Founder's Hall, Royal Holloway, Egham.

At the front edge of one summer, as an uncharacteristic heat settled in over Surrey’s A30, I hatched an ambitious plan. I cracked my window to let the mossy smell of drying English ground creep across my desk, I pushed aside the heaps of paper and notes that had gathered during the long semester, and I scrawled a basic map. At the bottom was the college’s Founder’s Hall and the A30 — my home base, my starting point; at the top, a shape like a lollipop to represent Windsor Castle and the straight, three mile road that leads to it from the south; and between, a wide-open space marked only by the dotted blue lines of my notebook and a series of lightly sketched landmarks, representing the vast expanse of Windsor Great Park. The plan was simple: I would cross the park and walk those five miles – or seven, or nine (nothing on my map was to scale) – until I reached the castle. Read the rest of this entry »