At Easter I had a fall. The wild garlic smelled lovely, but I didn’t want to die there

There I was, striding across the Gower Peninsula on my way to mass when a rotten stile left me bleeding and shaken

It’s well known that once you pass a certain age, falling over requires a noun rather than a verb. And on Easter Sunday, I had a fall. For one reason and another, I had been feeling overwhelmed with stress and anxiety, so I rummaged around in my Roman Catholic bag of tricks and pulled out the trusty old hair shirt.

I was staying on the southern tip of the Gower Peninsula in south Wales and resolved to walk 17 miles to St David’s Priory church in Swansea for that evening’s Easter mass. That should sort me out, I reasoned. For added difficulty, I would not take the obvious coastal route: no, I would proceed along Cefn Bryn, the ancient ridge in the middle of the peninsula known as the backbone of Gower. That would show the Almighty my mettle, and no mistake. Then it would be steeply down into wooded valleys and up and over commons and moorland to Swansea.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2GuZCVz
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