| The Heart Of England Way | |
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Satnaff …..
Three of us this morning, which required a modest expansion of the domestic routine to accommodate Bod, who had spent the night on a self-inflating mattress on the lounge floor. We had warned him about Frankie — our greyhound, who regards any prone human form discovered in the house as a personal invitation for snuggle times — and Bod had taken the precaution of being upright and operational before I came downstairs with the dog each morning. A sensible arrangement that worked throughout his stay.
The logistics of the day required us to leave a car at Drayton Bassett, the walk's endpoint, before driving back to the Drill Inn at Burntwood to pick up the route. Simple enough. I keyed the destination into the iPhone sat-nav with half an eye, conducting a conversation with Colin as I did so, and we set off — Colin with me, Bod following behind.
We made good progress through Lichfield. We were, as it turned out, making excellent progress toward Milford Common, which was yesterday's starting point and approximately the opposite direction from Drayton Bassett. Bod's headlights began to flash in the mirror with a persistence that suggested he had something to contribute to the navigational discussion.
We pulled over. I checked the sat-nav destination. I had keyed in the wrong place entirely.
"We're heading back to Milford Common," I admitted.
Bod said nothing. He has a particular quality of silence that communicates a complete and fully formed opinion without requiring any of the words that would normally be needed to express it. We followed him back to Drayton Bassett, left his car, and drove to Burntwood. The detour had added a quantity of time and mileage to the morning that I chose not to calculate precisely.
Chorley to Lichfield: Leopards and Horses ….
The walk started in bright sunshine — the Met Office had been promising fine weather for the bank holiday weekend with the cautious optimism of an organisation that has been wrong before and knows it — and for once the forecast was holding. We left the Drill and picked up a bridleway, passing almost immediately a premises of uncertain identity: part camp-site, part garden centre, part local shop, we never quite established which. On wooden logs outside the office sat a collection of large cats — leopards, tigers, and related species — reclining in the attitudes of animals entirely at ease with their situation. I took them at first for finely carved wooden sculptures, hand-painted and mounted. On closer inspection they appeared to be stuffed toys, weathered by extended outdoor exposure to a state of matted, slightly ominous authenticity. We never discovered their purpose. Some mysteries are best left on their logs.
The guidebook had served us adequately on the first day, but its limitations began to show almost immediately on the second. A passage of directions led us along a country lane to a junction that bore no resemblance to the scene being described.
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The Nelson Inn, Chorley |
We passed the Nelson Inn — a pleasant-looking pub on a quiet country road — and made a note to return at the end of the day. The route took us up onto higher ground, offering views across the countryside we would be moving through, and it was distinctly horsey country: chestnut mares in paddocks, horse-boxes in driveways, the general air of a landscape that has arranged itself around the preferences of people with stables. Where there's horses, as Colin observed, there's brass.
Descending into a shallow valley and crossing a series of paddocks, we became aware of unusual activity at the far boundary — fillies moving back and forth with some agitation, their communication carrying clearly across the field. The source became apparent as we climbed a stile and found ourselves in the middle of a gymkhana. Horse-boxes, ponies, young riders in jodhpurs wearing expressions of measured superiority, and parents with the concentrated faces of people whose competitive instincts have been fully engaged by proxy. The event proper had not yet begun — this was the preparatory phase, the stretching of legs and settling of nerves — but the atmosphere already had the charged, slightly tense quality of a Sunday league football match, albeit with rather less foul language.
We edged around the perimeter with the careful discretion of trespassers who are on legitimate business but are trying not to draw attention to it, and continued on our way.
Lichfield: History ….
The three spires of Lichfield Cathedral — the Ladies of the Vale — announced themselves above the treeline earlier than I had expected. Lichfield was only three miles from our starting point and we had been making good time. A woman walking her dog at the field edge approved of my stopping to photograph the view.
"One of my favourite aspects of it," she confided, with the proprietary warmth of someone who lives near something worth living near.
She asked how far we were going that day. Drayton Bassett, I said.
"Oooo! That's a fair step!"
It was part of the Heart of England Way, I explained. A hundred miles in total.
"Oooo! How far do you walk each day?"
About twelve miles on average.
"Oooo!"
She wished us a lovely time and called her dog to heel. I walked on feeling, as one sometimes does after a brief and entertaining encounter with a stranger, considerably better about the morning.
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Approaching Lichfield Cathedral |
"Surely she shouldn't be doing that," Colin said, as I drew level.
She continued pottering. Nobody moved to intervene. We moved on.
Lichfield has been inhabited since Mesolithic times, though its early history is, as histories tend to be in that period, somewhat obscure. It came to prominence under King Offa — he of Offa's Dyke — who established it as the ecclesiastical centre of his Mercian kingdom, its influence intended to stretch from the Humber to the Thames and to serve as a direct counterweight to Canterbury's authority in the south. This arrangement lasted barely sixteen years before Offa's death ended the experiment and Canterbury reasserted its position. In the eighteenth century the city enjoyed a notable cultural flowering, producing or hosting Samuel Johnson , David Garrick , Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward. and establishing itself as an important coaching terminus. Over two hundred and thirty listed buildings survive in the city centre, largely undisturbed by the industrial revolution that transformed so much of the surrounding Midlands. The name derives, most plausibly, from the Brythonic *Letocetum* — grey wood — combined with the Old English *feld*, meaning open country.
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Lichfield Cathedral detail |
The West Front of the cathedral stopped us in our tracks.
What we stood before was the third cathedral on the site. The first was a wooden Saxon church erected around 700 AD — by Offa, again — to give his northern diocese a physical statement of intent. It lasted barely two decades before Canterbury's political victory made it redundant. The Norman replacement followed, and then, from 1195, the great Gothic building that stands here now, thirty-five years in construction and the only medieval English cathedral to have three spires — the tallest exceeding two hundred and fifty feet. The local sandstone from which it is built has, over the centuries, allowed the walls to bow fractionally outward under the weight of the vaulted ceiling, a detail invisible to visitors standing at the base looking upward.
The Civil War treated it badly. Lichfield became a site of contestation — the clergy for the king, the townsfolk for Parliament — and three sieges between 1643 and 1646 toppled the main spire, shattered all but a handful of the medieval stained glass, and destroyed the roof. The last siege was broken by the first mine deployed in an English military conflict, a fact that speaks to the seriousness with which both sides regarded the prize. Restoration began almost immediately but proceeded slowly, and the eighteenth century was largely a period of neglect — the West Front stripped of its statuary and plastered over with Roman cement.
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Bod and Mark descend Gorsey Hill |
Colin, who had been in pressing need of a comfort break since before Burntwood, disappeared down a side street in the direction of café facilities and was gone for a considerable time. Bod and I sat in the sunshine under the Gothic splendour of the West Front and waited. We waited long enough to begin wondering whether he had met with some difficulty. Eventually he reappeared, looking considerably restored. We said nothing about the duration. Some things don't require comment.
Lunch was acquired along the pedestrianised shopping street, ice creams consumed, and a small contingent of middle-aged Mods admired — ranged outside a churchyard, astride Vespas and Lambrettas, revving their tinny engines with a self-consciousness that the passing public was returning with mild indifference. They had the wistful air of men keeping a flame alive.
The guidebook then led us into a housing estate and promptly lost its nerve, its directions becoming vague in inverse proportion to the complexity of the navigation required. We scratched our heads, consulted the GPS, found the route, and left Lichfield via the A51, where the traffic moved past us at close range and we breathed exhaust for a mile and a half. A car had broken down on the verge, propped on jacks, with a mechanic lying underneath it at a distance from passing vehicles that made all three of us wince.
Knox’s Grave and Gorsey hill in the sunshine ….
A bridleway off the main road restored order and we stopped for lunch in a field, where the breeze, no longer buffered by the effort of walking, made its temperature known. I lay on my back and stared at the clouds and assessed my physical condition. It was, by the standards of previous first-and-second days, remarkably good. No blisters — a fact which continued to hold through the entire week, a rarity in my walking history, and attributable to the foot therapy that Sue had regarded each morning with the patient tolerance of a woman who has learned to accept her husband's stranger rituals without requiring an explanation.
After lunch we followed the bridleway toward the Lichfield transmitter — a thousand-foot mast that had been visible on and off since before we left Cannock Chase and would continue to mark our progress for the next two days, dwindling at a pace that gave some sense of the ground being covered. We passed a large field covered in polythene sheeting — a full acre or more of it, the surface catching the light like a shallow lake, rippling gently in the wind. It was only on closer inspection that the agricultural rather than hydrological explanation became clear..
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Near Knox's Grave |
Knox's Grave, when we reached it, proved to be a lane rather than a landmark — named for an eighteenth-century highwayman who met his end at the gallows and was buried locally, which is the sort of biographical footnote that earns a place name and very little else. It was a pretty stretch regardless, and led us through Bucks Head Farm and past Bourne House, where a lively stream ran through the garden and the landscape began, for the first time, to acquire some mild topography. At a signpost near the foot of Gorsey Hill, Bod stopped and looked at it with a grin.
"It's the before and after," he said. The stick figure pointing up the hill was, unmistakably, on the rounder side of the standard human silhouette. The one pointing downhill was lithe and athletic. "He lost all the weight going up."
Gorsey Hill required some effort in the afternoon heat, but the reward at the crest was one of the best views of the day — Lichfield Cathedral's three spires visible behind us, dreaming in the heat haze at the horizon, and before us the flat expanse of the Tame Valley stretching away into blue distance, the white buildings of the Kingsbury oil distribution facility marking the middle ground like a set of small bright teeth.
Burton Dasset and the never-ending road ….
We recovered our breath and descended the far side of Gorsey Hill, passing White Owl Farm and turning onto Brockhurst Lane — old hedgerows, substantial properties, the feel of a landscape that has been quietly prosperous for a long time. Brockhurst became Bangley Lane, via a couple of fields, and then Drayton Lane for the last mile and a half to the car.
A mile and a half at the end of a warm day, when sitting down has been the objective for the previous hour, has a way of expanding to fill considerably more space than the map suggests. Bod went ahead, as he tends to. The lane went on, as lanes do. The sun continued to address the tips of my ears, which were a part of me I had neglected to protect.
We reached the car, drove to the Drill, and I suggested — with the confidence of a man who has been wrong about navigation once already today — that everyone follow me to the Nelson Inn. I led the convoy down a lane that came to a dead end. We performed the necessary six-point turns and followed Bod to the correct car park.
The Nelson was more contemporary inside than its exterior had suggested — modern décor, a younger clientele, the kind of pub that has moved on from its previous life without entirely announcing it. The beer was cold, that's all that mattered. We sat with it for half an hour, feet grateful and conversation easy, before heading home.
The evening offered the Star Trek reboot film, which we watched with the heroic wakefulness of people who have been on their feet since morning, sustained by quiet beer and the knowledge that tomorrow we could sit down again eventually.
Lights out at half past eleven. Not bad, all things considered.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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Three years ago already? I was outraged by this fact. Still, an enjoyable day and Lichfield Cathedral was awesome.
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