| The Millennium Way | |
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A man outstanding in his field …..
Starting a day's walking by taking an immediate wrong turn sets a certain tone, and I achieved this within the first five minutes. The directions told me to walk along Frog Lane at Upper Boddington, which I did — down through the small cluster of cottages along the main road — only to discover that Frog Lane forms a crescent, and it was the other end I should have taken. Ten minutes of my life, and a climb back up the hill, were expended before I had properly started.
As I turned away from the village a group of Lycra-clad cyclists swept through at considerable speed, riding two and three abreast with the cheerful disregard for oncoming traffic of people who have decided that their morning matters more than yours. Their leader was a florid, heavily built man with an unusually loud and carrying voice, addressing the rider behind him in the register of a politician with a megaphone. The monologue continued well after they had disappeared around a bend, the booming of it receding into the distance like the last echo of an over-emoting actor. I was glad not to be part of that group. Five miles of that at volume eleven and the hedgerows would be receiving him, complete with bike and a well timed kick.
A kissing gate led to a narrow footpath, heavily shaded by tangled hedgerows and, following recent rain, ankle-deep in mud. I had left my gaiters at home, which was a decision I was already regretting. When the path opened into more generous ground I stopped to record a video — mindful of my commitment to project a sunnier disposition than had been evident on Day One — and managed to discuss the mud and the likelihood of further rain without grumbling. It was an effort dear reader. I note it for the record.
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Looking back towards Upper Boddington |
"Are you alright?" she asked, with a trace of concern.
I confirmed that I was, and she moved on. I reflected, not for the first time, that a man standing completely motionless and alone in a field with a guidebook tends to generate a particular quality of attention from passers-by. The concern deepened somewhat over the next few fields, as I appeared to be following her — passing her on the second field, drawing her beagles away with me on the third. We parted at a stile to our mutual, if unspoken, relief.
I am not entirely sure what most farmers grow in their fields. Rapeseed is identifiable because it is yellow and makes me sneeze. Everything else is, broadly, Stuff: tall Stuff, short Stuff, green Stuff, brown Stuff. I crossed a field of lush tender-green Stuff and then a field of tall slender Stuff that I decided was probably barley, and reached a metal gate where, finding myself alone, I decided to film a walk-to-camera shot. I attached the camera carefully to the gate, lined up the angle, and was about to set off across the field when a gate creaked beyond a nearby hedgerow and a jogger appeared around the corner as if from nowhere.
He was tanned, lean, and sinewy, dressed in small blue shorts and running shoes and carrying a limp t-shirt in one hand. A faint sheen of effort covered him. "Warmer than I thought," he confided pleasantly, and loped off across the field.
I waited for his half-naked form to disappear before resetting the camera. My concentration, however, had departed with him, and the resulting footage shows me striding toward the lens with considerable purpose while a clump of cow parsley takes centre stage and eclipses me entirely.
Landmarks and diversions ...
A tower had been visible to the east since mid-morning, appearing through breaks in the trees or above an open field at intervals — too substantial for a radio mast, too unusual for an industrial chimney. Concrete rather than steel, four hundred feet or thereabouts (I correctly estimated), tapering slightly toward the top. I had no explanation for it while I walked. Research at home later identified it as the National Lift Tower — formerly the Express Lift Tower, known locally as the Northampton Lighthouse — a lift-testing facility built in 1978, opened by the Queen in 1982, and at four hundred and eighteen feet the only lift-testing tower in Britain and one of only two in Europe. It fell out of use in the late 1990s, was revived as a testing facility in 1999, and now doubles as a platform for people who enjoy abseiling off very tall buildings, which is a use I had not anticipated. It has already been awarded Grade II listed building status, making it the youngest listed building in the country. None of this I knew at the time. I just found it interesting to look at.
With the tower marking the eastern horizon and the landscape rolling west in the other direction, I walked a pleasant stretch of high ground and let my thoughts wander with the kind of undirected freedom that solo walking produces at its best. The mild disadvantage of this state is that it can carry you some distance past a turning without any internal alarm being raised. I became aware that the village of Priors Hardwick was not where the guidebook implied it should be, and that the directions no longer corresponded to what was in front of me. A short investigation established that the Millennium Way had turned east, toward the tower, while I had continued south into the village.
As it turned out, I didn’t mind. Priors Hardwick turned out to be a place worth the detour — a succession of fine properties, each more impressive than the last, culminating in the Old Rectory: a building of mansion-like proportions set behind sweeping drive and iron gates, the kind of house that one admires while privately working out what the heating bill might be. I emerged at a crossroads, turned left along a lane, and rejoined the Millennium Way at a stile into a large meadow.
The booming voice found me there.
The cyclists from Upper Boddington were hurtling along the lane behind me — their leader still in full conversational flight, still at volume eleven, his fellow riders still inserting the occasional *right I see* and *oh yes?* into the gaps. They disappeared around a bend with the purposeful momentum of migrating geese, and the morning settled back into quiet.
I was crossing the next large field — commenting to the camera on the humidity of the day despite a fresh breeze, and noting with some satisfaction the absence of cows all morning — when I reached the gate at the far end.
There were cows. A large herd of them, with calves, two-thirds of the way across a very large field. A sign on the gate advised caution, which I noted and climbed over, working out the best approach. Within twenty paces the herd took fright and thundered to the exact corner of the field where my exit stile lay. I walked toward them slowly, hoping they would redistribute themselves. They tossed their heads. They pawed the ground. Thirty yards away, with a lot of open field behind me, I raised my arms and walked backwards, as advised by articles dedicated to the avoidance of bovine murder.
The map showed a track down an adjacent field leading to a farm drive and a road. I took it, willingly, only to discover there was no track — just waist-high grass with roots that grabbed at the ankles. The farm, when I reached it, offered not a stile but a low stone wall and a metal gate opening directly into the farmhouse yard. I climbed the gate, crossed the yard with the forced nonchalance of someone who knows he is not trespassing but nonetheless feels like a trespasser , found my way through to the farm drive, and followed it out — past a shooting school that appeared on no map and explained the intermittent loud bangs I had been hearing — where a young man in tweeds with a broken shotgun across his forearm kindly pointed me toward a gap in the hedge and the public footpath beyond.
Which led me back into the field with the cows.
They had at least moved. I crossed quickly along the lower edge, one eye on the herd on the skyline, and pushed through two more pastures at a pace that gave me a stitch mid-field. I stopped, breathing carefully, a sitting duck — and tried not to think too hard about the shooting school's proximity.
Bridleways and Barges ...
With quiet relief I finally escaped the endless dung-strewn pastures and made my way into the hamlet of Priors Marston which felt like a small reward: a cluster of cottages, a crossroads, a granite war memorial listing the names of men who had left the village for a war overseas and not come back. A bench nearby offered rest. I sat with the birdsong coming from every direction and noted it on camera and was, for a few minutes, entirely content.
My stomach was growling but it was too early for lunch, so I shouldered the pack and followed the path through a gap between modern houses and a cul-de-sac of lock-up garages. From the rear of a nearby property a domestic disagreement was underway, its details unclear from a distance, becoming clearer as I crossed a horse paddock behind the back gardens.
"I'm not SCUM!" announced a man's voice, with considerable conviction.
I walked on, leaving the unresolved conflict behind.
A bridleway opened ahead, running through an avenue of silver birch and cow parsley. I have always thought well of bridleways — they are the motorways of rural walking: direct, uncluttered, free of the broken stiles and illegal barriers that characterise the lesser paths. I set off along this one with pleasant anticipation.
Horses use bridleways. Horses with large iron-shod hooves that churn the ground before the rain soaks in. The surface beneath me became porridgy and then openly, comprehensively muddy. I edged along the margins of the track with my walking pole testing each step, making slow progress. The mud gradually adorned my cream trousers to knee height.
Halfway along, through a gap in the birches on the left, a still pond appeared — lined with rushes, entirely secluded, with the specific quality of a place that has not been looked at for a long time and is entirely comfortable with that. Two swans posed on the far bank with the composed self-possession of birds who know exactly what they add to a scene. It was a hushed and beautiful little tableau. I filmed it and said nothing on the video, which was the right decision.
By the time I reached the end of the bridleway my trousers, much to my mortification, had achieved a condition that would have been difficult to explain even to a sewage worker.
Grassy meadows tumbled downhill before me, and Napton Hill rose in the middle distance, its village scattered across its flanks in the untidy, organic way of settlements that predate careful civic planning. A road between fields of black-horned cattle that put me in mind of Spanish fighting bulls. I was not a matador and I was content with the hedge between us.
Napton-On-The-Hill takes its name from the Old English for hilltop settlement — *cnaepp* and *tun* — and was already notable enough to earn a Domesday entry. In the Middle Ages it grew into one of Warwickshire's larger settlements on the strength of its status as a chartered market town, and later enjoyed a second life as a canal trading post. Both periods have faded into history, and the village now poses pleasantly atop its five-hundred-foot hill with an old windmill visible on the skyline for miles around. Ed Bishop — the naturalised American actor best known for playing Commander Straker in the 1970s television series
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A boggy bridleway after Priors Marston |
Other than Napton Hill there was little else of interest along the road apart from a tiny barn conversion, not much larger than a static caravan, where a woman of mature years pottered about in her garden, flanked on all sides by the green expanse of the cow pastures. The tiny building bore the numbers 1891 on one side, built into the brickwork, dating the building if not its tenant. There was also a ramshackle farm towards the end of the road, an untidy place of collapsed roofs and outbuildings overstuffed with carelessly stacked junk. Its forecourt was more like a scrapyard, hosting a larger than usual collection of rusting farm machinery which looked as if it hadn’t moved in years. Once again I was struck with the casual disregard farmers seem to have for their equipment; there must have been a small fortune invested in the rusting hulks sitting in that yard - surely it had some sort of scrap value?
The road ended at the hamlet of Chapel Green, a place I was in and out of in less time than it took to say it, and from there it was a traverse across a hummocky sheep pasture to gain the first canal of the walk. I could make out the line of the canal ahead of me as a number of canal barges were moored up and I could hear the occupants nattering to each other. The canal tow-path ran parallel to the meadow but at a greater height so that the barges appeared to sit on the crest of the field which made the whole scene a little surreal, an effect enhanced by the twisted remains of an electricity pylon I walked past, which put me in mind of a downed Martian tripod from Well's War Of The Worlds.
Lunch came at an old brick bridge on the canal tow-path where I adopted my brother's practice of baring my feet to the air — not a pleasure for passers-by but thoroughly restorative for the wearer. My socks were considerably wetter than expected, the boots having absorbed rather more mud and dew than they should have, which was a sign that after a few hundred miles of service they were beginning to lose their weather resistance. Spare dry socks, retrieved from the pack, solved the immediate problem and improved the afternoon considerably.
On the Oxford Canal ...
I had not gone far on the second half before the Folly Inn, appeared — a solid Georgian building behind a lawn beside the canal. My trousers were caked with dried mud and I had mild reservations about entering a public house in this condition. Then I thought about the cider and went in.
I cracked my head on the low lintel as I walked through the door and swore, loudly, in front of the small lunchtime bar. With the top of my head gently throbbing I took my drink outside to sit by the water and watch the barges drift by. A woman on a moored barge surfaced at intervals to berate a small child who, from what I could observe, was doing nothing wrong. I was moved to note my disapproval via a tweet.
The canal, I discovered when I got home, was the
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The Oxford Canal |
Back on the towpath the afternoon settled into a pleasant rhythm. I passed barges whose names offered brief portraits of their owners and purposes:
*Narrow Escape.*
*Country Wines* — a floating wine merchant, apparently.
*So Wye Not?*
And painted, wistfully, in crude whitewash on one shabby hull: *One Day.*
I filmed the *So Wye Not?* as it puttered toward me — a senior couple and a boy I took to be their grandson. They looked faintly self-conscious as I pointed the camera at them but smiled awkwardly, and I waved back. The awkwardness then continued for rather longer than any of us would have preferred, as my walking pace proved to be almost exactly equal to their cruising speed. For a considerable stretch of canal I moved along a yard from their gunwale, privy to their conversation and attempting to look as though I was attending to something else entirely. I stopped for a minute to let them pull ahead. At the very next bend they slowed, and I drew alongside again. We maintained this uncomfortable proximity until I finally left the canal at another pub.
A canal by any other name ...
The Napton Bridge Inn was closed. Probably fortunate, given the cider already in play. I crossed a busy road and set off through sheep pastures and more fields of Stuff, the sun finally committing to the afternoon and making the air warm and close. By the time I reached the farm at the far end I had stripped to the fleece, open and unzipped, deploying the ventilation strategy developed on Day One and confirmed, on this occasion, to be safe from public view.
Stockton came and went — church and pub facing each other across a village green, the streets quiet in the manner of all the villages I had passed through that day.
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Long Itchington |
A muddy woodland track followed. I came across a man with a lawnmower under the eaves of a small spinney. He was mowing the ground underneath the young trees although as far as I could make out it was devoid of grass, or in fact any kind of vegetation. I was too busy trying not to fall on my backside to ponder on this over-much. The woodland brought me, eventually and messily, to the tow-path of another canal. I was not aware at the time that it was a different canal — the Grand Union as it turned out, the Oxford Canal's great rival and the instrument of its commercial destruction. One hundred and thirty-seven miles from London to Birmingham, completed in its current form in 1929 following the amalgamation of several smaller waterways, it managed to turn a profit through the 1930s before the post-war decline that eventually overtook all British canals, and has since enjoyed the same revival that canal enthusiasts have brought to so many of these waterways across the country. I joined it opposite the Blue Lias Inn — Blue Lias stone being a type of rock formation that runs diagonally across England from Dorset to the Yorkshire coast, a deep seam of which passes through the Midlands and has supplied the raw material for a significant proportion of the nation's cement production. It is a name that raises questions and then answers them rather prosaically. A trendy canalside pub a short distance along had people in clean clothes sitting outside with cold beers, casting judgemental glances at my soiled condition as I walked by. I passed them with the aloof confidence of someone who has earned his mud and knows it. One last meadow, and then Long Itchington and the end of the day. A village of over two thousand people — large by the standards of the afternoon — named after the River Itchen that runs to its south and west, with a scattering of ancient buildings among the modern housing: the half-timbered Tudor House on the main road was worth stopping for. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have stayed here on a couple of occasions, and St Wulfstan, an eleventh-century Bishop of Worcester, is claimed as a local son, though history maintains these associations with a certain looseness of conviction. I had parked the car somewhere along the high street that morning, choosing a spot in the brief reconnaissance that always precedes the day's walk. I remembered the street but not precisely where on it I had stopped. I turned left out of the churchyard and walked for ten minutes before conceding.
My car was ten yards to the right of the church.
Day two: done.
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