| The Warwickshire Centenary Way | |
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A dim view of the world ....
I set off earlier than usual for this section, having accumulated sufficient evidence over recent weeks that twelve-plus miles — with the inevitable getting-lost supplement factored in — requires more day than one might optimistically assume. The forecast was good, but as I drove south along the M40 toward Gaydon a ghostly fog lay draped across the landscape, muting the colours and lending the morning a distinctly autumnal chill. There was something in using the M40 that brought home how far the walk had come: the early sections had taken me northward on the M6, whereas I was now heading south, the route having quietly swung around on itself. I would be passing Gaydon later in the day — a place I have commuted to many times over the years — and the thought that my legs had carried me all the way from Kingsbury to here, and beyond, without serious complaint felt quietly satisfying. Walking keeps me on just the right side of fitness: a counterbalance against the combined effects of a desk job and what I prefer to call a well-developed appetite for comfort.
I parked near the squat circular watchtower on the highest point of the Burton Dasset hills where the fog reduced the visible world to a radius of perhaps thirty metres. Everything beyond was grey and muffled. I was confident, however, that by the time I returned in the afternoon the sun would have burned it all away and the views would be waiting — a reward deferred rather than denied.
My chauffeur for the day was Griff, a colleague who lives in Kenilworth and had stepped in at Jamie's handover with admirable willingness. He arrived punctually and we drove back to Leamington Spa exchanging the kind of office gossip that makes the miles pass without noticing them.
From no path to tow path ....
Griff dropped me off in Leamington Spa, which, on a Sunday morning, was still largely asleep — empty streets, an absence of urgency, the whole town at rest. By a minor stroke of luck Griff set me down at the gated entrance to Jephson Gardens which turned out to be the official start of the day's route, and I set off through the grounds into what was, even in November, a rather lovely place.
The gardens were laid out in the early nineteenth century as a place where the great and the good of Leamington could gather to be seen — public access initially limited, reflecting the assumption that beauty was best appreciated by those with the funds to do so properly. The monuments dotted through the park pay tribute to the town's more notable residents: a Corinthian-style temple housing a statue of Dr. Stephen Jephson, chief advocate of the town's spa waters
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Jephson Gardens at Leamington |
From the gardens I followed the river Leam to a leisure centre, where I stopped to decipher the guidebook's next instruction. A sizeable group of ramblers filed past me as I stood there.
"You can come with us if you like!" one of the men offered cheerfully.
I smiled and told them they were going the wrong way. Then I set off in the wrong direction myself.
What followed was the better part of forty-five minutes of increasingly frustrated navigation — wandering, doubling back, consulting the GPS to no clear improvement — before I concluded that the only sensible course was to return to the leisure centre and start again. When I finally established the correct route, it brought me back to a small footbridge over the Leam barely ten minutes from where I had started. Forty-five minutes wasted. A bridge that had been in plain view. I stood on it for a moment and took a philosophical view of the situation, which is to say I said something unprintable and moved on.
The next several miles were, mercifully, as simple as walking gets. The route crossed a busy road and joined the towpath of the Grand Union canal. — the third canal of the Centenary Way — and ahead of me lay three miles of flat, unambiguous progress in a single direction. I set off at a leisurely pace and felt my mood improve almost immediately.
Around the first bend I ran into the back of the rambler convoy — so they had been going the right way after all, which I chose not to dwell on. A steady stream of cyclists, joggers, and speed-walkers came up behind me at regular intervals and, being the kind of walker who prefers solitude, I stepped up my pace to get past the group. The couple at the rear drew me into conversation as I overtook.
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On the Grand Union canal |
"Today?" he asked.
Within another mile the towpath had emptied, the ramblers breaking for lunch at a small set of locks and almost everyone else peeling off at a bridge to join a greenway. I was left in my preferred solitude, and the morning settled into the easy rhythm of canal walking — which I find, without apology, one of the most agreeable ways to spend a few hours. The water lay still and dark, willows trailing their fingers in it, the occasional narrowboat going about its unhurried business. The steerers were, almost without exception, middle-aged men of a pleasantly weathered appearance, often with a pipe, who returned my wave with the comfortable nod of people who have simplified their lives to a pleasing degree. A pair of swans passed with three almost-grown cygnets in tow, all of them moving with that particular serenity that swans deploy when they want you to know how unimpressed they are. And once, with a great rolling splash that made me look up sharply, a huge carp turned at the surface — a brief flash of creamy white flank — and was gone.
The guidebook, I noted, suggested an alternative route that bypassed the canal entirely in favour of fields and road walking. I note this only to dismiss it. Given a choice between a towpath and a field, the canal wins without discussion.
All too soon the exit point arrived. I left the water behind, knowing there would be no more towpaths on the Centenary Way, and turned to face what remained of the day.
Do you come here Ufton? ....
The small village of Ufton lay ahead, designated as my lunch stop, approached by a long track between fields paved with hefty granite chippings and liberally puddled from recent rain. Coming the other way was a man exercising a pair of greyhounds — dogs that are always an irresistible draw for me — one a tawny male walking free, cautious with strangers in the manner of his kind, the other on a long lead. The man started to warn me about the second dog a fraction too late. A large greyhound taking a flying leap at one's shoulders can be disconcerting, but I managed to keep my feet, crouched down, and made his acquaintance properly: a young, energetic animal with a lovely white and grey marbled coat, all unbridled enthusiasm and goodwill, nothing like the serene, sofa-loving philosophers that retired racers tend to become. He reminded me how much I missed having a dog on walks like this, and I thought briefly of Bryn, who would have found the whole enterprise simultaneously alarming and irresistible.
The track became a farm drive, then a lane, then a busier road, climbing to Ufton village — the first ascent of any note on the Centenary Way so far, and a mild preview of what was coming as the land began to undulate toward Edge Hill. I stopped for lunch under the eaves of the village church, where a bench had been considerately placed, and found myself looking across at the White Hart pub perched on the shoulder of the hill opposite, commanding far-reaching views across Warwickshire and Worcestershire.
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The White Hart, Ufton |
I shouldered my rucksack and prepared to leave. As a matter of routine I reached up to check that my sunglasses were sitting on the peak of my cap.
They were not there.
I retraced my steps to the lunch bench, scanning the ground carefully. Nothing. The landlord, still nearby, looked enquiring. I explained that I appeared to have lost my sunglasses. He offered, with genuine kindness, to come back with me to the beer garden and check. I said I didn't want to put him to any trouble and went back alone, eyes on the ground, brow furrowed.
It was while conducting this search that the situation clarified itself.
There was an excellent reason my sunglasses were not on my cap. They were on my face. They had been on my face the entire time. I had just told a man that I was looking for my sunglasses while wearing, in plain sight on my nose, the sunglasses I claimed to be searching for. Whether he had noticed this and chosen to say nothing, or had assumed I meant a different pair altogether, I could not determine. Either way I now needed to walk back past him to continue the route, and something would have to be said.
I considered slipping away without engaging but of course he spotted me before I could execute this plan and asked if I had found them. Committed now, I said that I had not — and then, in an ill-advised attempt to explain the glasses clearly sitting on my face, added that the missing pair were prescription reading glasses, quite different from these. This made things considerably worse, as he immediately became concerned about the expense of replacement and insisted on taking my telephone number in case they were handed in by a customer.
I gave a perfect stranger my phone number to facilitate the recovery of a pair of glasses that do not exist, do not need recovering, and will never be found. With what remained of my dignity I left the village and walked briskly away, grateful for the open air and the absence of witnesses.
After Harbury it's all downhill ....
On the village edge I passed a man working an extraordinary vegetable plot — an operation of such ambition and scale that it sat somewhere between devoted hobby and small commercial enterprise, with multiple beds protected by tall frames of insect mesh, several greenhouses, and an assortment of sheds. He trundled through the middle of it all with a barrow full of compost and called out a cheerful good morning, reconsidered, revised it to good afternoon, then admitted he wasn't sure which applied and appealed to me for a ruling.
I told him it was definitely afternoon.
"I've been here since six this morning," he said, with the satisfied air of a man who regards losing all sense of of time as one of the finer achievements of a day. "I've totally lost track."
What a good way to spend a life.
A small nature reserve followed, pleasantly green but curiously quiet — as though the wildlife had collectively decided to be somewhere else that afternoon — and then a stretch of uneventful field walking before I climbed into the village of Harbury: a straggly, spread-out sort of place with houses of every period and disposition lining its lanes, and a handsome pub at its centre. The way in was simple enough. The way out was not.
I pulled out the guidebook near the community hall, where a children's birthday party was in full swing behind balloons and paper banners. A small group of mothers stood outside taking a smoke break and fell silent to watch me with the detached curiosity of people who have just been given something more interesting to look at than each other. I edged around a corner into a side road before they could witness the extent of my confusion, established the correct route, and departed.
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Harbury |
The guide directed me to turn right onto a lane, then left past a house and around its edge for a quarter-mile to reach double white gates. I turned right, followed the instructions precisely, arrived at the end of the sequence, and found no gates. I stood in a field and consulted the GPS in the manner of a man who has been here before, which I had, metaphorically speaking, many times. The GPS showed clearly where the Centenary Way was. It also showed clearly that getting back to it required retracing my steps to where I had joined the lane and continuing in the other direction — left rather than right — adding the best part of a mile and a half to a day that was already longer than planned. I set off back with mutterings that I will not commit to print.
Passing a couple out for a stroll on my way back around the field, I registered them, moved on, and eventually found the double white gates and the shiny Centenary Way marker beyond them precisely where the guide had said they would be, had I turned the right way. Twenty yards further on, the same couple emerged from a gap in a hedge and joined the drive ahead of me. I could, it was now apparent, simply have followed them from the field and saved myself a mile and a half.
"Going in circles?" said the woman pleasantly, as they drew level.
I managed a smile. It was a tighter smile than I would have liked.
Ending on a high ....
The Centenary Way then delivered nine large fields in succession, connected by a track composed almost entirely of wet clay, each step requiring a negotiation with the ground about whether it intended to support my weight or redirect it sideways. The concentration required to stay upright meant I rarely looked up and the scenery, which I am sure was perfectly agreeable, passed largely unnoticed.
Things improved at the edge of Itchington Holt Wood, where a woman stood peering into the trees calling "Sammy!" in a sequence of tones that ran from encouraging through wheedling and on toward exasperated. Sammy — a large, handsome Alsatian — crashed through the undergrowth almost at my feet, tongue flying behind him like a pink scarf, wearing the expression of a dog who is entirely aware of the consequences and has decided they are worth it. He shot me a glance — *I'm in trouble now, but I don't CARE* — and loped back to his owner, who scolded him in the voice of someone who has long since accepted that scolding is as far as this ever gets, and was soon scratching his ears.
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Climbing the Burton Dasset Hills |
The other dog looked out across the fields with the dignified composure of an animal that has spent years pretending not to know Sammy.
The wood, as the guidebook noted, had a corner — an almost perfect right angle where the treeline turned, which struck me as an unlikely thing to find in mature woodland and almost certainly not a natural occurrence. Around it the M40 was suddenly visible below, cars made tiny by distance, moving south toward London. The Gaydon exit sign was legible from where I stood, which gave me my bearings and confirmed, thankfully, that I was closer to the end than I had imagined.
The Burton Dassett Hills were not yet visible — the nearest horizon was a line of fields and hedgerow — and I held the mild but distinct anxiety that the distant hills I could see might actually be the Dassetts and might therefore be further than I had budgeted for. I focused on the middle distance instead, not looking up, and let my feet handle the rest.
A family was blackberry-picking on the far side of a hedge, accompanied by a contraption I could not, no matter how long I studied it, definitively identify. It was either a large pram, an off-road buggy, or some form of agricultural shopping cart. I was never close enough to resolve the question, and it niggled at me for longer than it had any right to.
A small lane followed, then a gate, then a few final fields, then — I believe — Pimple Lane, around the first bend of which the Burton Dassett Hills appeared without warning, rising in the late afternoon sun with the satisfying suddenness of something that has been waiting patiently for the right moment. The tiny dot of the watchtower was visible on the skyline. I could see my destination, and I could see exactly how far away it still was, which is the kind of information that cuts equally both ways.
I stopped looking at the hills and focused on the road instead.
Northend appeared first — the last village of the day, tucked right against the base of the hills, its lanes strung with the usual random mixture of cottages and modern houses. A
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On top of the Burton Dasset Hills |
I passed a garden where a barbecue appeared to be taking place in conditions of complete misery — a small group sitting in near-total silence, staring at their plates, avoiding each other's gaze with the determination of people who had committed to an outdoor afternoon and were seeing it through on principle regardless of the emotional weather.
The road gave way to a steep track winding up into the hills. The track opened into a wide grassy vale climbing toward the ridge, and as I rose the views began to open up behind me — the first long views across south Warwickshire, the kind that justify every muddy field and every wrong turn and every well-intentioned piece of misdirection from a guidebook that is doing its best.
I arrived at the car slightly breathless, drank the cold drink that had been waiting in the boot, and walked the last few yards up to the watchtower.
The fog of the morning was gone. The late afternoon sun shone from a clear sky, exactly as I had predicted at the start of the day, and a great sweep of south Warwickshire lay below — the hazy line of Edge Hill visible to the southwest, the direction of Day Seven, the penultimate section.
It would be a couple of weeks before I could continue. Time enough for the seasons to finish their business, and for summer clothes to give way to thermals and the serious gloves. If the weather had anything to say about it, I might end up cold and wet again, exactly as I had on Day One back in August.
Some things, on a walk like this, you simply learn to expect.
See Route on ......
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