| The Warwickshire Centenary Way | |
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Shaggy dog stories ....
Today's walk almost didn't happen. Lenscap Dave — who was to have been my companion for the section — had been felled by what he described, with some dramatic flair, as the Tenby Plague, and had cancelled at the last possible moment. Into the breach stepped Chauffeur Jamie, who agreed at the eleventh hour to ferry me out and back with the cheerful willingness of a man who either genuinely didn't mind or hadn't yet fully understood what he'd agreed to. Either way, I was grateful. We met at Coombe Abbey Country Park in the early morning, and as he drove me back to Hawkesbury Junction, we exchanged dog-owner stories with the easy fluency of people who have made peace with the fact that their pets run their lives. I own a greyhound. Jamie owns a German Shepherd. Common ground was found through my previous dog, Bryn, who had been fifty percent greyhound and fifty percent German Shepherd, and was, as a direct consequence, one hundred percent schizophrenic.
Up the junction ....
He dropped me at Hawkesbury Junction, which at that hour of the morning was sleepy, still, and entirely innocent of the noise and menace it must once have embodied. Two centuries ago this was a place of hard labour and harder men — coal barges bound for London, competing canal companies engaged in a decades-long commercial war of attrition, and the Greyhound Inn providing the sort of Saturday night entertainment that probably ended in stitches. The Greyhound today is a different proposition entirely: hanging baskets, polished brass, and an air of studied rural charm that would have mystified any bargee who'd once drunk there.
The canal companies' feud — rooted in tolls,
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Hawkesbury Junction |
Progress, of a sort.
A dominant feature of Hawkesbury Junction is the large brick structure that once housed a powerful steam engine, installed to pump water from local mines to replenish the canals. The engine was originally commisioned for use in the Welsh coalfield. This much-travelled piece of Victorian engineering became known as Lady Godiva and now resides in the Dartmouth Museum, in Devon.
It was another gorgeous morning, everything crisp and luminous in the early air, and I felt the urge to record some commentary to camera. This took five attempts to get right, which in itself is not unusual, though I was aware throughout of an audience of waterfowl assembling on the bank with what initially appeared to be polite interest. They dispersed, with some disappointment, once it became clear that I was not going to produce stale bread.
My GPS helped me navigate the slightly confusing topology of the junction — it is, in truth, a place that takes a moment to decode — and then I shouldered my rucksack and set off along the Oxford Canal.
Itching on the cutting ....
A long line of narrowboats was moored along the first stretch, their occupants apparently in the early stages of morning ritual. Enticing smells drifted out through portholes and hatches — bacon, coffee, toast — and by the time I had walked the length of the queue I was salivating in a manner that reflected poorly on my breakfast discipline. Narrowboat people are generally a friendly lot. Everyone offered a good morning or a nice day, and there is something self-evidently logical about this: if you have chosen to live at the unhurried pace of a canal, surrounded by water and birdsong, with bacon sandwiches available at will, it would take considerable effort to be anything other than agreeable.
The first bend brought rather less pastoral scenery in the form of an electricity sub-station on the far bank, followed by a steel pylon that sizzled faintly overhead in a manner reminiscent of the bacon I had just been forced to walk past without partaking.
The guidebook promised around five miles of canal walking, which suited me on several counts. The towpath was flat.
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The Oxford Canal |
Everything, that is, except the itch.
It arrived somewhere around Bridge 6 — a small, insistent, entirely unexplained irritation just below my left ribs, as though a tiny thorn had lodged itself in the lining of my jacket and taken a personal interest in my suffering. It spread steadily with each mile, a creeping heat rash with no apparent cause. I stopped twice to investigate, finding nothing on skin or clothing to account for it. In the end I applied Vaseline to the afflicted area in the manner of a man who has run out of better ideas, which addressed the symptom while the cause remained, and always will remain, a complete mystery.
The bridge numbering along this section, I noticed, had suffered some attrition over the centuries. Bridge 6 was followed immediately by Bridge 9, two of its predecessors having apparently vanished without record or apology. Bridge 13 had acquired a companion — Bridge 13A, carrying the M6 overhead — which suggested the numbering system had, at some point, been improvised. I entertained a brief and irrational anxiety about Bridge 16. The Centenary Way's approach to waymarking was, to put it diplomatically, haphazard. Nothing was entirely certain.
Bridge 16, however, was still there.
To the lonely path ....
Before I reached it, the canal delivered me past the edge of Ansty, — a village that has existed since the Domesday Book, its name derived from the Old English for *one path* or *lonely path*, a piece of etymology it shares with four other villages scattered across England. It has the added misfortune of looking, at a glance, like a typo of the word *nasty*, which does it no favours. Seen from the towpath on a morning like this one, however, Ansty village was the very opposite of nasty — a row of handsome terraced cottages in pastel colours, their gardens brimful of summer flowers, looking out over the canal with the quiet satisfaction of people who know they live somewhere pleasant, even if the motorway now provides a constant low accompaniment to their contentment.
About a mile beyond the village I encountered the first other pedestrians I had seen all morning: a middle-aged couple, immaculately turned out in clothing that had clearly never entertained the possibility of mud. The man wore an expensive suede jacket across his shoulders in the manner of someone who had given careful thought to looking casually elegant. They were, by any rational assessment, a considerable mystery. There was nothing much to have come from in the direction they'd arrived from — just several miles of canal towpath — and they were emphatically not dressed for towpath-walking. As they approached, they offered a greeting.
"Guten morgen."
Germans. The mystery deepened, and remained unresolved.
Ansty golf course ran alongside the canal for a stretch, and I walked through the intermittent percussion of club meeting ball and the occasional distant cry of "Fore!" — none of which required me to take evasive action, though I remained alert. Shortly afterwards, where the canal ran parallel to an intercity railway, sleek express trains flashed past at intervals like silver thoughts, there and gone before they'd fully registered.
Not wishing to miss my exit point, I paused at the bank to consult my phone app, at which moment a narrowboat glided past and the man at the tiller fixed me with a look of mild reproof.
"No mobile phones please!," he said, in the tone of someone who had clearly decided that such devices had no place amidst the serenity of his environmentt.
"It's a GPS," I replied.
"Ahh yes — hahaha!" He cackled, nodding with sudden enthusiasm, and puttered away down the cut.
Narrowboat folk: friendly, but occasionally operating on a slightly different frequency from the rest of us.
Bovinophobia ....
Bridge 16 was intact. I climbed the short track from the towpath to find myself on a farm drive that spanned both the canal and the railway alongside it — a high, narrow steel bridge with additional barriers bolted onto its parapet at intervals where it crossed the line,
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A view from the bridge |
Musing on this I had barely begun crossing before a tractor appeared around the bend ahead, towing something with a great many blades, and moving with the purposeful momentum of machinery that has not yet been informed that walkers have rights. There was manifestly not room for both of us. I beat a hasty retreat.
Beyond the bridge, a wide concrete track ran for a mile or more across open fields toward the farm complex at Mobbs Wood. Sweeping views opened in all directions; away to the right the M6 snaked across the landscape, traffic made tiny by distance, throwing off a faint sound like a far-away sea. I left the track before the farm and climbed into a paddock, where a herd of cows awaited me.
Of all the livestock one encounters when walking, cows trouble me most. Horses are generally curious but manageable; pigs are aggressive and best given a wide berth; but cows are an enigma. Over many years of walking I have observed that they fall into recognisable categories:
1. Lying down, facing away and not in the least bit bothered
2. Standing up but at a distance, regarding you with mild interest
3. Standing up close by, heading towards you with intent to hassle
4. Rucksack Rage
I have experienced Category 3 on several occasions, and Category 4 once, and enjoyed neither. The problem with cows is the combination of curiosity, stupidity, occasional aggression, and — most dangerously — the sheer physical clumsiness of an animal that weighs half a ton and has very little idea where its own feet are. Cows kill people. I have no desire to be added to the statistics. *Crushed by half a ton of boisterous beef burger* is not the epitaph I have in mind.
These were, mercifully, Category 2. They regarded me briefly, found me wanting, and looked away.
I followed a grassy track along the edge of Mobbs Wood — tall conifers casting a slightly sombre shade — before emerging into a hayfield of brilliant sunshine, committing some thoughts to audio, and crossing a bridge over the thundering M6. I stopped there to take photographs of the traffic hurtling toward me, becoming, briefly, one of those people you see on remote motorway bridges as you drive past and idly wonder how they got up there, and what they could possibly be doing.
Beyond the bridge a long field hedgerow divided arable land from cattle meadows. I was happy to be on the arable side. The shaggy brown herds on the far side of the hedge were displaying unmistakably Category 3 behaviour, trotting along the fence line with an enthusiasm I found entirely uninviting. I pressed on without engaging. On my right, the wide fields of wheat stubble fell gently away to reveal, on the horizon, the skyline of Coventry: the twin spires of the ruined old cathedral just visible against the sky, watching over everything with the particular patience of things that have already survived the worst.
All roads lead to ....
My stomach began raising the subject of lunch as I crossed a brick railway bridge to reach a lane with the picturesque Colehurst Farm on my right. I settled the matter by diverting via a tiny bridge to rejoin the Oxford Canal at Bridge 26 — ten bridges further on from where I'd left it — and spent a very happy thirty minutes seated on the towpath with my legs dangling, eating lunch while narrowboats with names like
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Lunchtime view |
Eventually, reluctantly, I shouldered my rucksack and climbed back to the lane.
What followed was a couple of miles of quiet B-road walking, during which I met my first genuine fellow-travellers of the Centenary Way — a pair heading in the opposite direction — and passed the gates of Peter Hall, a Grade II listed building of sixteenth-century vintage, standing back from the road with the dignified composure of something that has watched a great deal of history pass and chosen not to comment.
These back lanes of Warwickshire put me in mind of years gone by, of visiting an aunt in rural Shropshire who had a smallholding near Admaston. I used to walk from Wellington station along lanes very like these — the same rich smell of cattle cake and pig nuts hanging in the air, the same threading between hedgerows, and, overhead, the twittering of skylarks, which were common enough then and are rare enough now that their absence feels like a loss worth noting.
The road walking eventually gave way to the long cinder drive of Hillfields Farm, where the asymmetrical skyline of the Rolls-Royce Aero centre poked above the fields to the east. The drive made an S-bend through the farm complex, offering a close view of a recently burnt-out barn. The fire was long out but the acrid smell of scorched timber and blackened metal still hung in the air. Accident or arson — there was no way to tell. Expensive either way. I hoped the farmer was insured and pressed on.
.... Coombe Abbey
The track climbed gently from the farmyard, enclosed by tall hedgerows, until it reached a second farm, where I turned left across a ploughed field toward the tree-fringed boundary of Coombe Abbey Country Park.
The Abbey's history is the compressed version of English institutional life. Founded as a monastery in the twelfth century. Dissolved in the sixteenth, at which point it became royal property — or, to use the less diplomatic term, was stolen. Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of James I, was educated here in the early seventeenth century; had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, she was to have been abducted from Coombe Abbey and proclaimed Queen Elizabeth II, which would have been several centuries premature for the postage stamps and the Christmas broadcast. In 1682 the West Wing was added by Captain William Winde, who also designed Buckingham Palace. In 1771 Lancelot 'Capability' Brown redesigned the gardens and added the lake. The Earls of Craven owned the estate until 1923, at which point the record goes quiet until Coventry City Council bought it in 1964 and opened it to the public two years later. What occurred in the intervening four decades is apparently not recorded, which history will presumably have to live with.
I stepped across a small wooden bridge beneath the cool canopy of mature oaks and picked up a tree bark path winding through into the park itself. Coombe Park: Five hundred acres of woodland, formal gardens, arboretum, open grassland and lake — and on a fine summer's day, extremely popular with what seemed like the entire population of Nuneaton and Coventry simultaneously.
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Coombe Abbey Park |
I meandered, became briefly lost amongst the park's many footpaths and recreational buildings, and eventually caught sight of the large car park beyond the rather grand Coombe Abbey Hotel. The hotel occupies the very centre of the grounds, Coombe Pool lapping at its feet, the whole arrangement looking considerably more impressive than a public park has any obligation to.
One advantage of a black Land Rover: it can always be found in a crowd.
I sat in the back and drank cold Lucozade Sport with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has earned it.
The day had been easy to follow, mostly. Picturesque, mostly. And enjoyable, completely. My notes on what lay ahead suggested the next section would offer the most industrial aspect of the Centenary Way — the Peugeot plant at Ryton-on-Dunsmore, scenery that would be interesting rather than pretty — but it would also deliver something worth having: the halfway point of the walk, at Stoneleigh.
All I needed now was transport, and decent weather.
Two things, in my experience, that are never both simultaneously guaranteed.
See Route on ......
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