| The Millennium Way | |
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Rumination and procrastination ...
I sat on a bench in the leafy quiet of St. Laurence's churchyard, Meriden, and watched the morning sun work its way through the oaks and ash, slanting across the old headstones. It was mid-September. My target had been to complete the walk by the end of September. I was still barely halfway through, and the year was already showing its intentions — the first tinges of autumn on the leaves, a distinct nip in the early air, the particular quality of light that September produces when it is telling you something is changing.
Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans, as John Lennon observed, and he was right about long-distance walkers as much as about anyone else. Holidays, family gatherings, and a generous portion of indolence had carried me through August and deposited me here, on a bench in Meriden, with fifty miles still ahead and the calendar moving in the wrong direction. By the time I reached Pershore it would be deep autumn, winter pressing in behind it. Walking in autumn has its virtues — I know this, I believe this — but the ploughed fields and cloying mud of late October were not something I was anticipating with enthusiasm.
Revised target: complete the walk by the end of October.
The church bell struck nine. I stood up and sauntered down the lane.
Memorials in Middle England ...
High grassy meadows above the village, the rooftops of Meriden below me, Birmingham shimmering on the horizon as a faint tower-studded haze. A lady came the other way with a Jack Russell who took the view that I was trespassing on her personal countryside and communicated this without hesitation. I walked with them for a while and described the route I was taking. She had never heard of the Millennium Way, which by this point in the walk I had come to accept as the normal state of affairs. She winced sympathetically at the day's mileage, which was moderate by any standard I had previously applied to the word.
In the lower meadow a tattooed young man was scrolling his phone while a bulky Staffy nosed about in the long grass nearby. The dog became aware of me a moment before I became fully aware of the dog. It stiffened. It fixed me with the specific stare you do not want from a brindled slab of muscle with a powerful bite. I stopped and waited. The dog began to move. At the last moment its owner looked up, lunged, caught the collar. We exchanged curt nods — the man and I, not the dog — and I continued along the hedgerow with my walking pole shortened to whacking-stick length, listening to the Staffy's gargling displeasure on the other side of the hedge until a kissing gate delivered me into a field of black cattle, who regarded me with the satisfying indifference of animals that have no agenda.
Meriden's main road and then the village green — a large triangular swathe of neatly mown grass I had driven past many times over the years with the vague awareness that there was something here worth stopping for and the usual failure to stop. I knew about the cycling connection, had an impression of a centre-of-England claim, had always filed it under *nice place if you can afford it* alongside Kenilworth and Leamington Spa and driven on.
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The village green, Meriden |
The actual centre-of-England marker was at the far end of the green, partly obscured by low shrubs and flower beds, easy to miss from the road: a weathered spire of red stone, five hundred years old, its crown cross long since lost. A Grade II listed monument announcing Meriden's claim to geographic centrality, in quiet competition with several other claimants around the Midlands. I had driven past it for years without noticing it was there. It seemed a shame, given its age and its provenance, that it was so easily overlooked.
I followed the guide's directions out of the village along one of the main roads and had not gone far before the lady with the Jack Russell appeared again, coming toward me from the direction I was supposed to be heading. One of us had doubled back on ourselves and I had a feeling it wasn't her. We exchanged pleasantries and I continued along the road for a short spell, admiring the fine properties that passed by on either side. I was directed down a claustrophobic track between a wire fence and thick brambles where a German Shepherd lurking onseen on the fence side erupted furiously without warning, making me start violently and produce a word I would not normally deploy in an open field. The fence did not look substantial. I edged along with one eye on the dog and emerged onto a concrete farm drive to find myself looking at the field of black cattle I had already crossed that morning, with the ascending slope of turf beyond them that I had already climbed.
The Millennium Way, I eventually concluded, had constructed a deliberate loop to carry the walker through Meriden, past its monuments, and presumably into its shops. A fair intention. The village is worth the visit. A more direct line across the cow field would have saved fifteen minutes and a German Shepherd, but these are the terms on which the route operates, and Meriden is, after all, its northern apex. From here the walk turned south-west, leaving familiar ground for the less familiar territory of Worcestershire.
The silent land ...
Almost immediately south of Meriden the path found the perimeter of a large quarry — hidden beyond high embankments, announced by No Trespassing signs and warnings about deep and dangerous water in the flooded workings. The noise of the morning disappeared entirely. No traffic, no livestock, just gravel crunching under my boots and the looming fences of a quarry I had never known existed, despite living a few miles from it for most of my adult life.
Lafarge Tarmac, the aggregate and mortar operation hidden inside all this embankment, covers many acres of land just beyond my doorstep and had been entirely invisible to me until today. The gravel track became a metalled road, the quarry still unseen beyond its defences, the silence complete and slightly strange in quality — the particular absence of sound that a large industrial site produces when it is not working.
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A scarred landscape |
Further along, the embankments dropped away and the quarry revealed itself — a blasted, cratered landscape of dust and rock, enormous machines parked among the craters like dinosaurs at rest. It was not beautiful. It was, however, genuinely impressive in the way that large-scale industrial intervention in landscape is impressive, the sheer scale of it making the idea of restoration and replanting seem, from where I stood, extremely optimistic. And yet this is what happens: the machines move on, the craters fill, the grass returns. It just takes longer than one afternoon to believe in.
The views opened again beyond the quarry and I crossed fallow fields under an autumnal sun that had decided to make an effort. By the time I descended into a shallow grassy valley I was warm and the day had the specific quality of late-summer sunshine that is pleasant precisely because it will not last much longer.
Two women were picnicking in the valley. Their dogs — a young German Shepherd and something smaller of uncertain heritage — were chasing each other enthusiastically over the tussocky ground. The German Shepherd spotted me at the same moment her owners did. I could read the intention in her eyes from twenty yards.
"No Sheba!" one of the women called.
Sheba galloped across the valley, tongue out, eyes bright, and from one yard away launched herself and planted all four paws squarely on my chest.
*Oooff.*
Mission accomplished, she raced back to her owners, who were apologetic. I waved the apology away. It was enthusiastic and well-intentioned and a German Shepherd jumping on you with its whole heart is a different matter from a Staffy staring at you with professional assessment. Sheba had passed no judgment. She had simply arrived.
The accidental A Road ...
More fields, more hedgerows, the mental drift that long stretches of unchanged scenery produces in a solo walker. I was some distance into this drift when I found myself standing on the verge of the A452 Kenilworth Road — a dual carriageway I had no plan to be standing on — with the steady swish of fast traffic and the particular bleakness of unexpected road walking spread out ahead of me.
The GPS eventually explained what had happened. Somewhere in the fields I had drifted west instead of continuing south, missing the path alongside Sixteen Acre Wood and depositing myself on the A452 considerably further from Balsall Common than I needed to be. The options were to retrace and find the correct route through whichever combination of fields and gates had produced this outcome, or to walk the road to the point where the Millennium Way crossed it ahead.
I walked the road.
This required crossing the dual carriageway three times, the footpath mysteriously petering out on one side and resuming on the other in the manner of a route designed by someone with a dark sense of humour. The central reservation provided some cover. The experience was nonetheless strongly reminiscent of Frogger, the arcade game in which a frog attempts to cross a busy road and typically fails.
I was glad to reach the end of the game intact.
Canine capers (again) ...
Back on route before Balsall Common, I turned onto a quiet country lane between fields of cattle and horses and recognised it immediately — the Heart Of England Way, walked with Colin in the spring of 2013. A brief reunion, parting at the next gate as the Millennium Way struck left across a grassy valley.
At a metal kissing gate a scene presented itself: a shaggy pony being escorted between an elderly couple, each of them with arms slightly outstretched in the manner of people managing something that requires caution. A Jack Russell walked at a careful distance from the pony's hooves.
I assumed they were the pony's owners and waited for them to pass through the gate.
"Is he nervous?" I asked, meaning: *should I stand further back?*
The woman shook her head. "No, he's not ours. We were just walking through the field and he came up and started biting us."
"He's well known for it," the man confirmed. "Lonely, I think. Wants the attention."
The pony, as if to illustrate this theory, waited for the man's attention to be directed at the kissing gate mechanism and took a generous chomp on his shoulder. "OOOOW NO stop it that bloody HURTS!" The man flinched and waved his arms. The pony skittered back a few paces and regarded us all with yellowish eyes.
I assessed the situation.
"Right," I said. "How do I get past him without getting bitten?"
"Where are you heading?" the woman asked.
I told her.
"Oh, you're fine then. You go straight down the valley — you don't go into his field at all."
I said my goodbyes and set off down the valley, leaving the pony with the slightly deflated expression of an animal who had been looking forward to something and found the something had other plans.
The sweet corn field beyond the valley held a weather-beaten man and a younger companion who kept emerging from the dense green depths, peering back into the stalks, and plunging in again — searching for something with sustained, methodical intent. What they were looking for remained their business. I left them to it.
Stripped fields followed — harvest done, brown stalks in serried ranks, no livestock anywhere. Where do the cows go at this time of year? The question occurred to me somewhere in the middle of the largest field of the day, a vast open savannah of late-summer earth that took long enough to cross for the question to develop and then remain unanswered.
By the time I reached the far side I had shed a T-shirt and accumulated an impressive quantity of honest sweat.
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The village of Temple Balsall across fields |
*Whoof.*
The owner apologised at length. He really likes people. He wouldn't have done any real harm. I did the right thing standing still.
I nodded reassuringly and wished, privately, that I had done the right thing by getting my boot to it while it was in mid-flight. I walked on, making a mental note about cricket boxes and their potential role in future kit lists.
Temple Balsall appeared in the middle distance — picturesque against its backdrop of billowing trees, the kind of view that a painter would compose deliberately and which this part of Warwickshire produces without effort. I crossed one more large field, and in the middle of it a walker appeared coming the other way. The first I had seen all day. We closed the distance over perhaps a minute. I considered possible topics: the weather, the routes we were each walking, the day's canine statistics.
We met in the middle of the field.
"Ayup," he said.
"Aye," I replied.
We walked on.
Not far from the madding crowd ...
The lane beyond the field led to a road and the drive of the Black Boy Inn, — a familiar landmark whose appearance confirmed the mileage covered and suggested a cold pint was in order. The Black Boy has a good reputation: generous food, reasonable prices, canal-side position. On a warm Sunday afternoon it was, as it reliably is, packed to capacity. Smartly dressed people in the bar, the queue long, the collective fragrance of a hundred colognes. My walking attire and its associated aromas were not suited to this company. I left the drive and found the canal towpath instead.
The ideal lunch spot required some searching. A narrowboat full of people doing noisy Sunday lunch in the sunshine was too sociable. A barge behind whose portholes a shadowy figure moved in apparent silence was too mysterious. I eventually found a grassy embankment beyond an old brick bridge and flopped onto it with the gratitude of someone whose legs have been going since nine o'clock.
The Grand Union moved past in its soupy brown way, carrying fallen leaves. A gentle breeze stirred the opposite bank. White clouds built and dissolved overhead.
I ate lunch, lay back, and discovered I had a headache. I opened my medical kit and found that I had not packed paracetamol, which was consistent with previous practice. I made a brief call home and then lay back again.
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The avenue of trees at Packwood House |
I rose stiffly from the towpath, passed the fishermen with a wave, and left the Grand Union at the next bridge.
The paddock and horse-jump section that followed was extensive and deserted — expensive horsebox outfits parked along the track, sand training areas behind neat fences, all of it conspicuously unoccupied. Umpteenth stile, and my knee joined the headache in registering formal dissatisfaction. I added paracetamol to the permanent kit list and climbed the final stile onto Rising Lane at Kingswood.
Familiar ground again — this lane was part of a circular route I had walked many times over the years. Past the Edwardian terraces, over the railway bridge, and down the drive to the cluster of cottages where, years ago, my wife and I had spent a hot afternoon eddying fruitlessly around the perimeter looking for the footpath to Packwood House, bickering with the gentle persistence of people who are both lost and too warm. We had tried every available path. We had found none of the right ones. Today, armed with experience and foreknowledge, I walked directly to the correct route and followed it without hesitation up a hedged field to the main road.
Here I stopped for a little video shoot, gurgling the last of my water and realising with some surprise that I had made very good time today and the walk was almost done. It had been a warm day for sure, but nothing like the baking, humid day that had sapped my strength on the Kenilworth section and as such I had covered much the same mileage today but with far less effort.
The green eaves of Packwood ...
Just a few hundred yards along the road I turned left onto the grounds of Packwood House, a National Trust property of Elizabethan vintage, approached along a straight avenue of old trees that I suspect was once the main carriage drive to the house. The trees have grown close together over the centuries and the avenue has narrowed to a footpath — carriages no longer possible, but the approach still carries the gravity of something designed to build anticipation as you walk.
I came along it with a scattering of families and couples, all moving in the same direction, the great chimney stacks of the house emerging above the treetops as we closed the distance. The old red brick of the buildings glowed in the late afternoon sun. The rooflines were uneven and characterful in the way of buildings that have been added to and modified across centuries without any one hand making all the decisions.
The house and its famous topiary yews were open, and I had intended to pay the entrance fee and film the gardens. The fair weather had brought people in numbers that made the idea of joining a crowd, after a full day's walking, feel like one obligation too many. I reached my car instead, drank a warm sports drink in one long grateful pull, and registered the arithmetic.
Five sections completed. Three remaining.
Whether three remaining could be managed before the end of October was a question that the calendar was going to answer in its own time. For now the day was done, the legs had carried their quota, and the walk was still in progress.
That was enough
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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Did you ever finish your Millennium Way walks? I've walked all of the 'East side' (from Middleton Cheney to Meriden), and was looking forward to reading your thoughts on the Western section.
ReplyDeleteIf you are looking for another Midlands walk, I've enjoyed all of the Jurassic Way sections that I've walked, so perhaps you could tackle that one for me next!
Hello there. I had to take a break from the Millennium Way during the winter but I'm going to complete the final three stages starting next month, so keep an eye out for the reports. The Jurassic way is certainly one that I've considered, but I've opted to tackle the Geopark Way (Shropshire to Gloucestershire) after completing the Millennium Way.
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