| The Heart Of England Way | |
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By Mark Walford
Day Eight Route: Chipping Campden to Bourton-on-the-Water Distance: 16m (26km) Elevation: 430ft (131m) to 866ft (264m) Climbing (ascent and descent): 1516ft (462m) and 1558ft (475m) 
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Chipping Campden and the Polish link …
The last day of the walk arrived without ceremony — there was no capricious wind romping through my garden, kicking my potted plants around like footballs, no grey blanket of the previous two days' making. A weak sun was finding its way through billowing cloud and strengthening as the morning developed, and we went through the morning routine for the final time with the practised ease of people who have been doing this for eight days and know each other's movements by now. We slipped out of the house without troubling Mrs W and drove south to Chipping Campden, the longest journey yet to a starting point, arriving to find the morning had properly committed to sunshine, the gold stone of Campden's buildings catching it and returning it warmly.
Following the posh cabbie's directions from the previous day we found the free car park tucked behind a row of rustic cottages at the eastern end of the high street — free all day, and with a sign informing us it was the recommended parking for walkers on the Cotswold Way. We were on the Heart of England Way, not the Cotswold Way, but the distinction seemed unlikely to cost us anything, and the saving in parking fees was real and welcome.
I had a few minutes while Colin prepared and spent them poking around the edges of the car park. On impulse I peered over a low wall capping an embankment and found myself looking down into a cemetery that stopped me where I stood. Uniform white crosses in precise rows, surrounded by a green border of clipped shrubs — nothing like the ramshackle individuality of an English parish churchyard. It had the careful, sombre tidiness of the war cemeteries scattered across northern France and Belgium.
Research since has suggested this was the Blockley Polish Cemetery, where displaced Polish citizens — refugees and exiles of the Second World War — found their resting place in a country that was not their own. It completed a circuit I had not been aware of completing. On the first day of this walk, a hundred miles to the north in Cannock Chase, I had stood beneath the trees and read the Katyn Memorial — another marker dedicated to Polish victims of that same war. I had not planned the connection. The walk had made it anyway.
Broad Campden: Americans and odd odours …
We made our way down to Chipping Campden’s historic high street and along it — the seventeenth-century market hall, a newsagent operating from within a sixteenth-century building in which I purchased some thoroughly twenty-first-century sweets — before a sign directed us sharply right and out through a hotel courtyard. A few fields, the spire of St. James's church marking where Campden was receding, and then Broad Campden. We entered the village through a narrow passage between cottages that opened before the parish church of St Michael and All Angels, its peculiar circular tower perched on a gable end as though it had arrived from somewhere else and decided to stay. Beside the church stood a flowering cherry of considerable size and ambition, its blossom cascading down in a great white fall over the clusters of terraced cottages ranged around it, all of them in the honey limestone of the northern Cotswolds, all of them absurdly charming, all of them backed by the rolling hills. We took many photographs. We nodded many approving nods. Broad Campden made a strong late bid for prettiest village of the walk. As we topped a rise that lifted us above the tree-line we bumped into a retired couple who were taking a breather, consulting their map and admiring the fine view of the hills surrounding us. We fell into conversation with them and discovered that they were Americans from Vermont and were touring the Cotswolds with friends, completing some walks along the way. They wanted to know all about the Heart Of England Way, and the other walks we had completed over the years, as they were very much a walking family and had relatives
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Church at Broad Campden |
The path beyond the village climbed via a narrow, canting track along the side of a valley — loose stones, hidden roots, the floor of the valley concealed beneath green treetops far below — which required attention and rewarded distraction with stumbles. I tripped twice and managed, on both occasions, to stumble forward rather than sideways, which avoided the alternative of an uncontrolled gambol down into the trees.
A small cluster of farm buildings at the top brought us to an abrupt navigational halt. We set off in several directions and returned from each of them. The GPS disagreed with our interpretation of it and then appeared to agree, then changed its mind. We dithered with the focused intensity of people who are close to being lost but haven't quite committed to it yet. The correct path, when we finally found it, was obvious. It always is.
We emerged past a stone quarry from which a smell of considerable peculiarity emanated — something between a chemistry laboratory and an industrial process I couldn't name, leaving a coating on the back of the tongue that lingered. We were glad to reach the lane beyond it and leave the quarry and its atmosphere behind.
Blockley: Wayward lambs and wayward paths …
A gate on the lane opened onto a sheep pasture in the full flush of lambing season — dozens of young ones in the field, closely attended. The gate was firmly closed and yet two lambs stood in the lane in front of us, having achieved an escape that neither they nor we could fully account for. They regarded us with the specific alarm of creatures who had wanted to be somewhere else and were now somewhere else and had not thought beyond that.
We advanced cautiously, intending to help them back into the pasture. They panicked, ran at the gate, head-butted it, ran back past us, turned left along the lane, and disappeared around a corner at a bleating gallop, their fluffy rear ends the last we saw of them. There was nothing to be done. We walked on. I worried about them for quite a while.
The rain came briefly as we continued along the road — a light forerunner of things to come, retreating before it forced a waterproof decision — and in the improved light after the squall’s gloom dispersed, we made out two figures on the far side of a large grass field. Our American friends from Vermont, who had evidently passed us while we were conducting our navigational experiments at the farm buildings. We caught up with them at the lip of a steep-sided valley that dropped away before us and then rose steeply on the far side.
We admitted we had taken a wrong turn.
They expressed surprise that we had found our way back without argument.
"In fact," the husband said, as I began the climb back up the far slope, "it's a credit to you both that as brothers you've walked a whole week together without murder being done."
I had not considered this before, but had the rest of the ascent to think about it. Colin and I had walked several long trails together and I could not recall a single genuine falling-out.
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Blockley |
We emerged from the valley and struck out across a large field toward Blockley, at which point we discovered we were off-route again. The Americans had followed us faithfully, on the reasonable assumption that it was our country and we ought to know where we were going. We gave them the news, located the correct path with the GPS — which the American husband examined with genuine admiration — and retraced our steps to a far corner of the field where a straight track led us toward the village edge. We lost sight of our friends from Vermont at this point, for the last time.
Blockley came to us down a narrow footpath angling between the walled gardens of cottages to its main street. It was another fine village, not least for being the location used for the filming of the Father Brown television series — which lends it a certain added charm, if you know this, and considerable charm in any case if you don't.
"Grand, eh?" said Colin.
The Heart of England Way passed through its narrowest section and out the other side in short order, as was its custom, and we began the long slow climb up a grassy hillside before pausing to look back down onto Blockley's rooftops spread below us, and beyond them the rolling Gloucestershire countryside. Then across a series of fields — easy, flat, unchallenging — and through a cool passage of mature trees, dappled shade and birdsong, at which I began quietly calculating our progress and concluded we were making excellent time. This sort of optimism is always going to court trouble and we didn’t have to wait long for it to arrive.
Sezingcote: A lost hour and red cows …
We reached a small road leading to Batsford Manor and its famous arboretum and into the fields of the Sezincote estate — or what we took to be the fields of the Sezincote estate — following the Heart of England Way markers until they stopped being Heart of England Way markers and became something else entirely. We retraced our steps. We tried a different direction. The GPS appeared to confirm the route we had already walked and which had not worked. We crossed the meadows again. We returned to Batsford lane. We crossed diagonally. We followed a hedge. We climbed a fence. We ended up, each time and without variation, back at Batsford lane.
This continued for the better part of an hour.
The resolution, when we finally found it, was maddening in its simplicity. Halfway across the first meadow, fenced off by barbed wire in a manner that made its markers entirely illegible, stood a signpost pointing a path that almost doubled back on itself toward a far corner. One of the disc-markers on that post, had we been able to read it, would have saved us an hour of increasingly irritated meandering. We also established that the owners of Batsford lane had declined to permit walkers to use it, forcing a triangular detour around its perimeter rather than simply walking its length. Between the inaccessible signpost and the unnecessary detour, the route had done everything possible to ensure we would get lost, and we had obliged.
We said a number of things about all of this as we squelched back along the correct path, most of them accurate and none of them suitable for print. The rain arrived simultaneously, hammering us with a cold squall as we reached the A44. We pulled on waterproofs. We were already soaked.
The A44 climbed into Bourton-on-the-Hill, where the rain intensified — hitting us once from above and a second time from the spray of passing traffic — and then, as we reached the village summit, stopped entirely. The clouds rolled back and the sun smiled down on us as if the rainstorm had never happened.
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Longborough |
Another brief squall on the open ground after Batsford, and then we picked up the Heart of England Way through the Sezincote estate proper — threading along a barbed wire fence, which I was very much in favour of given the density of cattle on the other side. Herds of them, and a respectable number of calves.
"Unusual colour," said Colin, regarding their deep reddish coats.
"Red Polls," I said.
"How do you know that?" he asked, genuinely surprised that a city-bred oik should have such knowledge.
In truth, I had no idea how I knew. The knowledge was simply there.
"I watch Countryfile," I offered, much to Colin’s amusement.
The great house itself came into view across yet another cattle pasture — Sezincote, with its onion dome and Indian Mughal influences, built by a man who had spent his most formative years in Bengal and wanted to bring something of it home. Late eighteenth century, entirely singular, looking out across its Red Poll pastures framed by a small forest of dark pines. We admired it and speculated about local broadband availability before a large and impeccably turned-out group of walkers filed past us — elderly gentlemen, young women, grandmothers, toddlers, all of them well-spoken and appropriately dressed. They exchanged many a pleasant hello. We suspected they might be connected to the house and out for a stroll among their own meadows, but we didn't ask.
Longborough: An unplanned lunch and a missing Slaughter …
We continued along the edges of four large fields that rose to a threatening skyline, and sure enough, midway through the third, the cold wind arrived over the hill and the rain came at an acute angle from the west, cold and insistent, running down our legs and into our boots before we reached any shelter. We passed a huddle of people behind a hedge — summer clothing, dripping dogs, wilted expressions — and pressed on, since waterproofs at this point were a largely symbolic gesture.
Longborough offered rescue in the form of the The Coach And Horses. We went in for a drink and decided, with the specific conviction of people who have been cold and wet for too long, that sandwiches were insufficient and steak and ale pie with chips was required. We were right. We stayed until we were dry, fed, and restored to something approaching our normal disposition. The afternoon that emerged after Longborough was a different proposition entirely — golden under a blue sky, the lanes past
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Bourton-on-the-Water |
Bourton-On-The-Water: The end that doesn’t end …
The path from Lower Slaughter to Bourton-on-the-Water was well-trodden and well-populated — tourists from Bourton making the return trip, almost exclusively international, the Cotswolds doing what the Cotswolds does for visitors from Europe and America and Japan. A young American boy discovered the distance from Bourton to Lower Slaughter was two miles and reacted accordingly.
"Two miles? Like, TWO MILES?!"
Try sixteen kid.
After crossing the A429 we entered Bourton's back streets, where the Heart of England Way's chosen approach appeared to take the most indirect route to the centre that geometry would permit, guiding us past a business park and several petrol stations before finally finding its way into narrower lanes and houses of obvious antiquity.
Crowds thickened as we approached the high street, the Windrush appearing between buildings, the old stone bridges and the shallow, swift, clear river doing everything that makes Bourton-on-the-Water one of the Cotswolds' most visited places.
But where was the end?
After a hundred and three miles through three counties, delivered to our destination by a path that had spent the week threading us through the best of the English Midlands and Cotswolds, the Heart of England Way offered no official conclusion. No landmark, no plaque, no marker of any kind. No cheap plywood hoarding (West Highland Way), no lumpen boulder with a plaque (Offa's Dyke), no elegant sandstone monolith (Great Glen Way). Even the Centenary Way had managed a bench. The Heart of England Way had, apparently, decided that arriving in Bourton-on-the-Water was sufficient reward in itself.
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Colin and the end of the route at Bourton-on-the-Water |
We shook hands.
"Well done."
"Congratulations."
It had the slightly formal quality of two captains concluding a Victorian cricket match, which felt, given the setting, fitting enough.
We sat on the bench and watched Bourton go about its business — the flotillas of ducks working the banks with the professional efficiency of animals that have identified a reliable food source and are not leaving, the stone bridges being photographed from every angle by people in every language, the river Windrush running swift and clear and absurdly picturesque over its shallow green bed. The model village, the motor museum, the perfumery — Bourton-On-The-Water has assembled a comprehensive set of attractions and is comfortable with what it is. We had planned to stay overnight and celebrate properly. Finances had intervened and we were driving home instead, which was a pity but not a tragedy.
We found the Old Manse Hotel and had cold beers at the window overlooking the Windrush while the afternoon cooled around us and we debated whether the temperature had genuinely dropped or whether it was simply the sudden absence of forward motion. A taxi was summoned. We gathered ourselves.
Outside, as our cab arrived, the clouds massed from the west with intent. We were in the car and moving before the rain reached us, and then it came — a genuine downpour, visibility down to yards, the sky turning purple, the trees thrashing. We drove through it watching the fields turn grey and the roads fill with water. Colin and I exchanged grins. We had been on foot in that field an hour earlier. We were extremely glad not to be now.
The storm had largely blown through by the time we reached Chipping Campden. We loaded our damp and well-travelled gear into the car for the last time and headed north toward Birmingham.
The celebrations that evening were quieter than previous years — no late revelry, just wine in the lounge at Chez Walford, tired legs stretched out, the week settling into the past tense. Over a hundred miles walked. Three counties and one metropolitan borough traversed. The Midlands revealed in ways that proximity and familiarity had previously made invisible.
The feet would itch again by September. They always do.
I already knew it would probably be the Midlands Millennium Way. But that, as they say, is another story.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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