| The Millennium Way | |
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Long Itchington: So good I saw it twice ...
A bright early summer morning, lemon sunshine and dappled shade, and I sat on a bench facing Long Itchington's large village green and felt a growing reluctance to leave the place. The soporific droning of bumble bees and the soft chimes of the church clock added to the ambience and I found myself staring across the swathe of grass, in no hurry at all to set off on a twelve mile walk. The days were long at this time of the year and time was on my side; I could have sat there for hours, drowsing the morning away, a nice lunch at a nearby pub, a stroll around the shops. Wishful thinking of course, brought on by an early start to the day and a nice merlot the night before. It took some effort but eventually I mustered up my enthusiasm, performed some warm-up stretches for the amusement of locals on their way to buy the morning papers, shouldered my rucksack, and set forth for day three of the Millennium Way.
I wandered down the high street passing neat rows of cottages and the lovely Holy Trinity Church, took a left turn over a stream, and then crossed a lumpy field of long grass and thistles serving as breakfast for a few straggly sheep who watched my passage with minimal interest. Halfway across, a white van bumped toward me over the uneven ground. I assumed the driver to be the field's owner — or, alternatively, the possessor of the world's worst sat-nav. I nodded as it passed. An arm emerged from the window and gave me a cheerful wave. After the field came a lane, and after the lane came Long Itchington again.
I have studied the map since. I could simply have continued along the high street to reach this point. The paddock, the sheep, and the white van were an entirely unnecessary diversion — a sheep-leg, if you will, rather than a dog-leg. Perhaps it once contained something worth the detour: an ancient monument, a plague pit, or (more practically) a burger van. Now it contained rank grass and indifferent livestock. I re-acquainted myself with Long Itchington's back streets and finally departed for good via a concrete drive leading to White Hall Farm.
Close Encownters of the Herd Kind ...
The trouble was visible from a distance. A stile led into a large pasture. Clustered densely around it, four deep, was a herd of Fresians. They made no attempt to move as I approached, merely turning their large brown eyes toward me with the unhurried composure of animals that have nowhere particular to be and see no reason to accommodate anyone who has.
I cooed at them. I waved my arms. I tried persuasion of various kinds. The herd remained as one body, immovable, a bovine blockade of considerable thoroughness. I could not climb over into them without the strength of Hercules to shift them, and there was no visible alternative route.
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Long Itchington |
The marker post I was looking for appeared freshly painted and incongruously smart against its unkempt surroundings, pointing me through a hedgerow into woodland that proved, if anything, wilder than what I had just left. I swished and trampled through chest-high nettles along a path visible only in theory, the trees hung with vines, the ground alive with shade-loving things. The River Itchin wound through it — little more than a stream here, dun brown and dancing with damselflies, the whole secretive place carrying a rich earthy scent that spoke of deep loam and undisturbed time.
Despite the nettle rash developing on my forearms in a pattern that could have been read as Braille, I was a little sorry to emerge the other side. A narrow bridge, a crossing, and more cultivated ground.
Abandoned poles and railways ...
A wide field of barley — I will commit to barley on the grounds that it had long whiskery ears, though I would not put money on this — opened ahead, the crop whispering as I passed through it, and a succession of such fields followed with wide views to the south-west. In that direction, a few miles distant, lay the village of Ufton, where in 2012 I had conducted a memorable conversation about a pair of sunglasses I was wearing on my face while claiming to have lost them, with a publican I had then obliged to take my phone number in case a non-existent pair of prescription reading glasses was handed in.
The Centenary Way had its moments.
Finding myself entirely alone — no farm visible in any direction — I set up the camera for a walk-to-camera sequence in the barley. I arranged the angle carefully, prepared myself, and set off. The footage was rather good: the barley whispering on either side, the larks overhead, the countryside doing exactly what it should. I was quite pleased with it.
Then, in the largest field of the sequence, the Millennium Way came to an abrupt end at a hedgerow. The guidebook indicated I should be on a lane. I retraced my steps some considerable distance before discovering the gap in the hedge — perfectly obvious, in retrospect — that let onto Stonebridge Lane.
The lane wound gently uphill and two cyclists came freewheeling down toward me, enormous grins on their faces, throwing a cheerful hello as they swept past. One of those moments arrived without announcement — the weather, the countryside, the simple pleasure of moving through it alone and unhurried — and lifted everything suddenly and completely. I filmed a short piece that sounded, for once, genuinely euphoric.
Then I noticed the walking pole was not in my hand.
I looked back across the many fields I had crossed. I could just make out the distant hedge where I had filmed the barley sequence. The pole was almost certainly propped against the kissing gate there. It was too far to retrieve. I walked on.
That pole had been with me across Scotland and the length of the Midlands — several hundred miles of shared experience. I was aware that finding the loss of an inanimate object genuinely distressing was not entirely rational. I found it distressing anyway, and fretted about it for the rest of the day.
Ridgeway Lane followed — old hedgerows, a surface that deteriorated from well-laid tarmac to potholed mud to waterlogged ruin, exactly the conditions in which a walking pole would have earned its keep. I edged around the worst of it until an iron bridge appeared, spanning the former railway line between Rugby and Leamington Spa — a rickety old structure
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Near Old Hunningham |
Old Hunningham offered a confusing cluster of signposts that ensured a comprehensive tour of its cottages and squat church before I located the correct Millennium Way track. Hall Meadow Nature Reserve passed without my noticing it. The internet, when I looked it up later, described it as agriculturally improved grassland with small areas of relatively species-poor semi-improved grassland, used for year-round horse grazing.
I saw no horses.
A churned and muddy path brought me to the White Lion inn — reached too early for a pint, which the state of my footwear may have dictated in any case — and then a stone bridge crossing the River Leam. Here the river was quiet and secretive, bordered by willows, cattle wandering its banks in the afternoon heat. I would see it again in Leamington Spa, where it would reinvent itself as something altogether more sociable and on a grander scale.
Sheep pastures followed, one after another, all broadly similar, the walking easy enough to encourage the mind to wander along its own paths without supervision. I have no memory of what I was thinking when I emerged onto a farm track and discovered I was lost again. The guidebook had reached one of its periodic crises of direction — equivocating between left and right and then something else — and I turned right, which seemed closest to the text's intentions. Around a corner: a small field, one horse, a cluster of terraced cottages, and a firmly closed gate blocking further progress.
I returned to the junction. I tried another direction. I came back. I tried the first way again. The horse, by my third visit, had his head tilted and ears pricked in what I can only describe as a questioning expression. Under normal circumstances I would have found this charming - but I was not in the mood to find it charming. In fact I found it faintly sarcastic.
An overgrown avenue that the guidebook appeared to have overlooked entirely turned out to be the correct route. I delivered my assessment of the guidebook's authorship to the camera with some feeling, so apologies to any of its contributors who might stumble across this journal. In my defence I was tired and under duress.
South Cubbington Wood — gloomy, close-grown trees, the particular brooding quality of a small wood that has been left to its own devices — was a brief passage, and then a large rapeseed field with the rooftops of Cubbington appearing beyond it. I sat down on the path's edge, freed my feet from their boots, ate lunch, and then lay back with the rucksack as a pillow and stared at the clouds drifting through the pale blue sky. The rapeseed pods hissed gently in the breeze. Insects droned. I am fairly certain I slept.
A middle-aged couple walking their dogs on a parallel path brought me back to consciousness with a start. I watched them head toward Cubbington, stretched, pulled on my boots, and stood up with the creaking of a man who has been horizontal longer than intended.
Parks and puns ...
Three corners of Cubbington's lanes and the King’s Head pub presented itself. I went in and sat outside with a pint of Abbot's Ale and the view of St. Mary's church across the road. The pub was full of locals who all appeared to know each other, their conversation running to weather forecasts and car trouble in the comfortable circularity of village gossip. A young woman arrived wearing a blue feather boa, a swimming costume, and deely-boppers.
"Don't mind me," she announced to the room. "I've been on a charity run."
Nobody minded. Nobody appeared particularly surprised.
Cubbington has a Domesday entry under the Old English *Cumbynton* — a settlement in a low hollow — and was considerably larger than its neighbour Leamington Spa until the latter's boom as a spa town in the nineteenth century. It now has four thousand inhabitants, a successful silver band that has won the area championship on several occasions, and this, from the annals of local history: the Manor House was said to be haunted by a young girl who starved to death when her mentally ill father locked the family inside and refused all contact with the outside world. Cubbington does not lead with this story, which is understandable.
The high street offered a short row of shops with names that amply justified the detour:
*The Prudent Purse* — a charity shop.
*Cubbington Plaice* — fish and chips.
*Only Foods and Sauces* — speciality foods.
The last of these is my favourite shop name I have encountered on any walk, anywhere.
Beyond the high street I climbed a grassy hill into open farmland — I had expected developed land after Cubbington, and was wrong. A gently rolling landscape of crops and wildflowers extended ahead, a tower block marking the distant edge of Leamington, falling away to the east behind a small wood. A genuinely pleasant surprise. Two Frenchmen came the other way — walkers, which was unusual enough on the Millennium Way to be noteworthy, and French, which was unusual enough in this corner of Warwickshire to be remarkable.
I entered Leamington Spa via Newbold Comyn, a public park that was in private hands for centuries before Leamington Corporation acquired it in the 1960s. The Luftwaffe dropped two bombs on it during the war while returning from Coventry — the craters are apparently still visible — and in 2009 a reported lynx sighting on the golf course earned it brief coverage as the home of the Beast of Newbold Comyn. The golf course I crossed without incident, which I consider an achievement worth noting given my historical relationship with golf courses on long walks.
Beyond it, a wide cinder track opened into a sequence of parks and leisure grounds along the River Leam, alive on this summer afternoon with dog-walkers, frisbee-throwers, cyclists, roller-skaters, footballers, and the general cheerful noise of people making the most of the sunshine. Ice cream vans were doing excellent business. After so many miles of quiet fields the company of crowds was genuinely welcome, and I moved through it all feeling pleasantly anonymous.
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A juxtaposition of town and country |
Formerly known as Leamington Priors it became Leamington Spa in 1838 after a visit by Queen Victoria, establishing itself as one of the nation’s burgeoning royal spa towns. Leamington’s spa waters were rediscovered and commercialised in 1784 by William Abbotts and Benjamin Satchwell although the Romans had known about them long before. The spa became a runaway success and the town experienced a population explosion as a result. By 1901 the denizens of Leamington had grown from a few hundred to nearly 27,000. The economy of Leamington decreased towards the end of the 19th century following the decline in popularity of spa towns. These days it's a popular destination, like Kenilworth and Warwick, for Brummie retirees, and the professional middle-class. Strangely it’s also a hub for the video games market with many of the top
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Leamington Spa |
Leamington has been featured in a number of television series, including the 1990s BBC situation comedy Keeping Up Appearances. The occultist Aleister Crowley was born in Leamington as was Randolph Turpin, world champion boxer. Russell Howard, comedian and performer currently lives in the town. Bizarrely Napoleon Bonaparte also lived in Leamington Spa, as an exile between 1838 and 1839.
I continued along the Pump Room gardens, crossing a small footbridge to continue along the banks of the River Leam, passing into Victoria gardens, the fourth and final park in this sequence, stopping for a moment to film the rear of the imposing office building where I had worked for a short while, before continuing on into the grounds of the park. Victoria Park can lay claim to being the spiritual home of Crown Green bowling in the UK and is also one of the birthplaces of Lawn tennis, being one of the first in the country to establish a club. Up until the 1830s the park was just part of farmland on the edge of the growing spa town. Then the ubiquitous Willes family began to hold archery competitions on the land, starting its transformation into a leisure area. In the middle of the nineteenth century Leamington Cricket club made their first home there and in the 1860s the New Riverside Walk was opened. The park was extensively landscaped and redesigned in 1899 to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. It also hosted the Royal Show before it moved to its current venue in Stoneleigh Park. The bowling greens are amongst the best in England hosting the English Women's Bowling Championships annually as well as Women's World Bowling Championships in 1996 and 2004.
Again this was a place busy with people, including Crown Green Bowlers dressed in their dazzling whites, and I ambled along without a care in the world. I had convinced myself that the route through Leamington Spa was simply a reversal of the route I had taken on the Centenary Way and only at the viaduct after Victoria Park would I have to consult my map to determine how to get onto the canal for the final stretch of the days walk. I moved through it without consulting the guidebook, on the comfortable assumption that I knew the Leamington route from previous experience on the Centenary Way.
I did not, in fact, know the Leamington route. I was wrong about this in a quiet, confident way that would cost me time. At the viaduct beyond Victoria Park I sat on a bench, pulled out the guidebook, and read that I needed to retrace my steps all the way back to Jephson Gardens to pick up the correct route to the canal. I sat with this information for a moment.
I had just walked rather a long way in the wrong direction through a series of very attractive parks.
Backtracking rather than backpacking ...
A woman with a border collie was practising frisbee acrobatics nearby — dog catching the disc mid-air with real elegance, both of them clearly experienced — and I watched for a few minutes while I worked out my options. A short cut across the park toward the canal seemed theoretically possible. But theoretical short cuts on this walk had a consistent track record, and I had already paid for one navigational assumption today. I went back the way I had come.
The return through the parks was less enjoyable at pace, the jolly crowds now more obstacle than company, the leaden feeling in the legs asserting itself after the best part of ten miles. I stood again before the gates of Jephson Gardens and followed the guidebook through a zigzag of commercial districts before the towpath of the Grand Union Canal appeared — familiar from earlier sections of the Millennium Way, reliable in the way that canals are: pointed in the right direction, two miles to the car. As I set off along the towpath a thought occurred to me with unpleasant timing: I had parked the car based on what I believed to be the correct route, and the correct route had already proved itself to be not quite what I thought. The car might not be where I was heading. I pushed this thought aside and walked.
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Final stretch of the Grand Union canal |
The towpath was quiet, a welcome contrast to the parks. Birdsong came back. A few moored narrowboats, apparently unoccupied. The architecture on either side described the gap between two towns in reliable sequence: shops, business parks, posh houses, old houses, fields, old houses, posh houses, business parks, shops.
On the Leamington side, newly built apartment blocks opened directly onto the towpath — courtyard gardens, block paving, wrought-iron lamp posts. The remnants of old factory wharfs appeared further on, their crumbling stonework carrying the memory of coal and iron delivered by water rather than road.
An old fellow came the other way.
"Sunny day for you," he observed as he passed.
He was, I realised, the first person I had actually spoken to since the barman in Cubbington. This is the specific texture of solo walking that no other kind of walking produces — the conversation you didn't have, noted only when someone breaks the silence.
Bridge 49. The canal walk over.
As I sat in my car drinking blood-temperature Lucozade Sport I kept an eye on the houses I had parked in front of. There had been a degree of curtain-twitching when I had pulled up in the morning and, even though I was legally entitled to park my car in this spot, I half expected an indignant resident to fling open a door or window to 'have a word'. However nobody stirred and I finished my drink unmolested.
Day three: done.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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