Cutting from the Chilterns in Oxfordshire across the Thames to the North Wessex Downs, the trail has existed for 5,000 years, and the sense of following the ancient tread of travellers, herdsmen and soldiers is quite surreal.
IN THE centre of the blazing whiteness, four Afar herdsmen chip away at the salt with pickaxes.
Matthew Paris, a monk and chronicler who lived in England in the 13th century, was scathing about the shepherds' leader:This impostor, who could speak French, German and Latin, wandered about everywhere preaching without papal authority or the licence of any prelate, falsely claiming that he had received an order from Blessed Mary, the mother of the Lord, to summon shepherds and herdsmen.
One idea in Kenya is to recruit spear-carrying Masai herdsmen to graze their cattle and goats on top of the twittering fibre, just as they already guard the oil pipeline that runs across their pastures.
Now many nomadic herdsmen and subsistence farmers have lost their animals, and thus the ability to sell their assets to buy food, let alone survive another period of possible drought, should that happen.
Recognising Tibetan poverty, the government recently announced that it would offer aid to more than 230,000 farmers and herdsmen.
Those were specific to Darfur, whereas the sharp drop in rainfall hit the whole Sahel, without intensifying conflict elsewhere.Another commonly cited example is violent competition for scarce grazing between nomadic herdsmen in the Horn of Africa.
Higher cereals prices prompt herdsmen to sell more of their livestock.
This year's meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in San Francisco, however, heard of an earlier change in the Mongolian climate that may have been responsible for complicating the lives of rather more than just a few herdsmen.
For most of the millennium, armies, traders, pilgrims and nomadic herdsmen moved, and others did not.
His plan was for a symbolic overnight stay in a particularly nasty bit of Darfur the vast desert region that has seen perhaps 300,000 people killed and more than 2m displaced in the last three years of fighting there.But on a barge journey up the Nile from Juba, surrounded, he says, by naked Dinka herdsmen, Mr Egeland received a satellite call informing him that he was not welcome in Darfur.
