| The Warwickshire Centenary Way | |
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Abbey Road ....
Today Today I was to enjoy the company of Dave for the fourth instalment of the Warwickshire Centenary Way, and he kept me informed of his progress with a series of text updates.
"I am just leaving the house."
"I am just about to go into Morrisons."
"I am just leaving Morrisons."
This allowed me to time my own departure to a nicety. I was grateful, at least, that he hadn't felt the need to document any intermediate stops of a more personal nature. Nobody needs that level of detail before eight in the morning.
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Leaving Coombe Abbey Park |
We still needed to drive to Coombe Abbey.
I drove the Land Rover through the outskirts of Coventry beneath a grey pall of cloud that threatened rain at any moment and delivered us, eventually, to Coombe Abbey — which on a Monday morning bore almost no resemblance to the place I had arrived at on the previous occasion. No crowds, no children, no dogs, no ice-cream vans, no cars circling the car park with gathering desperation. The silence was considerable. I found it a distinct improvement.
We set off along the long drive leading away from the hotel and I filmed the first of what would turn out to be many commentary clips for posterity.
Crime scene ....
We followed the arrow-straight ribbon of the Abbey drive out of the park, crossed the B4027, and picked up a bridleway that continued the same line off into distant trees. Open fields on either side left us fully exposed to the elements, which served to emphasise just how nippy the early morning breeze was and how decisively the year had turned toward autumn. I found myself idly calculating that I expected to complete this walk sometime in November, by which point the golden leaves would be long gone, the trees stripped bare, and a raw wind hurrying me along whether I wanted it to or not.
We passed through young woodland of birch and rowan and discovered a length of police incident tape wound around several trees, cordoning off a patch of brambles and nettles with official-looking gravity.
We paused. I peered into the undergrowth. No grisly corpse. No sign that Inspector Barnaby had recently been on the premises, though the tape had his fingerprints on it in spirit.
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Thatched Cottage at Brandon |
"Get under it," he said. "I'll take a picture of you examining a twig."
This is the sort of suggestion that only lifelong friends can make and expect to be acted upon without further explanation. I got under the tape and crouched over a twig with what I hoped was a forensic air. Dave took the photograph with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has been waiting years for exactly this opportunity.
Leaving the woodland behind, we emerged onto the verge of the A428 and turned down toward the village of Brandon. — a pleasing prospect of whitewashed cottages and the occasional thatched roof, its A-road status apparently causing it no aesthetic anxiety whatsoever. The traffic had obligingly vanished as we arrived, so I stopped to photograph a particularly attractive row of houses running alongside the road. A five-minute procession of vehicles immediately appeared from nowhere, as though they had been waiting around the corner for me to raise the camera.
We threaded through the village, ducking under a stone railway bridge — its scarred archway a monument to the optimism of several generations of lorry drivers who had taken confident aim at a low bridge with a high load — and crossed a rickety wooden footbridge over the fledgling River Avon. The bridge marked the boundary between Brandon and the neighbouring village of Wolston, which presented itself handsomely: cows grazing a village green in front of a row of cottages, and a picturesque church framed by tall elms. Wolston was an instantly likeable place.
It also contained a guidebook ambush, but we didn't know that yet.
No sense of direction but a good sense of smell ....
The guidebook delivered us to the war memorial in the centre of the village, at which point it appeared to lose interest. Dave spotted a small shop and went in search of a chocolate bar — a man who knows his priorities — while I sat beside a stream running in a brick culvert along the high street and studied the next set of directions. By the time he returned I was confident about the way forward.
This confidence did not survive contact with the actual village.
The guidebook's instructions bore no discernible relationship to our surroundings. After extended head-scratching and GPS consultation we determined that we should never have ended up on the high street at all, but should have taken a small alleyway near the school, mentioned in the text almost as an afterthought — a piece of information so casually buried that missing it was practically guaranteed.
We located the school gates, where a woman was delivering a comprehensive verdict on someone called Kevin via her mobile phone.
"No Kevin I ain't walkin' when you've got a bloody car! Do I LOOK like the sort of person that likes walking?"
She did not.
Back on the correct route, we filed along an overgrown path running alongside the schoolyard, where the inmates were enjoying their lunchtime freedom and we provided a welcome diversion.
"Hello!"
"Hello people!"
"Hey — walky-people, HELLOOO!"
The school bell rang, which nipped their curiosity decisively. We got off lightly. The school I attended would have thrown a few bricks.
Beyond the school we found ourselves in a strip of greenery behind a row of houses — and straight back into navigational difficulty.
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The trippy subway at Ryton |
The fields eventually gave way to a narrow fenced track, and then — horrible and unexpected — a sewage treatment works, where a large vat of brown liquid was being agitated into an unspeakably fragrant froth. A small sign on a nearby tank announced itself as a *Flocculation Chamber*.
We stopped. We read the sign twice.
*Flocculation*, it turns out, is a perfectly legitimate process in which clarifying agents are added to raw sewage to encourage the heavier material to separate and settle — the chemistry of persuading unpleasant things to become, in some technical sense, more manageable. The word itself, however, is magnificent: round, improbable, and faintly suggestive of something that would be frowned upon in polite company. Dave and I turned it over for some time, applying it to various hypothetical contexts, none of which bore much relation to water treatment.
We walked on, putting a sensible distance between ourselves and the flocculation, and took lunch on a rickety wooden footbridge spanning a nettle-choked ditch through which brown water moved with thoughtful slowness. I stared down into it and made a conscious effort not to think about what we had just seen.
It didn't entirely work.
Bubbenhall ....
After lunch we crossed a grassy meadow that climbed briefly but sharply uphill — Dave noting, with the quiet precision of a man who has learned to monitor these things, that the guidebook had omitted to mention this — and continued into Ryton-on-Dunsmore via a subway under the A45, its walls decorated with silhouettes of children at play in vivid primary colours. It was a considerable improvement on the usual standard of subway art, which tends toward the unprintable.
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Bubbenhall |
Progress, of a sort.
Leaving Ryton behind we struck out across a series of paddocks, following hedgerows hung with rose hips and wild damsons, and then turned onto a long straight farm track running across open fields where the blustery conditions could be fully appreciated. Dave delivered a lengthy and eloquent commentary to camera about the wind, the weather, and the relative mercy of the rain holding off — all of which was completely inaudible on the recording, the microphone having surrendered entirely to the conditions.
The track brought us eventually to the oddly named village of Bubbenhall. — a name derived, with admirable directness, from the Anglo-Saxon *Bubbas Hill*, Bubba apparently being a common enough name in those parts during the ninth century to merit its own hilltop. The village bore its curious etymology with dignity: a pretty lane of old cottages leading to a fourteenth-century Gothic church of the kind that appears in every other Warwickshire village and never loses its appeal.
The Centenary Way walked us straight through the churchyard, front gate to rear, and back out into pasture, where we plodded along seeing little but the occasional cow and the even more occasional Centenary Way marker.
Road walking followed — as it always eventually does — and we emerged through a kissing gate onto the Stoneleigh Road. Here, at a crossroads, stood an old lodge or gatehouse: a solid carved-stone structure with a large arched entrance. Within the arch, two doors had been inserted at odd heights and mismatched angles, which we took to be later additions — one sized for pedestrians, one for horse-drawn carriages, both having once, presumably, served whatever grand property lay beyond. As we approached, a man appeared with some suddenness on the lead roof of the building and began ripping vegetation from the guttering with an intensity that suggested a personal grievance against the plant kingdom.
We continued past without comment.
Dave had been quiet for a moment or two, in the way that means something is being assembled.
"Mark — we're on a road."
"You're not wrong there, mate."
"The last time we were on a road you said we were nearly at the end. And then it went on for ages."
"Yeah, but we were lost at the time."
"And we're not lost now?"
"No — not at all. But then, to be honest, neither are we nearly at the end of the walk."
A pause.
"Well. Okay then."
This is the kind of exchange that only works between people who have known each other long enough to understand exactly what is and isn't being said.
Showers at Stoneleigh ....
The landscaped grounds of the business park drifted past — spreading cedars, wizened old oaks, the whole arrangement wearing the composed authority of trees that have been there considerably longer than the buildings — and it was here that I made a genuine discovery. Dave, it turns out, loves trees as much as I do. This came as a complete surprise. In the years of our long friendship the subject had apparently never arisen, and I had not, if I'm honest, had him down as a tree man. A photograph of him actually embracing one has been added to my list of long-term objectives.
Shortly after the business park we passed a tiny cottage set back from the road — barely large enough for human habitation by any reasonable standard, a place so compressed and improbable that it might have wandered in from the pages of a Grimm fairy tale. I half-expected a gnarled face at the window. There was none, which was either reassuring or disappointing depending on one's outlook.
Dave's earlier remarks had, by now, begun to work on me. The road was going on rather longer than I had suggested it would, and I was contemplating the uncomfortable possibility of having made a wrong turn when two landmarks appeared ahead exactly where the guidebook had promised they would be: Park View Farm, and a post-box set into a wall.
I said nothing, but felt privately vindicated.
We entered a small belt of woodland, crossed a footbridge, and emerged onto a wide swathe of open grassland — at which precise moment the rain that had been threatening all day arrived with sudden conviction. Within minutes it had become a proper squall, the wind whipping sideways across the exposed ground and doing its best to knock us off course.
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The river Sowe at Stoneleigh |
The rain eased as we left the meadow for a short stretch of road, and by the time we descended through a thicket to the River Sowe it had stopped altogether, the sun making tentative overtures through the breaking cloud.
The walk's official end came at a footbridge over the Sowe, with Stoneleigh church just a short walk across a paddock. The river at this point was slow and meandering, fringed with great weeping willows that softened its banks and cast a cool green shadow across the water. It was an ideal place to end a day's walking — unhurried, quiet, and possessed of exactly the kind of understated beauty that the English countryside produces without appearing to try.
Dave's smartphone chose this moment to reboot itself for no discernible reason, placing in jeopardy the day's tracking data he had been carefully accumulating since Coombe Abbey. We attended to the revival of the phone, admired the willows, filmed the willows, and gave some thought to the apple tree in a garden on the far bank, laden with fruit and entirely unguarded. We thought about a quick scrumping raid but we had walked far and the desire for sour, wormy apples swiftly lost any appeal..
We crossed to the church, passed through its grounds, and emerged onto Church Lane where — more through good fortune than navigational skill — we had parked our cars a stone's throw from the end of the walk.
Coombe Abbey was as quiet on the return as it had been at the start. Dave drove away and I sat by the Land Rover with a sports drink, enjoying the stillness. The grounds were deserted, the hotel distant and silent; the whole place returned to peace at the end of another day.
I sat for a while thinking about the next section — Stoneleigh to Leamington Spa, some twelve and a half miles — and about Dorset, where I was heading first, and about the fact that the Centenary Way would still be there when I got back, patient and largely unsignposted, waiting to see what I'd make of it.
But that, as they say, is another story.
See Route on ......
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