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Wind trouble …
The driving distances to our start points had been growing steadily all week as the walk moved further south, and the logistics of leaving a car at each day's endpoint were beginning to consume a meaningful portion of the morning. We decided to revert to taxis for the return journey, which meant we could park once and return to the car at the end of the day, dispensing with the need for a second vehicle. This also meant placing a degree of faith in our ability to find a taxi in whatever village the route deposited us in. We set off from Bidford-On-Avon with the casual confidence of people who have never tried to find a taxi in a Cotswold village on a Friday afternoon.
The weather at Bidford was more or less unchanged from the previous day — persistent wind, dull cloud, the particular quality of grey that suggests it has been there for some time and intends to continue. I stood more or less exactly where I had stood the day before and filmed the river and the town and delivered some thoughts about the day ahead. The audio, as I later discovered, sounded like allied advances across the Somme circa 1917 — the wind slamming and buffeting the microphone with the thoroughness of a dedicated sound engineer who has been asked to ruin everything. The occasional intelligible word surfaced through the din. I have concluded that the microphone on this particular camcorder has no effective defence against wind noise, and that this is something I need to address before the next walk. Or alternatively, stop trying to film in wind..
The Cotswolds: Rural knocking shops and rampant bulls …
We left Bidford behind almost immediately, following the River Avon upstream past an impressive set of cataracts spanning the water and some workmen digging a large hole alongside the bank for no discernable reason. The tiny village of Barton arrived quickly — aesthetic cottages, the atmosphere of somewhere that has been quietly attractive for centuries and is aware of it — and with it a restaurant called the Cottage of Content.
Colin pointed it out because he knows a restaurant of the same name near his home. The name, I should say, presents two entirely different images to the imagination in rapid succession. The first is a plump and contented hobbit before his front door, pipe in hand, beaming across his garden. The second is rather less wholesome and involves a different kind of cottage industry entirely. I put this theory to Colin — that the Cottages of Content were in fact a rural chain, scattered across the English countryside as the countryside equivalent of inner-city massage parlours — and received in return the look of a man who preferred not to countenance such a theory.
Barton was tiny and we left it almost immediately, crossing fields and climbing to higher ground, threading along bridleways between more of Felix Dennis's tree plantations.
Dorsington followed — another cluster of thatched cottages, unmistakable money in the air, the specific quietude of a village that has been settled by people with the means to live in it. Here we encountered what would become the characteristic pattern of the remaining days: enter the village briefly, transit through it without quite troubling it with our presence, and then begin a sustained climb to escape it.
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A quaint cottage, Barton |
He announced himself immediately — a deep, resonant series of groans and bellows from further up the slope. We located him without difficulty. A large red bull, all muscle and irritation, looking down on us with the specific indignation of an animal that did not invite our presence and would prefer us to leave.
A thin electric wire ran inside the fence about a metre from its edge, providing a corridor of approximately that width by which walkers could traverse the meadow. It did not look like something that would give a determined bull significant pause. There was, however, no alternative, so we entered the corridor and walked, keeping one eye on the bull, who continued voicing his displeasure and, for additional emphasis, pawed the ground.
From further down the slope, his cows and calves observed proceedings with the mild interest of spectators who have seen this sort of thing before.
We were directly opposite the bull — no more than a few yards away — when Colin stopped, kneeled, produced his camera, and began composing a photograph of the animal. I did not hang around to admire this foolhardiness. I continued at a steady and unhurried pace around the corner and out of the meadow, and waited there until Colin appeared, grinning.
"Got a couple of good pictures," he said. "He followed us along for a bit, seeing us off his turf."
He then suggested I go back and capture the bull on video.
I made a counter-suggestion regarding the camcorder and a specific anatomical location, and we moved on.
Two hundred yards further on the sun broke through. We stopped, somewhat incredulously, to apply sun cream — an obligation that had seemed unthinkable an hour earlier. The clouds had retreated. The day had changed its mind. Ahead of us lay the Cotswolds in the specific weather the Cotswolds seem to produce for themselves: bright sun, high billowing cloud, a cooling breeze. We walked into it gratefully.
The Quintons and a bench revisited ….
More meadows, thankfully free of livestock. Long Marston — a brief transit — and then the road alongside Long Marston airfield, concealed behind a hedge but historically significant. It was a wartime training ground, now hosting drag racing, microlight flying, an air school, a plane graveyard, and the occasional festival. The Bulldog Bash was held here in years gone by, an event I attended in a previous chapter of my life when my hair was longer and my years considerably fewer.
Lower Qunton appeared over a rise, its modern houses and bungalows arranged with enviable views across the countryside. We skirted its edge and passed, almost without transition, into Upper Quinton. There is, theoretically, a boundary between the two — the road signs confirm it — but on the ground the distinction is largely academic. Upper Quinton is where I had concluded the Warwickshire Centenary Way
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A row of thatched cottages at Dorsington |
The houses around the green were individual in style but consistent in their quiet confidence — square frontages, symmetrical windows, some red brick, some whitewashed in pastel shades. We attempted to rank them by age, based on evidence of wear and time. This was a delaying tactic for feet that would rather not get up, and we both knew it. Eventually we shouldered our packs.
As we walked away I turned for a last look at the green. It was my third visit to Upper Quinton. I had acquired a soft spot for it over the years, and as we moved toward the looming presence of Meon Hill I had the quiet conviction that I would never return.
Mickleton: A haunted hill and tattooed trees …
More fields, more farm tracks, past Clopton Orchard Farm and what Google Maps identified as Hoody World — not, as the name briefly suggested, a theme park for disaffected teenagers, but a business producing personalised hooded sweatshirts, which is rather less interesting.
Meon Hill drew the eye as we approached it, not because it was large or visually dramatic but because it stood apart from everything around it, isolated from the Cotswold escarpment that flanked us to the south. It had the sky to itself and something in its separateness that invited attention. People have lived on it since the Stone Age. It once had an Iron Age fort. It has a black dog — the legendary Black Dog of Meon Hill, whose appearance brings death — and a connection to a witchcraft murder in 1945, and is claimed by some to have inspired Tolkien's Weathertop. It is a hill with a complicated relationship with its own reputation.
None of this I knew at the time. In warm afternoon sunshine, Meon Hill just looked rather lovely — mature trees, a smooth covering of turf, the particular quality of an ancient hill that has been there a very long time and fully intends to experience a lot more.
Beyond the hill the Gloucestershire countryside opened into something softer and more pastoral. We heard lambs before we saw them, their bleating carrying from behind tall hedgerows, and then passed a large flock being herded back to pasture by a farmer who held the gate open for us with a cheerful wave — a ruddy-faced, broad-shouldered man who looked precisely like the farmer in a children's book, which I mean as the compliment it is.
The wealth of the medieval Cotswolds was built on wool, and the evidence of it is everywhere here
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Walking towards Chipping Campden through horse pastures |
Mickleton arrived across a paddock of tussocky grass, announcing itself as the most northerly village in Gloucestershire. It is typical of the northern Cotswolds — oolitic limestone, that honey-coloured stone that mellows to a warm golden brown over centuries, all of it arranged into cottages and houses that look as though they grew out of the hillside rather than being built on it. I have driven through Mickleton many times and was pointing out its charms to Colin as we walked its streets when it gradually became apparent that we had wandered off route. We navigated our way back to Ye Olde Butchere Shoppe — which produces, without any contest, the finest game pie I have ever eaten, and which I commend to anyone within reach of the northern Cotswolds — and picked up the correct path through a narrow alley between cottages, into the churchyard of St. Lawrence's, and out through a sunlit glade of young birches onto Baker's Hill.
The climb up Baker's Hill followed a high track along the flank of old woodland, steep-sided and full of light, the views between the trees opening across Gloucestershire and Worcestershire below. Ancient beeches stood among the trees, their smooth grey trunks rising above us, and many of these trunks had been carved — names and dates, some going back to the early years of the twentieth century, cut into the silvery bark at heights ranging from ground level to about six feet. Nothing obscene, nothing hostile. Just names, sometimes initials paired together, and the dates they were left. A lovers' meeting place, perhaps, for several generations. The trees had absorbed the marks and grown on around them, the letters stretching slightly as the trunks expanded across the decades.
They looked, as Colin accurately observed, rather like tattoos.
Chipping Campden: An excess of tourists and the paucity of taxis …
Baker’s Hill Wood ended at Furze Lane and then a long tree-lined farm track descended toward Chipping Campden, horse paddocks on either side, the afternoon sun finding its way through the canopy above us in the dappled, intermittent way of late spring. Colin and I talked through whatever subjects presented themselves — the walk, the week, things further afield — and I thought, as I sometimes do at moments like this, that the specific pleasure of walking long distances with someone you know well is that it creates exactly this: hours of conversation that have nowhere to be, and go wherever they will.
We climbed the edge of an open field toward a skyline occupied by the broken silhouettes of derelict farm buildings — the kind of location that a film director would use without modification if he wanted to suggest the aftermath of something. At the top, coming the other way, two American tourists out for a local stroll. We told them we were heading for Chipping Campden.
"Well it's right there," one of them said, gesturing around the hedge. "Just around the corner."
It was.
Chipping Campden announced itself via the perimeter of the school academy — students still inside and out, a few faces turning toward the windows as we passed along the fence — and then Church Street and then the immediate realisation that we were in one of the Cotswolds' more comprehensively visited places.
Chipping Campden at this hour and in this season was busy with people conversing in the full range of European and American languages, all of them pointed at the same things we were pointed at: the ancient almshouses, the historic buildings, the streets that look approximately as they have looked for several centuries. It entirely justified the attention. Chipping Campden is a gem, and gems draw crowds.
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Walking into Chipping Campden |
We did not mind waiting. We ordered a second pint.
The last ten minutes of the wait were spent outside in the drizzle, on the grounds that missing the cab after all of this would have been a miserable outcome. It arrived on schedule, driven by a woman who immediately won the award for Cabbie With Poshest Voice — clearly well-to-do, clearly enjoying herself in the role, and full of useful local knowledge. She told us, on hearing that we would be parking in Chipping Campden the following day, exactly where to find the free all-day car park. This alone justified the fare.
She deposited us back at Bidford-on-Avon, which was still wearing its grey and drizzly expression and making no effort to improve my opinion of it. I am sure it is a far better place in sunshine. I will probably never know for certain.
We drove home later than usual — Chipping Campden is further from Birmingham than Bidford — and ate a late dinner and talked about the following day. The last day. One more stage and the walk was done. Eight days had seemed like plenty when we started, and had turned out to be, as it always does, not quite enough.
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