| The Heart Of England Way | |
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Forecast is forewarned ….
As predicted, the day arrived under a grey blanket of cloud with a lively wind doing its best to remind us that May in the Midlands is not September in the Midlands. The temperature had dropped noticeably overnight and the warm bank holiday weekend felt, already, like something that had happened to other people. Our decision to extend the previous day's route and shorten today's had been the right call — we could see that now, looking out at the morning over breakfast with the quiet satisfaction of people who planned around a weather forecast and found the forecast accurate.
It wasn't hideous walking weather. It was just considerably less agreeable than anything we had experienced so far, and we were under no illusions about the day ahead.
Alcester: Millionaire’s oaks and wind ….
We drove across Warwickshire to the hamlet of Morton Bagot — via Bidford-on-Avon to leave the car — and set off into a climb almost immediately, up a lane and then a narrow winding track ascending through woodland. At the top we broke into a pasture containing cattle, which is never my preferred way to begin a morning. I have written about my cautious relationship with the bovine at some length across various journals, and my position has not materially changed. Colin shares the sentiment. We kept an eye on them as we crossed, they kept an eye on us, and nobody escalated.
We reached a small patch of woodland just as the sun made a brief and unconvincing appearance through the clouds — enough to improve the visual quality of the morning without doing anything for the temperature. Colin had on his World's Worst Ninja hat against the wind,
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Some shelter from the wind, a wood near Morton Bagot |
For the next hour or so the route followed bridleways threading between fields and plantations of young saplings, each nursery accompanied by an information board bearing the same face above the text. The face belonged to Felix Dennis — publishing magnate, poet, former inmate of Wormwood Scrubs on obscenity charges relating to Oz magazine, and latterly one of the UK's wealthier philanthropists. What Mr Dennis had decided to do with a portion of his considerable fortune was to plant some twenty thousand acres of broadleaved woodland across south Warwickshire. Oak, chestnut, the native species — a project he described as the thing closest to his heart, and which would take a century or more to reach maturity. He would never see it. Future walkers crossing this section of the Heart of England Way would walk under its canopy without knowing his name. Both of these things seemed to him, apparently, beside the point.
I had never heard of Felix Dennis before that morning. He struck me, from the information boards alone, as exactly the sort of person one should know about.
Update: Felix Dennis died the year after this journal was written, before even the plantation was complete. The trees are growing.
We reached a farmhouse on the crest of a high hill and stopped for a moment. The Cotswold escarpment was visible to the south — green-grey hills rolling away into the distance, unhurried and ancient. Tomorrow we would be among them. The wind, which the hedgerows had been partially absorbing for the past hour, hit us without obstruction on this exposed position, and any video commentary I attempted was removed from the recording and replaced with sustained buffeting. We descended a road for a while, then more fields, and across them an object Colin had been trying to identify for the past mile or two — a tall structure poking above the tree-line, something about it suggesting purposeful engineering. It looked, from a distance, like an air traffic control tower. This seemed unlikely given the location, but grew no less plausible as we approached. It turned out, on arrival, to be two very large grain silos beside a farmhouse. Entirely logical. Also somewhat less interesting.
Alcester: Chafing and wind ….
I had never been to Alcester and had formed, in advance, a vague impression of it as one of the quasi-industrial towns that are scattered across this part of the Midlands — born out of the industrial revolution or built on the canal network, red brick and Victorian in character, functional rather than charming. The outlying streets confirmed this expectation. The town centre did not.
Rounding a corner onto the high street was one of the better surprises of the week. The old heart of Alcester is full of half-timbered buildings that predate the industrial revolution by several centuries — Tudor shopfronts with sagging eaves and black timbers and whitewashed walls, the rows of parked cars the only concession to the current century. A plaque on an ancient wall identified the oldest surviving property on the street: Cruck House, built in 1385. A local woman noticed our interest and approached with the proprietary pride of someone who lives somewhere genuinely worth living in, pointing out the church and the narrow Malt Mill Lane as the places not to miss.
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A farm set high on a hill in Warwickshire |
We carried on.
The guidebook did its usual thing when asked to navigate us out of a town larger than a village, becoming vague in inverse proportion to the complexity of the task. We used it sparingly and relied on the GPS, crossed a bridge over the A46, passed through a small thicket of trees, and reached the farm track with the grain silos — which I had been looking at for the past mile and which, as confirmed, were merely grain silos.
It was here that I stopped to address the chafing.
This is not a subject I raise without purpose. The lower part of my back had been steadily rubbed raw over several days by the combination of rucksack, movement, and honest sweat, and had now reached the point where *tender* was too mild a word. Past experience has taught me to carry a jar of Sudocrem in my pack — what works for nappy rash works for chafing, and the two conditions have more in common than their different reputations suggest. I applied a generous amount to the affected area and felt immediate relief.
Colin had also developed a chafing problem. His was in a location that precluded public application of Sudocrem, and he dealt with it in the manner of a man who has concluded that stoicism is the only remaining option.
Wixford: Beer and wind …
The farm track continued for a couple of miles through the most exposed section of the day, the wind now with nothing to interrupt it and making the most of the opportunity. We hunched into it and moved as quickly as the surface would allow, aiming for a distant line of trees and the shelter they promised. On either side of the track enormous fields of rapeseed flourished in vivid lemon yellow — the one genuinely cheerful note in an otherwise grey afternoon, each field a flat blaze of colour thrown against the dull sky.
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Malt Mill Lane, Alcester |
The Fish Inn stood at the end of the caravans. We had a short day's walking and were nearing its conclusion. It would have been rude to pass without investigating the beer. We went in.
By the time we left, the rain had promoted itself. We pulled on waterproofs and grumbled about the British weather in the specific way that you grumble about it when it was brilliant three days ago and you know you have no right to complain but you're going to anyway.
Beyond the river, paddocks containing young horses who were extremely pleased about the rain — rearing at each other, rolling in the wet grass, conducting their own interpretations of the afternoon with the exuberance of animals that have not been asked to carry a rucksack all day. We envied them briefly and walked on through Broom — a village of upmarket cottages and a handsome timbered pub, — and out via a small playing field to the road into Bidford-On-Avon.
Bidford-On-Avon: An anti-climax in the wind ….
Bidford-on-Avon had formed, in my imagination, as a small and picturesque riverside settlement — limestone cottages, weeping willows, the Avon going about its business below, perhaps a cow or two on the bank for compositional purposes. The name encouraged this. *Bidford-on-Avon* sounds like somewhere that has realised its charm-potential and has named itself accordingly.
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Mark leaving Alcester |
The old stone bridge over the river was genuinely handsome, and the restaurants lining the bank had a certain charm, but Bidford-on-Avon as a whole failed to fulfil the expectation created by its name, which is entirely the town's right and entirely my fault for constructing the expectation in the first place.
We crossed the bridge and reached the park on the far bank — our endpoint, the river behind us, the town across the water, the wind doing its level best with the decorative sails of a nearby restaurant, which billowed and strained with the enthusiasm of something that has not been properly secured. In the park a marquee was being assembled in what was, by any reasonable assessment, an unfortunate day for the task. I filmed the river, the town, and the weather, and said what I thought about all three.
I would stand in the same spot the following day to film again. The two pieces of footage would be indistinguishable. The weatherman had failed to mention that.
We were home by half past three. The earliest finish of the week, and on the coldest, wettest day of it, which seemed about right.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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