| The Warwickshire Centenary Way | |
|
|
|
|
Gadget grief ....
Technology is a double-edged sword. With the right collection of devices you can now film, photograph, plot, track, tweet, and narrate every detail of a day's walking, then edit, produce, blog, and bore people with the results when you get home. Wonderful. What did we ever do without it.
The downside is that you start to rely on these things, reliance quietly becoming dependency, and when they fail you the withdrawal symptoms are immediate and unpleasant. My iPhone is a case in point. It functions as a sat-nav, a GPS, a camera, and a camcorder — a pocket-sized marvel capable of doing everything except lasting the day on a single charge. Its battery drains with the focused enthusiasm of a thing that has somewhere better to be, and I find myself monitoring the power indicator with the anxious attention usually reserved for fuel gauges on long motorway drives. I had invested in supplementary power units to extend its range, and in a USB socket for the Land Rover's cigar lighter to keep it charged during sat-nav use.
 |
|
Church of the Virgin Mary, Stoneleigh |
The sat-nav from home to Stoneleigh consumed fifteen percent of the battery before I had taken a single step. When I arrived, I discovered I had left my camera at home, which meant the iPhone would now be carrying additional duties as sole recording device for the day. I doubted it would survive. Setting off with a nearly depleted phone and only the guidebook and waymarkers for navigational backup was not, given previous experience of both, an entirely comfortable position.
It was, however, a beautiful September morning, and I paused for a moment in the grounds of Stoneleigh's church — savouring the mellowness of the light, the trees beginning to turn — before heading back to the River Sowe and the start of the route.
This was, more or less, the halfway point of the Warwickshire Centenary Way. The walk had taken me from the north-west of Coventry in a clockwise arc around the city — touching Nuneaton, Ansty, reaching its eastern limit at Coombe Abbey, tucking south to Stoneleigh. Now I was to continue toward Kenilworth, Warwick, and Leamington, before turning south across the gentle countryside of south Warwickshire toward the northern tip of the Cotswolds. On a map, the entire route resembles a wonky figure three, with Coventry sitting inside the upper curve, like a misplaced punctuation mark.
In the rough ....
From the river I followed a dark enclosed track between houses and out onto a vast field of grass that swept away to my left and off into the hazy distance, where a man was walking his dog all alone, their tiny silhouettes almost swallowed by the vivid green. A small lane followed, then a busier trunk road. where I walked for perhaps a mile through the morning rush, attracting the mildly baffled attention of passing drivers. It was a relief to escape back into open country, though the dull roar of the Warwick bypass stayed with me across the next few fields like an uninvited companion.
In one of these fields I met a couple coming the other way. We stopped to compare notes — the instinctive exchange of walkers passing on a route — and it emerged they were completing the The Coventry Way, a forty-mile circuit of the city limits that shares much of its footpath network with the Centenary Way before the two diverge southward. They were pleasant company for five minutes, which is about the right amount of time for a field conversation.
I have met, across all the sections to date, perhaps two other people who might have been walking the Centenary Way. It was unconfirmed in both cases. It is entirely possible that I am the only person ever to complete it, which raises the question of whether Warwickshire County Council
 |
|
Abbey ruins at Kenilworth |
After the couple left I traversed another field and a farm drive, musing pleasantly on how straightforward the navigation had been and how efficiently I might finish the day. This is, of course, precisely the kind of thought that precedes a golf course.
I have never liked crossing a golf course. The objections are multiple: the risk of interrupting a game, the hazard of incoming balls from unexpected directions, and the near-total absence of anything resembling a clear path.
Kenilworth Golf Course presented all three, along with the additional complication that the guidebook's instruction to *bear left and cross two stands of pines* turned out to describe one of three possible left-hand options, all of which had stands of pines, none of which was labelled.
I selected the most plausible and crossed a couple of fairways to arrive at a chain-link fence and a dead end. The GPS was duly consulted — another bite from the battery — and a route extracted. More fairways. More greens. Golfers watching my passage with the quiet displeasure of people whose game was being delayed by a rucksacked interloper. At one point I emerged with complete confidence onto what I was certain was an exit path, only to find myself standing on the fifteenth tee: a man in walking gear, poles in hand, occupying a space where a man with a nine-iron was supposed to be.
I stood there for a moment. In a parallel universe, I thought, there is probably a man in a pastel jersey and checked trousers standing at the start of the West Highland Way with a golf bag over his shoulder, looking equally bewildered.
I retreated, found an alleyway between rear gardens, and emerged onto a metalled lane on the outskirts of Kenilworth. First golf course: navigated. Dignity: negotiable.
Kenilworth ....
I recognised the next few streets from previous drives through the area, and joined a secluded leafy track along a nature reserve where an unseen brook chuckled alongside me and the birdsong was uplifting to the soul. While autumn had taken firm hold of the fields and hedgerows, this little hidden valley appeared to be running a season behind — still green, still summery, sheltered from the turning of the year by its own particular geography. I passed a stone pump house bearing a carved lintel dated 1864, then ducked beneath the high arches of a railway viaduct, before climbing out of the trees onto a road called Lower Ladyes Hills: a lovely stretch of characterful villas and cottages overlooking acres of allotments, unexpectedly pastoral for a town with Kenilworth's reputation for des-res urbanisation.
The high street followed, where I looked for but failed to find a Japanese restaurant
 |
|
Thatched cottages at Kenilworth |
St. Nicholas church came next, where I would have navigated the grounds a lot more efficiently had I read the guidebook directions with anything approaching care. Thirty minutes of A-to-B-to-C-and-back-to-A were eventually resolved, and I emerged via a path lined with old trees and ancient gravestones, passed beneath the arch of the ruined Abbey, and crossed Abbey Fields with its pretty lake before climbing a grassy knoll to find Kenilworth Castle announcing itself on the horizon ahead. I crossed the road towards the castle itself following a path that led me around the left side of the outer castle walls. Kenilworth Castle is one of those ruins that does the job properly. All gaunt red sandstone and cliff-like walls, crows wheeling around the broken summits of its towers — romantic, compelling, and carrying the quiet sadness of something that was once enormous and knows it. It has earned its drama honestly enough: a record-breaking siege in 1266 that lasted nine months and remains the longest in English history; a staging post in the Wars of the Roses; the location at which Edward II was relieved of his throne in 1327; the scene of the Earl of Leicester's extraordinary nineteen-day entertainment of Elizabeth I in 1575, which involved water pageants, fireworks, and an expenditure that would make a modern events planner weep. Those crumbling towers have a great deal of stories still inside them.
I descended Castle Hill past a small private estate of thatched cottages, rounded a corner by the Rose and Crown, and continued along the path around the outside of the castle walls along the dry moat — a wide, grassed ditch that once held water and served as both defence and larder for the garrison within. A sign informed me that I required a ticket to enter the castle grounds. I needed only a photograph, so I ignored the sign, stepped inside briefly, took my pictures, and stepped back out. Eight pounds to visit Kenilworth, which still felt like a reasonable transaction.
 |
|
Kenilworth Castle |
Lunch was taken at a sheltered spot with a fine view across the wide flat meadow that once formed part of the great lake surrounding the castle — a sheet of water that served for centuries as both moat and fish pond, drained long ago and now just quietly green. It was a tranquil thirty minutes: just me, a steak bake, and eight hundred years of history keeping each other company.
The walking after Kenilworth was, for a while, simply excellent. A cinder track across open pasture, sweeping views across Warwickshire, stands of oak and willow in a hundred shades of green swaying gently in the breeze — whispering, as they do, like a distant sea. Great white clouds sailed across the blue sky like galleons, their shadows running ahead of them across the landscape. I didn't see a soul for the entire section, and arrived at the gate to the road feeling physically invigorated and mentally restored.
It didn't last. But while it lasted it was exactly what walking is supposed to be.
A short stretch of road brought me to a long concrete drive where — just by a cottage hedge — a bench had been installed with a water bowl for passing dogs and a small sign reading *Rest a while*. I paused to appreciate this small act of kindness, glanced over the hedge into the garden, and found a sour-faced woman of advanced years shuffling two elderly dogs around the lawn. She looked up. Her face appeared not to have been designed with smiling in mind.
"Gerrin'," she grunted to the dogs, herding them back indoors.
The bench lost some of its appeal after that.
Bullied ....
The path left the drive and crossed rough fields of tussocky grass where fresh evidence of cattle suggested their recent presence, and shortly afterwards the cattle themselves confirmed it. A large herd of brown cows with calves occupied the field ahead, clustered along the hedge I needed to follow. The calves skittered nervously as I approached; the cows regarded me with the usual bovine mixture of curiosity and mild contempt. Category 2, I assessed. Manageable.
I had not, at this point, noticed the bull.
He emerged from behind his herd with a bellow that carried across the field like a public announcement, conveying in no uncertain terms that my presence was unwelcome and my continued approach would be interpreted as provocation. I slowed. He tossed his head — the specific, unambiguous head-toss of an animal that has moved beyond curiosity into something considerably less comfortable. I took two more steps, more from stubbornness than wisdom. He began to trot.
There was a gate in the hedge. I took it with a speed that surprised me and got myself out of sight on the other side.
I waited. The bellowing subsided. I peered back through the gate to confirm he had not followed me with any intention of going further, and noticed, as I did so, that the gate bore a Centenary Way marker. The bull had, entirely without meaning to, redirected me onto the correct route at precisely the point where I would otherwise have missed it.
 |
|
St. Marys Church at Warwick |
What followed next was, to my boundless joy, a second golf course.
I will not dwell on this at length. The guide described a wood and a path through it which I never found, then offered directions through a golf course that bore no relationship to the one I was actually standing in — a discrepancy not helped by the fact that the course perimeter was being redeveloped and had been reduced to a broad expanse of ploughed mud. For the better part of forty minutes I muttered and wandered, crossing fairways and skirting greens, consulting the GPS with increasing desperation while the battery dwindled toward its final reserves. I eventually worked out that I was approximately as far from the Centenary Way as it was geometrically possible to be while still technically on the course.
To get lost on a golf course is unfortunate. To get lost on two different golf courses in a single day is, I conceded, a pattern that says something unflattering about the navigator.
I exited via a kissing gate, spent some time with the GPS map working out exactly what had gone wrong, and established the following: the bull had accidentally shown me the correct gate, but I had then taken an incorrect turning immediately afterwards and emerged onto the Warwickshire Golf Course considerably further up than intended. Had I turned right rather than left, I would have walked through the promised woodland, emerged at the correct point on the course, and found the guidebook's directions perfectly sensible. Instead, I had entered the wrong end of the course, found the directions nonsensical, and spent forty minutes proving it.
I edged around the next field on a narrow margin between brambles and an electric fence while three horses watched with the interested patience of animals who have learned that humans sometimes twitch unexpectedly. Then I made my way across an acre of ploughed mud to a metalled farm drive — Woodloes Lane — which meant I was approximately a mile from Warwick town centre, and set off along it with the enormous gratitude of a man restored to solid ground.
A man passed me heading the other way toward the farm. He had the appearance of a very angry Borat Sagdiyev and was moving with considerable purpose. I suppressed my usual inclination toward eye contact and a cheerful greeting, and hoped for the farmer's sake that the visit was expected.
Warwickshire’s capital ....
The lane led to a suburban road, then down to a railway bridge where the guidebook's directions and the actual geography of Warwick had another of their periodic disagreements, resulting in some creative alternative routing that took me past the railway station and under it via a subway. I have chosen to regard this as a more interesting approach to the town centre, and I stand by that.
What I never tire of in Warwick is the transition — the moment when red brick gives way to carved white stone and timber-framed buildings simply by turning a corner, as though two completely different centuries have decided to share a postcode without making a fuss about it. I made my way along Northgate Street toward St. St. Mary’s church, whose lofty eighteenth-century Gothic tower rose at the far end of the street and dominated everything within sight. At a hundred and thirty feet it is visible from miles around, and I had never been close enough before to properly appreciate the quality of its stonework and the elegance of its proportions. A Latin inscription was carved into the stone at height — one of four, it turns out, each face of the tower bearing a different portion of the same account. Together they record the church's founding by Roger de Newburgh in the reign of King Stephen, its complete rebuilding by Thomas Beauchamp in 1394, its destruction by a catastrophic
 |
|
Warwick Castle |
I passed beneath the tower's archway and crossed toward a set of half-timbered buildings of notably earlier vintage, including the sixteenth-century Thomas Oken Tea Rooms which advertised thirty different varieties of tea on a sign outside with the quiet confidence of an establishment that has been doing this for a very long time.
Warwick Castle came into view shortly afterward. I know a spot where a good photograph can be had for free, which seemed preferable to the thirty-odd pounds the castle charges for admission — a sum that makes Kenilworth's eight pounds look positively charitable, though Warwick does offer considerably more in the way of intact stonework, dragon towers, and the various entertainments that come with Merlin Entertainment Group ownership. The castle began as a motte-and-bailey constructed by William the Conqueror in 1068, passed through the hands of thirty-six different owners over the subsequent centuries — ranging from Richard Neville, the Kingmaker, who used it to imprison kings before meeting his own end at the Battle of Barnet, to the Roundheads who garrisoned it during the Civil War and used it to imprison several prominent cavaliers (probably not laughing), to Sir Fulke Greville who bought it as the ultimate country seat and bequeathed its considerable maintenance costs to subsequent generations — until 1978, when the Greville family sold it to Madame Tussauds, who later sold it to Merlin.
St. Nicholas Park sat in the castle's shadow beside the River Leam, and my legs made a persuasive case for the nearest available bench. The park is known locally as St. Nicks, has its origins in the 1930s, and on an autumn afternoon was looking rather wonderful — leaves turning every shade of red and gold, one particular specimen directly in front of me glowing in the afternoon sun as though lit from within.
It also holds, for me, some quieter associations: boating on the river with my two young daughters, ice-creams at the shop by the fountains, sandwiches on the river bank. Younger, carefree days. So many years gone by.
I would have been content to sit there considerably longer, growing ever more nostalgic, but time was pressing, and the rain which now began to fall from what had appeared to be a perfectly clear sky suggested that the afternoon had its own ideas about the schedule.
Elvis, el español taxi driver de Leamington ....
I followed the path along the banks of the Leam out of Warwick, the sounds of canoeing schools carrying across the water — laughter, splashing, the occasional startled yell — before fading behind me into a short, agreeable stretch of towpath tranquillity.
The guidebook advised that I would pass beneath a railway and a canal before reaching a road bridge. Distinguishing one type of bridge from another while standing beneath it on a riverbank proved, in practice, more difficult than the guidebook implied, and I climbed a set of steps expecting a road to find instead a canal — specifically, an aqueduct carrying a canal across a river, which is the kind of engineering that deserves a moment's appreciation even when you are not supposed to be on it. I descended, rejoined the Leam, and followed the river past the kitchen windows of modern apartment blocks looking directly onto the water, until the road bridge finally appeared. From there, two roads (and thankfully no remaining room for navigational error) led me to Victoria Park through the arches of a viaduct, The park had a distinctly Victorian character — wrought-iron decorations, a handsome bandstand set on an elegant dias — and was busy with the ordinary, agreeable life of a Tuesday afternoon. A father was attempting to retrieve conkers from a chestnut tree by hurling a log into the canopy while his young son stood directly underneath, watching the descending log with scientific interest. At the bandstand, Bhangra music rang out from a small speaker and a group of teenagers sang and danced with the unselfconscious enthusiasm of people who have not yet learned to be embarrassed in public. It was an entirely fitting introduction to Leamington Spa
 |
|
Leamington Spa |
I walked into the high street, obtained a couple of numbers from a hotel, and found a telephone box — the first I had used in years. The minimum charge was sixty pence, which bought approximately one minute of call time: enough to contact a cab firm, request a taxi, and provide roughly half the information required before the line went dead. I had no more change.
Eventually I found a taxi rank and negotiated a price with a cabbie who turned out to be Spanish, enthusiastic, and a devoted fan of Elvis Presley. He drove me back through the rush-hour traffic to Stoneleigh with Elvis providing the soundtrack — *Suspicious Minds*, *In the Ghetto*, *A Little Less Conversation* — while my driver offered commentary on the King's genius in terms that brooked no dissent.
At Stoneleigh, he discovered the Land Rover.
What followed was a tour of inspection — slow, thorough, clearly delightful to him — accompanied by stories of his father's Defender back on the family farm, his twelve brothers and sisters, the vehicle's legendary reliability in extreme conditions, further Elvis, and several return circuits of the vehicle to check details he had missed on the first pass. I stood in the car park in my walking boots, quietly aching in several locations, longing only for a comfortable seat and a cold drink.
Eventually he left. I opened the back of the Defender, found the Lucozade Sport, and downed it gratefully.
Another section completed. From historic to bucolic, town centre to river path, golf course to castle, the Elvis-soundtracked long way home — this had been, for all its navigational indignities, the most varied day the Centenary Way had yet produced. The remaining sections would leave the towns behind entirely, heading south across the quiet countryside of south Warwickshire toward the Burton Dassett Hills, Edge Hill, and the gentle backwaters beyond.
I found my way home without a sat-nav. It turns out I am considerably better at navigation behind the wheel than on foot — a fact which raises questions I am not entirely sure I want to answer.
See Route on ......
|
|
|
|
|
Prev
Next
No comments:
Post a Comment