| The Heart Of England Way | |
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Minor adjustments ….
Over drinks the previous evening we had looked at the week's remaining mileage against the approaching weather front and concluded that some redistribution was in order. Thursday's forecast was insistent: cold, windy, possible yellow weather warnings in places, though mercifully not quite where we would be walking. The sensible response was to extend today's route by a few miles — stopping at Morton Bagot rather than Henley-in-Arden — which would shorten Thursday's exposure to the elements at the cost of a longer day today. We were accustomed to sixteen-mile days and decided the trade was worthwhile. The wine may have assisted this decision.
Baddesley Clinton: History for the retired …..
We drove back to Balsall Common under cloudy skies, reaching a quiet leafy lane and spent a few minutes finding somewhere to park. The first spot I selected turned out to be a bog masquerading as a lay-by. The car sank with a quiet dignity into the mud, and Colin got out to push while I extracted us. We settled eventually on rough ground in front of a large house and set off back to the stile leading out of town, trying not to dwell on the morning's opening notes.
Google Maps had already indicated that the first portion of the day would involve a considerable quantity of fields, and so it proved — half a dozen in the first few miles, some ploughed and bare, some left fallow, a few occupied by livestock. The ground rose steadily until we rounded a hedge to find a wide grassy space where a farmer and an assistant were erecting a wire fence. The farmer's role in this enterprise was to hold a wooden pole upright while his colleague stood back and directed him to nudge it a few inches one way and then a few inches back. He gave me a look of patient martyrdom as we passed.
"Hard work?" I asked.
"Oh yes," he said. "All this leaning on posts is knackering."
Beyond the farmyard we passed through a small copse, Priests Park Wood, noting as we went a child-sized wooden horse carriage abandoned in a corner — one of those pieces of farmyard flotsam that I find consistently fascinating. Britain's farmyards are repositories of the improbable and the forgotten: vintage cars, antique furniture, ancient tractors, evil-looking multi-bladed contraptions, buses, the occasional totem pole. They rust and rot in corners for decades, covered in chicken droppings, and I am convinced that whoever finally gets around to cataloguing these things will find a small fortune hiding in plain sight.
The copse delivered us to the edge of a village and a series of back alleys before depositing us in front of the Orange Tree pub on the main street.
"I didn't realise this was Chadwick End," I said to Colin. "You've walked through here with me before."
He received this with the patient expression of a man who has heard some version of that sentence several times during the week.
The Heart of England Way dipped through the village and out the other side via three uneven fields, where blinkered horses stood with ears twitching, alert to our presence but unable to see us.
The next set of buildings was also familiar territory — a complex of stables and outbuildings I have walked through many times over the years and from which I have never, in all those visits, received so much as a nod of acknowledgement from anyone working there. Walkers on a major long-distance path pass through, invisible, by practised indifference.
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Mark at Baddesley Clinton |
The manor was founded in the thirteenth century and is now a National Trust property, and the car park was being emptied and refilled with retired couples as we passed, coaches delivering their contents in orderly waves toward the house. Our route ran along the eastern boundary rather than into the grounds, and we walked beside the wall with the upper floors and chimneys visible above it.
I told Colin the story of Baddesley Clinton and its near neighbour Packwood House as we went — the two great families that had lived in parallel prosperity through the Tudor period before religion divided them. The Packwood family were Protestant, and therefore very much in favour with a Tudor monarchy that had strong views on the subject. The family at Baddesley Clinton were staunchly Catholic, which in that period was not simply a matter of private conscience but a political position that attracted official displeasure and the systematic erosion of wealth and influence. They had survived, somehow — hiding persecuted priests in purpose-built priest-holes that can still be seen today, keeping as low a profile as a prominent Catholic family could manage in a country that was actively looking for them — and had eventually donated the house to the National Trust in 1983, much diminished from its Tudor prominence but still standing, which was more than many similar families could say. Packwood House, meanwhile, acquired much of Baddesley Clinton's furniture during the lean years — no doubt to the considerable satisfaction of its Protestant owners.
History is rarely tidy, but it is occasionally instructive.
The Stratford canal and the narrowboaters ….
Beyond Baddesley Clinton we reached Lapworth and the Navigation Inn, where the Heart of England Way performed its usual brief acquaintance with a village before moving on, and joined the Grand Union Canal at a bridge. A few hundred metres of towpath brought us to Kingswood Junction where the Grand Union and the Stratford-on-Avon canals meet.
We turned right onto the Stratford canal — territory I hadn't walked before and hadn't expected — and the sun, which had been intermittent all morning, broke through properly and made the canal considerably more pleasant than it had any obligation to be.
The Stratford-upon-Avon canal has a history of near-misses. Built in the early nineteenth century as a coal transportation route designed to circumvent the increasingly difficult Birmingham Canal network, it completed its twenty-five miles from Kings Norton to Stratford just in time to be rendered largely irrelevant by the railways. It was purchased by a railway company, which promptly closed it.
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The Stratford-upon-Avon canal |
A narrowboat putted alongside us, slowing to negotiate a lock. The woman aboard was the more experienced canal hand; her partner was newer to it but already evangelical about the lifestyle. Colin stopped to chat with them. He had always fancied a canal holiday, he said. They couldn't recommend it enough — the essential quality of canal life, they explained, was that urgency ceased to exist. Everything slowed to the pace of the water, and the water had nowhere particular to be. The locks, the woman assured us, were always managed cooperatively; canal people helped each other through without being asked.
As we spoke, a white goose landed on the lock spar and arranged itself in a pose of considerable self-importance, apparently aware that photographs were being taken and willing to accommodate them. We obliged.
Lunch came at a convenient bench a little further along. Colin removed his boots. I retrieved a bag of crisps from my rucksack, squeezed it to open the top, and burst it at the bottom instead, distributing the contents across my lap with some thoroughness. Behind us a garden ran down to the canal bank, at the far end of which stood a cola vending machine, unplugged and presumably decorative. We ate in the intermittent sunshine, enormous clouds sailing overhead, and tried to calculate how far through the extended day we actually were. We concluded we were roughly halfway, with Henley-in-Arden and the climb to Bannam's Wood at Morton Bagot still ahead.
We crossed under the great concrete span of the M40 and left the canal at Lowsonford, climbing Mill Lane to pause and admire a small house at the top of the rise before crossing a stile into fields.
Henley-in-Arden: An ad hoc canine ….
What followed was a prolonged episode of field walking — pleasant as an experience, limited as subject matter. We passed through Bush Wood briefly, a stretch of pine forest where the path dipped into a quiet needle-carpeted twilight before rising back into sunshine, and continued across paddocks and meadows until a scrubby path opened onto a high ridge of grassland and the rooftops of Henley-in-Arden appeared below us. It was an unexpectedly impressive view, the more so for not having required any obvious effort to achieve.
Colin was reading the guidebook.
"It says we're looking south-westwards toward Bannam's Wood, which is set atop a hill."
We made out a dim smudge of raised woodland on the horizon.
"Isn't our car just before that hill?" Colin asked.
"It's the other side of the hill, actually," I said.
The guidebook's use of the word *distant* to describe Bannam's Wood now struck me as carrying more information than I had initially appreciated.
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Mark at Henley-in-Arden |
Henley-in-Arden's high street is a conservation area and an interesting one — half-timbered Jacobean taverns alongside smart Georgian shopfronts, a town that has absorbed several centuries of architectural fashion with apparent ease. It first appears in official records in the twelfth century, somehow escaping the Domesday Book entirely, and has at various points in its history been a centre for trade, a subject of military remodelling, and a location for a number of private lunatic asylums, which is the kind of biographical detail that a town tends not to lead with but which I find endearing. It is also, more cheerfully, locally famous for its ice cream.
We passed through during the school run — pavements full of students, roads full of people carriers — crossed a wooden bridge over the railway where a noisy group of pupils were playing impromptu cricket on the platform, and emerged onto a wide meadow. The guidebook attempted a passage of direction here that required more interpretation than it strictly had a right to demand. We scratched our heads, identified the obvious route forward, and took it.
At the bottom of the meadow a large fallen tree marked a boundary, and beyond it a peculiar v-shaped bridge of concrete and tubular steel crossed a small brook. On the far side, in the next wide meadow, a small dog appeared from somewhere, assessed us at close range, and decided that she would be joining us.
She was a cheerful and determined little animal who greeted our attempts to redirect her — *Shoo*, *Go home*, *Bugger off* — with the equanimity of a creature for whom these phrases carry only encouragement. She led the way across the meadow with the purposeful air of a dog who has lived here all her life and knows where things are. There had been a man mending fences in a field further back, and we assumed she was his — on familiar territory and in no real danger — but the assumption became less comfortable with each meadow she crossed with us. Several fields were crossed before we reached a stile set into a hedge, and we clambered through it with some haste. The little dog stopped at the hedge, regarded us briefly through the gap, and elected not to follow.
We walked on, feeling mildly relieved.
Bannam’s Wood: Memorials and detours …..
The fringe of Bannam's Wood was now visible on its hillside and growing steadily closer as we worked our way across farmland toward it. The sun had been withdrawn by the time we reached the foot of the steep grassy climb up into the trees, replaced by low cloud and a lively breeze that moved through the treetops and sighed through the long grass. The wind had found its ambition, clearly. We plodded up on legs that had been going for some hours and settled at the summit, looking back along the day's route, the location of Henley-in-Arden already a matter of inference rather than visibility.
Bannam's Wood is classed as ancient woodland — meaning it has existed continuously since at least 1600 — and it felt it. The trees did not appear especially welcoming; branches snagged at us as we walked, roots made deliberate bids for our ankles.
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Colin in Bannam's Wood |
Shortly after the bench we went wrong.
It was a gradual realisation — the kind where you continue walking for a while in the hope that the path will resolve itself, until the GPS removes any remaining ambiguity. We were off-route. The correction required us to forge around the perimeter of the wood without a path, pushing through waist-high ramsons, stepping over fallen branches, navigating by GPS alone. It was trackless and effortful and the moment I began privately calculating how much daylight remained, a well-beaten track appeared and a waymarker stood beside it with the quiet satisfaction of something that has been there all along.
The path led out of Bannam's Wood and onto a tiny country lane. We stopped to assess the situation. We were not entirely sure where we were, and inclined to assume the worst about how far remained. I was mid-pessimism when we rounded a bend and found a cottage
The bin had *Morton Bagot* painted on its side in large, plain letters.
Never in my walking life have I been so pleased to see a bin.
"We're done," I told Colin. "I recognise this place. Your car is around the next bend."
It was. We climbed in with the gratitude of people who have been on their feet for considerably longer than planned and drove back across country by GPS, through tiny back lanes, toward home.
By the time we arrived the wind had picked up considerably. We ate and drank and listened to it growing outside and went to bed with a reasonable certainty about what Thursday would deliver. Sunshine was not among our expectations.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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