| The Warwickshire Centenary Way | |
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Prerambling ....
I got up and peered out of the bedroom window with very little optimism. It wasn't raining, which felt less like a promise than a technicality — the sky had that heavy, settled look of something merely gathering its thoughts. Sure enough, as I stepped out and headed for Dave's house, the rain began. Not as a polite drizzle or a tentative overture, but with immediate conviction, as though it had been lurking behind the door and was annoyed at having been kept waiting.
This was, of course, the first day of a carefully planned eight-stage walk across the Midlands: roughly one hundred miles of countryside, canals, modest hills, and a generous scattering of history.
The Centenary Way, was devised to mark one hundred years of Warwickshire County Council, looping in a broad arc around Coventry before dipping south toward the Cotswolds. Quite who had been in charge of Warwickshire for the preceding thirteen centuries was less clear, though I suspected the answer would not be revealed by trudging damply across its fields. Warwickshire had once been my home county, before administrative boundaries shifted and I was quietly annexed by the West Midlands — an administrative decision I had never entirely forgiven. This, I decided, was reason enough to walk it end to end.
Today, on this inaugural stage, it also had appalling weather.
Kingsbury Watery Park ....
My companion for the day was my old friend and frequent walking partner Dave Somen — known to the online world as @Lenscap — who greeted the conditions with the stoic resignation usually reserved for dental work but was still willing to set forth. We set off in convoy, Dave leading with the authority of a man in possession of sat-nav, and promptly conducted an exploratory tour of Chelmsley Wood and Kingshurst before returning, with quiet inevitability, to his own front door.
Walking boots, it transpired, are not optional.
This small delay proved oddly beneficial. By the time we had dropped Dave's car at Hartshill Hayes Country Park and reached Kingsbury Water Park the rain had eased itself into a brief pause. We seized the moment, togged up, and set off with the faint hope that the worst might have passed.
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Dave at Kingsbury Water Park |
The route wandered, somewhat indulgently, around the lakes of Kingsbury Water Park — an area I know well from years of dog-walking in all seasons and moods. It is, in fairness, a fine place: a patchwork of lakes formed from old gravel pits, now softened by trees and time into something altogether more agreeable. Three decades of nature's influence have turned it into a proper haven, and in summer it teems with anglers, sailors, families, and the sort of cheerful chaos that suggests leisure is being taken very seriously indeed.
On this particular Wednesday morning, it was empty.
The lakes lay flat and grey under the low sky, their edges blurred by rain. Even the most committed fishermen had evidently drawn a line somewhere, and today that line appeared to be the front door.
We threaded our way through this subdued landscape and slipped out to follow the River Tame which moved along with deceptive calm. I have seen it in less accommodating moods — swollen and spreading until the entire park becomes an extension of itself — but today it behaved impeccably, as if keen to demonstrate that not everything in Warwickshire was intent on drowning us.
Whitacre Heath - twice ....
Leaving the river behind, we struck out across open meadows, the grass slick underfoot, conversation drifting comfortably between the trivial and the profound. We were corralled into a narrow track fenced off from the large but unseen Lea Marston reservoir, and when we emerged onto the Birmingham Road, we found that the rain had eased off — sufficiently, at least, to prompt the optimistic removal of waterproofs.
Two hundred yards later we were putting them back on again.
The first of the day's villages, Whitacre Heath, hove into view. — the youngest of the three local Whitacres, Victorian in origin, and sharing its corner of the map with Nether Whitacre and Over Whitacre, as though the parish council had once run out of ideas and simply started adding prepositions.
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The River Tame |
Something was obviously amiss.
Closer inspection revealed the problem: the guidebook contained both northbound and southbound directions on the same page, distinguished only by discreet little letters that I had entirely failed to notice. We had followed one set of instructions, then the other, and effectively undone our own progress — a feat of accidental symmetry that required some effort to achieve. It was only the presence of reasonably clear waymarkers elsewhere on the route that had prevented this happening sooner. I apologised to Dave with what I hoped was sufficient sincerity. He received it with what I suspected was insufficient conviction.
The resulting detour — perhaps two miles — was not in itself significant, but it acquired a certain weight when combined with persistent rain and a growing sense of dampness in certain places one usually prefers to keep dry.
We retraced our steps and found the correct route.
A break for lunch ....
The path led us past a field of Alpacas — an unexpected but agreeable audience — before rejoining more familiar ground along a local route called the Foul End Walk. Somewhere along here we passed the sign for Colin Teall Woods, which continues to advertise a woodland that exists primarily in spirit and a pleasant copse of shady undergrowth.
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The mysterious Colin Teall sign |
[MW: May 2016 update: An enigma resolved. At last I know the answer to this as I just received the following Tweet from Oliver Teal - "@DarkFarmOwl to solve your Colin Teall woods mystery he was my grandfather and willed the woods to the council in 1996." Thank you Oliver, and thank you also Colin Teal for your donation of this quiet and charming piece of Warwickshire countryside.]
We crossed the railway and a couple of meadows before Dave made polite noises about a lunch break, and I agreed that we would stop in the village of Shustoke, which was just around the corner.
Shustoke is a tiny place — a couple of reservoirs, some houses, and a pub — with a long history that stretches back well beyond the Norman Conquest. It is pleasant enough to look at, but, as we discovered, a thoroughly useless place in which to eat soggy sandwiches in a monsoon. Shustoke doesn't do all-weather seating.
Lunch was taken instead in a narrow lane beside the reservoir, where we found partial shelter under a tree and conducted a frank assessment of our situation.
We were, by mutual agreement, sodden.
Waterproofs had surrendered. Trousers clung with grim determination. Dave confessed to a developing relationship with trench foot. My own consolation lay in dry feet — briefly — courtesy of gaiters and boots that had thus far performed admirably above and beyond the reasonable expectations of their manufacturers.
I looked south, where the weather was coming from, and confidently predicted improvement within the hour. Dave said nothing but remained visibly sceptical.
The call of the Griffin ....
For a while it seemed I might be right. The rain eased, the light shifted, and we walked along the reservoir under skies that hinted at better intentions. A congregation of some two dozen ducks pulled away from the shoreline and headed purposefully toward the centre of the lake. I suggested they were assembling to determine the Daddy Duck in some form of aquatic tribunal. Dave suggested they were preparing an offensive against the pair of swans gliding about snobbishly on the far side. We moved on without discovering the conclusion but I hoped it was resolved peaceably.
Predictably, the rain returned. It came back with the renewed enthusiasm of something that had merely popped out briefly and was annoyed to find we had made progress in its absence. We dithered around on a confusion of tiny tracks before spotting a concealed
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Shustoke reservoir under the weather |
Shortly afterwards we encountered the inevitable flooded underpass: a wide, brown expanse of cold water occupying the entire route beneath a railway bridge, with no sensible alternative presenting itself. We waded through this cold soup fatalistically. Beyond it, the fields were thoroughly saturated, the ground giving way underfoot with a damp, yielding squelch that suggested impressive depths of bog immediately below the surface. Breaking its surface offered up plumes of fragrance reminiscent of boiled cabbage.
It was a relief to gain a road again at the village of Furnace End, — a name referencing the iron-smelting furnaces that once operated there. We walked through quickly, past a village pub and an abattoir in close proximity, departing with an unwholesome mixture of coal smoke and deceased livestock in the air that lingered in the nostrils for a considerable distance.
[Note: The abattoir has since closed and is now a small butcher's shop, which has made the village considerably more agreeable to walk through.]
Three challenges ....
What followed was a sequence of fields, hedges, and increasingly imaginative obstacles, which I will summarise briefly. There were ploughed footpaths, thoughtfully erased by a farmer with a clear philosophical objection to walkers. There were brambles and nettles that took a personal interest in our progress. There was a fall — mine — executed with some force onto ground that offered no resistance whatsoever, and missed entirely by Dave, who was otherwise occupied in not falling over himself.
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Dave, Birchley Heath, and sunshine |
And then there were the cows.
Large, tan, horned, and possessed of a stillness that did nothing to reassure. We advanced with studied nonchalance, acutely aware of a single slender electric fence that offered what might loosely be described as protection. It didn't look capable of deterring a determined Labrador, let alone half a ton of horned cattle and it was a considerable relief to leave that field with dignity intact.
A few minutes later found us skirting the edge of a freshly ploughed field, which offered a change of scenery, and also evidence that the sky was beginning to brighten. I suggested stopping to remove our waterproofs. Dave, perhaps a little weary of leg by now, declined to pause and suggested I manage it on the move. This presented an interesting technical challenge that occupied the next several minutes: removing the rucksack, wriggling out of the waterproof, opening the rucksack, stuffing the garment inside, closing the rucksack, and replacing it — all without breaking stride.
It is, I can confirm, possible. It is also entirely pointless. It will never make the Olympics.
A break in the weather ....
Suddenly, without announcement or apology, we were in sunshine.
This small miracle occurred as we filed along a narrow, tree-lined track threading between field boundaries — a pretty, peaceful stretch where the leaves overhead filtered the light into shifting patterns on the mossy ground below. I stopped and looked up. Actual dappling. The rain clouds had shuffled away to bother Norfolk and in their place were cheerful patches of blue, smoky white cloud, and the pale gold of late-afternoon sun doing its best to make amends.
For the remainder of the walk we moved through gorgeous sunshine and a sky that seemed to have entirely forgotten the events of the morning.
Birchley Heath, appeared ahead
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Oldbury picnic meadows |
We pressed on through the village and out the other side, into fields of golden wheat and the occasional startled rabbit. I was slightly ahead when Dave called me back. "I'll just stay right here," he said. "It's nice."
I retraced my steps to find him lying flat on his back in a small patch of muddy grass, where he had slipped and fallen without ceremony and, apparently, without sound — a fall so quiet it would have gone entirely unnoticed had he not chosen to mention it himself. Which, in its own way, was quite impressive.
We passed through a dairy farm, a row of Friesians observing our progress from their sheds with the slow, ruminative curiosity peculiar to their kind, and continued across a meadow to a little line of cottages, a bridge with its span missing, and the largest road we had yet encountered. I risked a final consultation of the guidebook. Left under the span-less bridge, right up Oldbury Lane, then across country and uphill to journey's end.
"Nearly there now," I told Dave, this time with genuine conviction.
It's the last mile that does for you ....
We were not nearly there.
We turned off the lane and ambled through a series of narrow meadows — drifts of late-summer wildflowers, stands of rowan and birch casting that fabulous dappling again — until we arrived at a locked gate and a dead end. We had missed a turn somewhere. Dave was not the happiest I had ever seen him when I explained this, and I cannot say I entirely blamed him. Backtracking in fading light after almost twenty miles, to find a turning we had misread in a guidebook that was now essentially a damp block of compressed paper, held limited appeal for either of us.
We were on the edge of woodland with a road audible somewhere above, so we took a track uphill through the trees and emerged onto tarmac that felt familiar enough to fill us with confidence. We turned right, then right again along a second road, both of us fairly sure this would deliver us to Hartshill Hayes Country Park.
It did not deliver us to Hartshill Hayes Country Park.
What it delivered us to — after a road walk considerably longer than anticipated,
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Hartshill Hayes Country Park |
We had just completed a large and expensive circle. We were no further forward than we had been an hour and a half ago. The bridge regarded us with the indifference of something that has seen this sort of thing before.
I turned and walked back to Dave, who was some distance behind me. He looked tired and crestfallen, and I felt reasonably certain that what I was about to say would not improve either condition.
He sagged slightly at the news, then — to his considerable credit — asked for Plan B.
Plan B was Oldbury Lane: if we turned left and simply followed the road, it would eventually deliver us to Hartshill Hayes. It wasn't the official route. It wasn't scenic. It wasn't what either of us had planned. But it was unambiguous, it was tarmac, and it went in one direction only.
We took it. Up the lane, around several corners, past the gates of a number of rather grand properties with immaculate lawns, and finally — finally — the entrance to Hartshill Hayes Country Park and the sanctuary of Dave’s car.
Of the park's 137 acres of species-rich woodland and its reportedly magnificent views across the Anker Valley, we saw a toilet block and a car park. Had we continued half a mile along the main path we would, apparently, have enjoyed some of the finest panoramas in Warwickshire.
We had just walked the best part of twenty miles. Continuing anywhere but into the car was not an option that required serious discussion.
My guide book died ....
We had walked close to twenty miles — extended, in the most creative possible ways, by wrong turns, flooded underpasses, a two-mile accidental circuit, and an entirely unplanned tour of the Hartshill road network. Dave drove us home in a state of quiet exhaustion, assuring me — between yawns of some structural integrity — that he had enjoyed himself.
I believe him.
The following morning I transcribed the relevant sections of the guidebook into a more durable format. The original — now swollen, warped, and faintly aromatic — has retired from active service with what honour it can muster.
It will not be going out again.
See Route on ......
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