| The Millennium Way | |
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One Christmas, One Easter, and one summer holiday later ….
Almost a year since the last section, and here I was again, standing before Packwood House under a bright August morning and wondering where the time had gone. There was the winter hiatus, of course. And then in spring I had decided to dig a large hole in the garden and fill it with water — a project that consumed more of the calendar than anticipated. Family things, commitments, a holiday in Devon, and a quantity of laziness that I would rather not specify precisely. Mid-August 2015. Early summer already a memory. Autumn shuffling its feet in the wings. And not one single mile added to the Millennium Way since the previous autumn. I had started to feel genuinely guilty about this — not guilty enough, apparently, to do anything about it until now, but guilty nonetheless. I had mentioned, at some point, an intention to finish the walk by the end of the year, though I had been careful not to specify which year, which in retrospect was prudent. I had shoe-horned this Sunday in between holidays and household maintenance tasks that remained, as ever, on the list, and here I was: over-rested, under-prepared, and ready for stage six.
A big house, a small church, and a silent car ...
I stood before the wrought iron gates of Packwood House which looked very fine in the early morning light — ancient brickwork glowing orange and russet, uneven rooflines against a cloudless blue, the lawns still sparkly with dew. Two National trust volunteers were doing battle with a gazebo in the car park. I walked up and down in front of the main house, with the camera and a pleasant hour slipped by.
The house was built in the sixteenth century and its interior extensively reimagined between the wars by Graham Baron Ash — a man who accumulated salvaged objects and exotic pieces into what one visitor in the 1920s described as *a house to dream of, a garden to dream in.* It contains a fine collection of Tudor textiles and furniture, and gardens with renowned herbaceous borders and a famous stand of topiary yews. It also carries the longer history of its rivalry with Baddesley Clinton — the Protestant family of Packwood against the Catholic family of Baddesley Clinton, a game of influence and survival whose rules were set by monarchy and whose consequences I described in the Heart of England Way journal. Packwood won. They were on the right side of the Reformation, which in Tudor England was the only side worth being on.
I gave the house a final backward glance, shouldered the rucksack, and set off along the lane.
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St. Giles church, Packwood |
This was the third walking pole I had lost on my Midland meanderings. The first disappeared under brambles in Meriden Shafts Wood. The second was propped against a wall in a field in Northamptonshire, last seen and never retrieved. This third one, there being no way of disposing of it ecologically, was laid to rest in a roadside ditch beside the lane at Packwood.
I am now responsible for three walking poles quietly degrading in various corners of the English countryside. It is becoming an unwelcome theme.
St. Gile's church came next — eight hundred years old and sharing a name with the church where I was married in Birmingham, along with around one hundred and fifty others scattered across England. St. Giles himself was a Greek Christian hermit saint from Athens, based in Provence and Septimania. His tomb in the abbey Giles in Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, became a place of pilgrimage and a stop on the road that led from Arles to Santiago de Compostela. He is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers and was a busy patron, covering among his responsibilities: beggars, blacksmiths, breast cancer, breastfeeding, Edinburgh, epilepsy, forests, hermits, horses, lepers, mental illness, noctiphobics, outcasts, poor people, rams, spur makers, and sterility.
Something for everyone.
A small congregation was filing out of morning service as I photographed the church and grounds. They were a friendly group, several *good mornings* offered as they passed. One asked if I had walked far.
"Not yet," I replied feelingly, thinking of all the miles ahead.
I was composing further thoughts on this subject as I walked down the church's gravel drive when a polite *excuse me* came from behind me. An electric car had rolled up without my hearing it — no engine noise, just the faint whisper of its motor once I was already stepping aside. It glided past and disappeared. I had noticed, for the first time, electric charging points at a motorway services on my way back from Devon and had wondered how common they might become. On reflection I think electric vehicles will eventually require some form of artificial sound — a tone, a hum, something — otherwise mowing people down in church car parks will become as stealthy and effective as a ninja assassination.
In the Lapworth of luxury ...
Packwood merged into Hockley Heath and I followed the village's cottages to its high street, where a business offered itself as a *cleaner of fine clothes*. I spent some time imagining the proprietor turning customers away on the grounds that their garments weren't quite fine enough for the establishment.
*What’s this – a parka? Try the next village. They have a Sketchleys.*
The Wharf Inn provided an exit from the village via its beer garden, and then the Stratford-upon-Avon canal — the same waterway I had walked with Colin on the Heart of England Way, a pleasant twenty-five-mile cut that arrived too late to compete commercially with the railways and has since reinvented itself as exactly the sort of place you want to spend a slow morning.
On the embankment I paused to consult my notes and was immediately addressed by a tweedy woman of a certain age with a small dog. She wanted to know if I needed help. I said I was fairly confident of the way ahead, which she received as though I had said something provisional. She demanded my destination. When I said Henley-in-Arden she pointed firmly in the direction I was already intending to walk and confirmed that this was correct. From this location Henley was reachable from practically every point of the compass, but I thanked her. She nodded with the brisk satisfaction of a school mistress who has set a pupil right and moved on.
The canal was peaceful — a duck here, a rolling fish there, the still brown water undisturbed between the trees. Eventually the moored narrowboats appeared: *Classy Lassie*, *Montana*, *Sea Jay*. Their occupants were audible rather than visible, moving behind portholes, conducting the quiet domestic business of people who have chosen to live at four miles an hour.
I left the canal over a bouncy drawbridge and crossed grassy meadows until the spire of St. Mary the Virgin appeared above a green hill. The climb to its lychgate was the first proper test of the day and left me breathless in a way that confirmed the year's interruption had not done my fitness any favours.
Lapworth itself was glimpsed rather than visited — the Millennium Way barely grazed its edge. I walked a lane alongside the churchyard wall, its old brick topped with ancient headstones. The wall was perhaps six feet tall, which meant the occupants of the graves were resting more or less at road level. Traffic rumbled past doing its best to wake the dead.
Beyond the church the route descended a long block-paved estate driveway of considerable investment — smooth, level, flanked by neatly mown pastures and large greenhouses. Through a gap in the hedgerow to the right: a brightly painted gypsy caravan, and further along, a converted windmill standing as someone's main residence. This was either Lapworth Grange or Green Acres and had average property values approaching a million pounds. I could probably not afford the raised vegetable beds. It was most pleasant to walk through.
The sound of shotgun's cracked and echoed as I progressed, along with the unmistakable surf-like roar of a motorway. Luckily for me I met the motorway first, the M40 to be exact, and I crossed over the rushing traffic via a bridge and ascended a steep flight of wooden steps to find myself amidst sheep grazing the grass of a large pasture, exhibiting no concern whatsoever for the gunfire, the motorway noise, or my sudden appearance.
Bothered by Bullocks ...
Beyond the sheep I negotiated a scrubby field of knee-high thistles and the clumpy tussocky grass that specialises in turning ankles. I emerged from it with lower legs stinging and consulted the guide sheet at a tiny lane beside a shallow brook. A group of ducks waddled away from me with practised indignation, quacking their displeasure as they left.
The guide sheet warned of route changes in italics. I had not italicised the changes when copying the directions. I was therefore about to discover them as they happened, which is a novel approach to navigation even on the best of days. This wasn’t the best of days.
I dithered about aimlessly for quite a while: a few wild fields, a narrow lane, one field too many, before relocating the right path and learning that I had overshot the hedge that the guidebook described as hosting *the most delicious blackberries in August*. I noted this loss with genuine disappointment. The lane continued, quiet and dappled, and I filmed a walk-to-camera piece in the dell as consolation.
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The Stratford-upon-Avon Canal |
The wheat fields were fine. The views were fine. Then a gate opened onto a field full of young cattle — heifers or bullocks, I did not investigate closely — who spotted me from the far end and surged forward with the wholehearted enthusiasm of animals for whom a stranger at the gate represents the most interesting thing that has happened all week. The entire herd clustered at the stile, jostling each other, peering at me, skittering sideways when I made any movement.
"Go away," I said.
Twenty blank faces looked back.
The GPS showed a second farm drive a short backtrack away, leading to a lane and then a bridleway rejoining the route. I weighed this against the prospect of climbing into the middle of that crowd.
"Sorry fans but Elvis is leaving the building. Bye-bye," I told my disappointed audience, and turned back.
Falling apart at the seam ...
The alternative farm drive ended at a metalled lane. My infallible sense of direction suggested turning left. The lane narrowed between high hedges and began to feel less like a public road and more like someone's private approach. A car rolled up behind me, the driver giving me the specific look of a man who suspects something. I continued around a bend to find a very fine house in flowery gardens. The drive swept past it and disappeared around a further corner in a way that implied a road beyond. I continued past the house with the feeling of being watched, turned the corner, and found a compost heap.
Behind the compost heap: well-stocked greenhouses. Nearby: raised beds with carefully netted vegetables in neat rows.
I was trespassing. I turned around and walked back past the front of the house, this time with the certainty of being watched — the man from the car stood at a window, tracking my progress. I was grateful to reach the bend and pass out of his line of sight.
Right, then left, then the bridleway. Simple, in retrospect.
Back on route at Buckley Green, I encountered two women walkers, the first fellow hikers I has seen all day and they cheerfully informed me that there was a good climb just ahead. Sure enough I approached a meadow which sloped upwards for around 100 meters at its further side. There were curious blemishes stretching across this slope, resembling large molehills but arranged in neat rows. Intrigued by these grassy lumps I clambered over the stile into the meadow and heard a sharp rrriip followed by a sudden and cooling gust of a breeze in a region that shouldn’t be receiving it. My trousers had ripped apart just below the zipper. I couldn’t believe it, first my walking pole and now my favourite pair of walking strides;
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Wheatfields at Irelands Farm |
Feeling slightly grumpy but, as a practical matter, well-ventilated, I climbed the slope. The curious blemishes across it turned out to be the stumps of a previous plantation, grassed over but still visible as rows of gentle mounds.
At the top I found a bench at a ridge viewpoint. I was aware that anyone ascending below me would have a direct sightline to the damage so I declined horizontally across the bench in the manner of someone taking their leisure, deployed a large Cornish pasty for cover, and ate lunch in what I hoped was a posture suggesting contentment rather than concealment.
The ridge opened into familiar ground — the Heart of England Way path I had walked with Colin two years before. To the west the low mound of Bannam's Wood marked the day's end. Still a good hour distant, but known and locatable, which at this point in the day was its own kind of comfort.
(nearly) A Field Of Dreams ...
The grassy hummocks of a motte and bailey castle — reduced to gentle undulations in the turf, anonymous to any eye that didn't know to look — accompanied me along the ridge. On the descents my toes were registering complaints against the front of the boots, which was new and unwelcome. Four years old, those boots. I added them to the mental account of write-offs, alongside the pole and the trousers.
Beaudesert Lane brought me into Henley-in-Arden between two large and ancient churches — St. Nicholas and St. John the Baptist, once belonging to separate parishes, now amalgamated, their proximity still slightly incongruous. On a busy Sunday morning the competing organs would have been something to hear.
Henley-in-Arden is famous for two things: ice cream, and the private lunatic asylums of the Victorian period. The latter no longer operate. The ice cream establishments, on this particular Sunday, appeared to have closed for the weekend. The high street was quiet — a few sightseers moving between the old buildings, searching for a scoop and finding the shutters up. I waved the camera at the architecture, grumbled about the ice cream situation, and found the side alley leading up between old walls to the railway station, deserted in the summer holiday quiet, and then out into the fields beyond.
Several fields of varying sizes — recalled from the Heart Of England Way — and then the point where, on that previous walk, a small brown mongrel had adopted Colin and me with the implacable persistence of a dog that has made an irrevocable decision. She had followed us across several meadows before the stile through the arched hedge marked the limit of her territory, and she had watched us go with the expression of an animal exercising restraint. The arched hedge was still there. I climbed the stile with knees that registered with a muted complaint, and continued. Bannam's Wood grew closer with each field, though at the slow rate that things grow closer when you are tired and the ground is uneven. Rickety stiles replaced the kissing gates of the morning's walking, and each one cost something. By the time I reached the long sloping cornfield at the wood's foot I was, in the most honest available assessment, knackered.
The ochre corn swayed and hissed in the warm air, a sound like a barely audible ocean. I thought about how pleasant it would be to lie down for a moment among the stalks and watch the clouds. Just for a minute. A brief horizontal interlude before the final climb.
I woke up.
Not in the corn, mercifully — I had found a grassy margin at the field's edge — but the lethargy in my limbs as I came back to consciousness was enough to confirm I had actually slept rather than merely rested. A minute, possibly two. Easily an hour, had I not woken. Farm machinery was not nearby, but the principle held. I got to my feet, climbed the slope, and at the top turned to look back east across all the fields I had crossed: Henley's church towers in the middle distance, and somewhere beyond them, in Northamptonshire, Middleton Cheney, where this walk had begun.
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Looking back eastwards from the edge of Bannams Wood |
It looked, and felt, like a very long way.
I turned and walked into Bannam's Wood.
The eastern edge of the wood was accessed through a creaky iron gate and an immediate thicket of brambles and nettles, considerably more overgrown than on my previous visit in early spring when growth was still tentative. Branches snatched at my cap. Thorns investigated the torn trousers with interest. The path widened eventually and the brambles retreated, the trees growing smaller and sparser, the woodland opening to cool green depths in all directions.
I was alone in it, as I had been alone for most of the day. The silence was the specific silence of old woodland — dense and attentive, the kind that makes a snapped twig underfoot sound disproportionate. Somewhere in the canopy a Jay was producing its mad, rattling cackle, the only voice in the place, not especially melodious but at least company of a kind.
Bannam's Wood has been here, continuously, since at least the sixteenth century. Ancient woodland, in the technical designation — a place that was already old when most of what surrounded it was still being shaped by human hands. Walking through it alone in the late afternoon, I found it both peaceful and faintly watchful, in the way that very old places sometimes are.
The bench at the western viewpoint — the one dedicated to the memory of a woman who had loved this wood, its words both sad and uplifting — was somewhere to my left, behind thickets that Mother Nature had been cultivating diligently in my absence. I knew it was there. It was late, my legs were done, and forcing through the undergrowth to find it felt like more than the day had left to give. Another time.
The track met a forestry road, descended through the trees, and delivered me through a wooden gate onto the far side of the wood. A short road section and then the car: boots off, Lucozade Sport retrieved from the back seat, two wasps who made a bid for it and lost.
Twenty-eight miles remaining. Two sections left, whenever the calendar allows.
The final day ends at Pershore, along the River Severn, at the abbey.
I am looking forward to it.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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