| The Heart Of England Way | |
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Drayton Basset: Sunshine and sun cream ….
I looked out of the window as I got ready and found an almost perfect spring morning — brilliant sunshine, azure sky, the kind of bank holiday weather that feels slightly implausible and therefore slightly precious. It occurred to me, a little late, that I had not included sun cream on the week's shopping list.
I kicked an empty beer bottle crossing the lounge and noticed it was one of several. It had been a perfectly pleasant and unremarkable evening, which made the number of empties mildly surprising. Three blokes, a quiet night, and somehow the recycling was full. Bod's contribution to the collection had been exclusively pear cider — a drink he described, with the paradoxical satisfaction of a man who has found something he enjoys and wants you to know he's not sure about it, as *"a fruit-based drink for the ladies."* He drank it consistently throughout his time with us.
The day's logistics were a pleasant change. The Heart of England Way was now running through north Warwickshire — my home territory — which meant short car journeys and familiar ground. The first car went to the Griffin Inn at Shustoke, which is as close to a local as I have, a place of exceptional real ale and many happy evenings. Then back to Drayton Bassett, where we parked in a small lay-by opposite a row of smart houses whose curtains showed signs of taking an interest in proceedings. Nobody emerged to discuss the parking arrangements. They did get to watch three men applying sun cream — Colin had thought to bring some — liberally to their ears and necks before shouldering rucksacks and marching off along Drayton Lane.
Kingsbury Water Park: Narrowboats and crowds …..
Drayton Basset village was still half-asleep as we passed through — cottages, a church, a shop, all of them quiet in the morning sunshine. The lane narrowed after the village and almost immediately delivered us to the Birmingham and Fazeley canal, where the crossing required a bridge of considerable architectural character. Two whitewashed pillars, crenelated at the top in the manner of castle towers, stood at either end, each containing a spiral stone staircase that wound up to a railed wooden walkway above the water. Bod folded his not inconsiderable frame into the narrow doorway of the first tower and began climbing, singing *"I'm the king of the castle"* as he went. Colin remained on the embankment to film us on the bridge before following.
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St. Peter's Church, Drayton Basset |
The boats moored along the embankment were painted in the traditional roses-and-castles style, each boat's interpretation of the motif slightly different from its neighbours, all of them bright in the sunshine. Frying bacon was available by smell from several galleys, and their owners were installed on fore and aft decks with coffee, extending cheerful good mornings to us as we passed. One boat had a small terrier with his snout poking from the cabin hatch, dozing while his owner strummed a banjo on the deck.
Colin turned to me with the expression of a man who has just seen something that clarifies his priorities.
"That's the life," he said.
I agreed entirely. I also made a private resolution to one day buy a banjo, on the grounds that a reasonably well-played banjo is one of the more cheerful sounds available to the human ear, and I would like to be the person producing it. This resolution has not yet been acted upon but I consider it still active.
The canal banks offered other pleasures: beds of tall reeds, wild flowers in full spring bloom — vetch, campion, harebells, poppy, marsh marigold, balsam — and to our left the wide flat acres of former gravel workings, now filling naturally from rising water tables into reedbeds and marsh. Kingsbury Water Park itself is a more mature version of this transformation — gravel extraction having ceased forty years earlier, giving nature time to establish willows and birches and a series of lakes that have become a substantial habitat for birds and a popular destination for the people of Nuneaton and Birmingham. I know the park well from years of Sunday morning dog-walking with Frankie, and it was slightly odd to be approaching it from an unfamiliar direction.
At a row of terraced cottages where the route turned away from the canal I paused and thought of spring 2010, when torrential rain had driven the River Tame over its banks and submerged the entire water park. The flood had found its way into the canal through the end cottage — in through the front door, out through the back — while the owner stood in the remains of his garden watching it happen. The canal itself had turned brown and churned, narrowboats straining at their moorings with the specific vulnerability of things not designed to resist a current. Standing here in blazing sunshine with the water park shimmering peacefully behind us, it required a genuine effort of imagination to reconstruct the scene.
We stopped for tea at the Granary Tea Room, sitting outside with a view across a large lagoon where gangs of geese and ducks conducted their
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The Birmingham-Fazeley canal |
The water park on a bank holiday in fine weather is a busy place. We moved through it in the cheerful chaos of families, adventure playgrounds, donkey rides, and the Echills Wood miniature railway, navigating north past the yachting lake — white sails cracking in the breeze — and a second lake where jet-skis were drawing their white signatures across the surface. Eventually we found a path out of the park and across a meadow to an old stone bridge over the River Tame, Last year I had started out on the Warwickshire Centenary Way from the visitor centre at Kingsbury Water Park and I had assumed that the Heart Of England Way would follow the same southbound route heading out towards Bodymoor Heath. Instead we exited the park in the opposite direction, crossed a meadow, then climbed steps to a narrow lane between the old church and the recently restored Hemlingford Mill. Until very recently the mill had been shrouded in scaffolding and polythene; revealed now, it was worth the wait. It had served many purposes across its history — grinding corn into flour, and at one point grinding gun barrels for Napoleonic muskets, which gives its gentle millstone a more martial biography than one might expect.
Beyond Kingsbury: Gunfire and rabbit droppings ….
The guidebook, as it reliably did in populated areas, became vague at this point, and we navigated out of Kingsbury by GPS and instinct before emerging onto flat meadows, passing through a subway under the railway, escaping the village and out into open country.
A military firing range occupied the next section of boundary — the crack and rattle of distant shots a Sunday morning fixture in this area that I had always assumed to be commercial clay shooting. The concrete target wall was visible in the middle distance, the wooden billets housing classrooms and lockers standing empty. Nobody was about. We were mildly disappointed at the lack of activity.
Beyond the range came the largest field any of us had ever attempted to cross. A hundred acres, perhaps more, ploughed to a fine tilth — brown, flat, and extending to a horizon that seemed to recede as we walked toward it.
"Vultures are going to start circling when we're halfway across," said Bod.
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A handsome property at Foul End |
At the crest of the long gentle rise a cluster of farm buildings sat behind a beech hedge, with a sward of mown turf before it that offered shade and a view. Lunch was called. Colin unlaced his boots and offered his bare feet to the breeze. Somewhere overhead a skylark was working through its repertoire in the unhurried manner of a bird that has found its element. The gunfire had stopped. The breeze was just enough to be pleasant. We stretched out on the grass, produced sandwiches and pasties, and were, for a while, entirely content.
Colin was lying propped on one elbow, working through his trail mix with the methodical contentment of a man who has everything he needs. He paused, made a sound, and spat with considerable force.
"Pfffaaggghhh!"
He had dropped some trail mix on the grass, gathered it back up without close inspection, and introduced a quantity of rabbit droppings to his mouth along with the raisins. The similarity in size and shape was, in retrospect, an obvious hazard. Bod and I offered our sympathy through the medium of extended and helpless laughter.
After this the three of us lay back and let the afternoon do its work. Bod, after a time, began to snore — quietly at first, then with a single loud and conclusive snort that woke him immediately. He hummed a brief tune to establish that he had not, in fact, been asleep. Colin, who had the camera running throughout, said nothing. The footage exists.
Towards Shustoke — Missing Cows and Reservoirs ….
We were all a little reluctant to leave this comfortable spot. The sun was warm and the grass was soft to lie on, but we still had a few miles to make so we got to our feet, stretched our legs and shouldered our packs once more. The silos of the Kingsbury Fuel Depot, seen as distant white dots on the landscape the day before, were now close-by to the east and suggested that the route would take us further north-eastwards to skirt them before heading south once more towards Shustoke and our journey’s end. We left the farm behind us and walked for a while along a country lane where, looking back, we could still make out the slender spike of the Lichfield transmitter, just visible against the northern sky. It would disappear over the horizon the following day, having served as our landmark since Cannock Chase. Through Foul End — an unfortunate name for a genuinely pretty hamlet — and onto familiar paths. The Heart of England Way was now running through ground I walk regularly with Frankie, and I was able to provide local intelligence of the kind that only comes from repetitive acquaintance with a landscape. As we took a bridleway down between a hedgerow and the boundary of a fine old cottage — one I have earmarked as a lottery win acquisition for some years — I pointed out the potato field belonging to a cheerful, ruddy-cheeked farmer I knew from the Griffin. And I told them about the old orchard just ahead, where a trio of Highland cattle — great shaggy beasts, tame as dogs — were invariably to be found, at all times of the year, in all weathers, a reliable photo opportunity. We reached the orchard. The Highland cattle were nowhere to be seen. The orchard was empty. We moved on. Halloughton Lane climbed gently between high leafy boughs and the large gardens of well-maintained properties. An elderly gentleman sat under a tree in a deckchair with a book and something cold and tall in a glass. He looked up as we passed, held us in his attention for a moment, then set down the glass and wandered across his lawn for a refill. I found this deeply enviable. We descended through pastures to the edge of Whitacre Heath where the path briefly joined the Centenary Way — the route I had walked in steady rain two years before on its first day. The same place, different weather, different purpose.
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Nearing Shustoke Reservoir |
A railway crossing followed, the access arrangements having changed since the guidebook was written — one of the few occasions when the guidebook's failings could genuinely be attributed to the world rather than the author. We stopped to photograph an abandoned tractor at the field's edge, standing alone in the sunshine with the particular dignity of machinery that has accepted its fate.
The final mile ran parallel to the railway on one side and the reservoir on the other, along a path paved with large stone chippings of the kind that tired feet find especially unrewarding. Bod had reservations about this section. I rather liked it — dappled shade, a gurgling brook alongside, the occasional train providing a change of acoustic scenery — though I will concede it went on somewhat. We passed through a small glade where the brook slowed and ran clear over a stony bed, cool and transparent in the late afternoon heat. It looked inviting in the specific way that water looks inviting when you are hot and have a walk to finish.
We came up and around the edge of a field to the B4114, where the Heart of England Way continued over a stile directly opposite. Our walking, however, was done, and we turned left along the road, climbing to the sharp left-hand bend and the Griffin Inn.
Shustoke: The Griffin and goodbyes ….
Mick, the landlord of the Griffin Inn, observed traditional licensing hours and we weren’t expecting it to be open for business but, being a bank holiday, he had decided to keep the place open all day. We arrived to find it in operation and cold pints of Stowford's Press cider waiting to be ordered so we installed ourselves in the beer garden, stretched our legs into the sunshine, and spent a very satisfactory hour doing very little.
This was Bod's last day with us. He had work commitments the following morning that required him back in Southport, and while it would have been excellent to have had him for the full week, two days was considerably better than nothing. I would not be walking with Colin and Bod together again until September at the earliest — they were planning the Wainwright Coast to Coast without me. As always, the few days the three of us had spent together had passed swiftly - as moments are apt to do, during the very best of times.
We finished our drinks and pointed ourselves toward home, which was only seven miles away — the closest the Heart of England Way would bring us to it all week. It had been a fine day's walking.
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