short essay about a walk across Hergest Ridge the hill by one of Cicerone’s guidebook writers Mike Dunn.

Mike was fairly restrained in his praise of the walk and had this to say about it:

Some places just keep drawing you back, demanding another visit.

Which sounds like a compliment until you consider that the same can be said of your office.

I happened to own another Cicerone guidebook Hereford & the Wye Valley, published in the darkest depths of 1993. These were the years when Cicerone’s quirky assortment of guides included such memorable titles as Coniston Copper Mines and Birdwatching on Merseyside. The author of this particular guidebook, David Hinchliffe, was rather more effusive.

Some names evoke visions and inspire people from childhood – Xanadu, Samarkand and Timbuktu… When a hill on the Welsh border inspires a piece of music and has a name reminiscent of ancient heroes such as Hengist and Horsa, curiosity just has to be satisfied.

You may be thinking that David leans a little too far in the other direction. It reminds me of the memorable line by sports commentator Sid Waddell after Eric Bristow had won the World Darts Championship for the third time: ‘When Alexander the Great was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer… Bristow is only 27.’

I’ve not been to Samarkand or Timbuktu, and the closest I’ve been to Xanadu is listening to the classic track by Canadian prog rockers Rush… I mean reading the poem Kubla Khan by the great Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’m guessing that none of these places are at all like Hergest Ridge, but if like me you live in the UK then the latter is a little more accessible and well worth checking out.

Edita was back from Haiti for a week of R&R, so I booked a couple of days off work and a room in a pub nearby. We left our home in the Cotswolds at 8am; by 10.15 we had parked up in the village of Gladestry and were starting our traverse of Hergest Ridge.

We joined the Offa’s Dyke Path, a 285km long-distance trail that roughly follows the England-Wales border. A tarmacked track slanted beneath the western edge of the ridge and joined the crest beyond the first small peak. I use the word ‘crest’, but Hergest Ridge is a broad hillside that has more the feel of a great plateau than a ridge. However, its isolation gives it a true roof-of-the-world feel with views for miles around: south to the Black Mountains and north to the high plateau of Radnor Forest.

We could not have chosen a better day for it. The sky was blue, temperatures mild and spring was in the air. The walking was easy, on a wide trail across soft, sheep-cropped grass, dappled with occasional patches of gorse. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and for the first hour only the twittering of skylarks broke the silence. We crossed from Wales into England and stopped briefly on the main summit for two rounds of photos among a herd of wild ponies. There is an Ordnance Survey trig pillar at 423m, but the true 426m summit is marked by a pile of stones a little to the west of this.

The word ‘Hergest’ is pronounced with a hard ‘g’ as in ‘Gibson guitar’. You may be wondering if the superlative has a meaning. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I suspect that in old Herefordshire dialect, the adjective ‘herg’ means ‘bedecked with monkey puzzles’. Hergest Ridge is therefore the ridge with the greatest number of monkey puzzles. This is a remarkable coincidence, given that some monkey puzzles actually did sprout up on the ridge about 20 years after Mike Oldfield recorded his seminal album.

A short distance east of the summit, we reached a small copse of nine healthy trees rising up to 5 or 6m in height. According to Wikipedia they were planted in the early 1990s by Dick Banks – not a sperm donor, but the erstwhile owner of nearby Hergest Croft Gardens. I was somewhat sceptical of this when I read it. We planted a monkey puzzle in our garden in 2021 and it’s still only slightly bigger than a thimble. For these monkey puzzles to have reached such prodigious proportions in only 30 years seemed a stretch. But then I found a photo of the trees from 2007 where you can still touch the top by standing on Mike Oldfield’s Marshall amp (I wouldn’t recommend this: they are extremely spiky).

Having not seen a soul besides sheep and ponies since leaving Gladestry, we passed many more people during the gentle descent to Kington on the English side of the ridge. This was partly explained when we reached a sign at the top end of town welcoming us to ‘The centre for walking’. Kington is a quaint and characterful market town; it was surprisingly lively for a weekday and there were at least six pubs. Only one of the pubs, the Swan Hotel, was open for lunch, but that was enough for us. The walking had been easy, but the hot sun meant that our thirst needed quenching. We had a couple of pints and a substantial lunch.

I had intended to turn our walk into a circular by taking footpaths to the south back to Gladestry, but we had so enjoyed Hergest Ridge that we were all for returning back over the top. Had we taken the southern route then we would have passed Hergest Court, home of the infamous Black Dog of Hergest, a ghostly hound that overturns wagons in broad daylight, frightens women on their way to the market in Kington, and is believed to be the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles. Scary stuff.

Legend has it that the hound is the ghost of Sir Thomas Vaughan, known as Black Vaughan, who was executed by Richard III for seizing the boy king Edward V and imprisoning him in the Tower of London. Historians may dispute this version of events, but the story becomes murkier still. Thirteen parsons assembled in a circle in Hergest Court and stood with lighted candles until they captured the spirit of Black Vaughan in the flame of a candle. They enclosed the candle in a stone box and buried it beneath the lake at Hergest Court. This was presumably the inspiration for the film The Exorcist.

Instead of taking this route back to the car, it was clearly going to be much safer to explore Hergest Croft Gardens, a 70-acre estate of maples, birches and pink azaleas on a hillside at the foot of the ridge. Alas, it was still early in the season and only the tearoom was open. We took a footpath out the other side and rejoined the ridge.

We compromised by taking a lower return trail that contoured Hergest Ridge by its southern flank. This was a nice alternative that looked south to the dark outline of the Black Mountains on the far horizon. This path provided some ups and downs in the form of two deep hollows cutting across our route. These small valleys are known locally as ‘dingles’, blessing the map with named features that you might expect to find in a Carry On film. On the other side of Rabbers Dingle we rejoined the ridge and descended into Gladestry, arriving back at our car little more than five hours after starting out.

Hergest Ridge had exceeded our expectations. Samarkand could only be a disappointment by comparison. But our mini break didn’t end there. We crossed over the border and stayed at a marvellous pub, the Harp Inn, Old Radnor, on a hillside looking north to the peaks of Radnor Forest. Our room had oak panels and a four-poster bed, and the food tempted us to overeat. I have to doff my hat to the landlord for his welcome. Checking in mid-afternoon, I asked what time the bar opened that evening.

‘If you want a pint now, I can give you a pint now,’ he replied in a lyrical Welsh lilt.

For good measure, the following day we bagged a county top in the Radnor Forest. Great Rhos, the highest point in the old Welsh county of Radnorshire, is not a hill that many people talk about. But its 660m make it slightly higher than the much more famous Kinder Scout, the highest point in both Derbyshire and the Peak District. It shares much in common with its counterpart. Like Kinder Scout, its summit lies in the middle of a giant, peat-laden plateau. A very different kind of walk from gentle Hergest Ridge but only a stone’s throw away, it provides an interesting contrast if you’re in the area for longer than a day.

You can see all my photos from our mini break in my Hergest Ridge and Great Rhos Flickr album, and as a bonus, here are links to the GPX tracks on the Ordnance Survey website.

Route maps

Day 1: Hergest Ridge (426m)
Total distance: 16.94km. Total ascent/descent: 534m.
View route map and download GPX

Day 2: Great Rhos (660m)
Total distance: 12.34km. Total ascent/descent: 506m.
View route map and download GPX