The Cheviot Hills stand at the northern edge of England as the last great upland barrier between Harold Fry and Berwick-upon-Tweed. When Harold first sets out from Kingsbridge, having just promised Queenie Hennessy that he will walk to her, he looks ahead and names the chain of landmarks that will carry him north: the Blackdown Hills, the Mendips, the Malverns, the Pennines, the Yorkshire Dales, and finally the Cheviots, with Berwick-upon-Tweed beyond them. In that moment the hills are pure anticipation, the far edge of a map of space that lies ahead, a place he can only imagine. The sea lies behind him; before him stretch rolling hills and the blue outline of Dartmoor, and beyond that the long succession of ranges that ends in the Cheviots. The hills are thus fixed at the very outset of the pilgrimage as its terminal geographical marker, the threshold that must be crossed before the journey can be complete.

The Gateway to the Cheviot Hills

The Cheviots return at the pilgrimage's darkest hour, when Harold's faith has collapsed and he no longer knows where he is. Walking through a landscape of hills, gorse, and bracken, he telephones Maureen and confesses that he has stopped seeing things quite a while ago. He tells her that wherever he is now might be the Gateway to the Cheviot Hills, though he is not certain, and that he may have noticed a sign some days earlier. The uncertainty is devastating: the man who once measured his journey in remembered miles and knew every step of his route can no longer place himself on the map. He says again that he wants to come home, that she was right, that he cannot do it and does not want to. The Cheviots, which once stood as the glorious culmination of his imagined route, have become the site of his surrender. Maureen's response is to ask for half an hour to work out where he is and what to do, and to beg him to phone her back. He nods, forgetting she cannot see him. The hills thus mark the precise point where Harold's solitary resolve breaks and he reaches out for help, the moment when the pilgrimage nearly ends not at its destination but in despair.

The Postcards from the Edge

In the aftermath of that crisis, the Cheviots appear again, transformed into the image on the postcards Harold sends home to Maureen. She receives a card bearing a picture of the Cheviots with no stamp, its message reading only "Weather good. H. x." The following day another card arrives, showing Hadrian's Wall, but this one carries no message at all. The cards come every day, sometimes several at once, with the briefest of messages: "Rain. Not good. Walking. I miss you." Once he draws a hill shape; another time a squiggly w that is possibly a bird. Often the cards are blank. Maureen asks the postman to look out for them at the sorting office and offers to pay the extra charges, and she says the messages are more precious than love letters. The Cheviots, which nearly witnessed the end of Harold's journey, become the emblem of its continuation, the picture on the card that proves he is still walking, still alive, still reaching toward her. The hill shape he draws is a kind of self-portrait, a man reduced to the simplest possible mark of the land he is crossing.

The Threshold of Arrival

The Cheviots also stand as the last barrier before the sea, and it is only after passing through them that Harold finally smells salt in the wind. At three thirty on a Tuesday afternoon he catches the scent, and an hour later he reaches the brow of a hill and sees a town lying before him, fringed by the endless gap that is the sea. He approaches the pinkish-grey town walls, but no one stops, or looks twice, or offers him food. Eighty-seven days after setting out to post a letter, Harold Fry arrives at the gates of St Bernadine's Hospice, having walked six hundred and twenty-seven miles including mistakes and diversions. The Cheviots are thus the hinge between the inland pilgrimage and the coastal arrival, the point where the land finally gives way to the sea and the journey's end becomes visible. The hills that Harold once named as the last landmark before Berwick have been crossed, and the town that lay beyond them is finally reached.

The Hills as Measure of the Journey

The Cheviots function throughout the narrative as a measure of Harold's progress and his state of mind. Early in the walk, when he is still learning to trust his body, he inspects his feet in a hotel room and feels quietly proud of their condition, imagining the nurse telling Queenie that he is walking and that all she has to do is keep living. The hills lie far ahead, a distant goal that gives shape to his effort. Later, as he walks through the Cotswolds and into middle England, he no longer knows how far he has come but only that he is going forward, and he feels that he has been waiting all his life to walk. The Cheviots are the fixed point toward which all this movement tends. When a young man named Mick calls his journey a pilgrimage for the twenty-first century and asks to photograph him, Harold is still far from the hills, but the comparison already links his walk to the great religious journeys of the past. The hills are the secular equivalent of a sacred destination, the place where the ordinary man's extraordinary walk finally ends. They are also the place where Harold's identity nearly dissolves, where he becomes no more than a body that houses a walk, blue-duct-tape feet and Berwick-upon-Tweed. The Cheviots thus hold both the triumph and the near-failure of the pilgrimage, the summit from which the sea is finally seen and the valley in which Harold almost gave up.