| The Heart Of England Way | |
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The Griffin Inn and a forecast of change …..
Another fine morning, though breakfast television was issuing warnings about an approaching change — the high pressure giving way to something more unsettled, a severely windy day forecast for Thursday. This was unwelcome information on a morning of brilliant sunshine, and we absorbed it with the mild disbelief of people who are basking in warmth.
Bod was leaving us today, heading back to Southport and his work commitments. We said farewell properly — Bod has the quality of arriving without ceremony and departing the same way, which always makes the goodbye feel slightly underscaled relative to the actual pleasure of his company — and then the remaining two of us climbed into the cars and drove to Balsall Common, where we left Colin's car, before returning to the Griffin Inn. The Griffin's car park was empty at that hour. A silver car tucked in a corner started up as we were preparing and exited without stopping, and something in the driver's manner gave me a brief concern about our parking arrangements. I went in to check. A staff member was restocking the shelves in the empty bar, the clink and chink of bottles the only sound in the place. She told me Mick had just left — so it was he in the silver car — and that parking was perfectly fine. I went back out, recorded a brief video of the Griffin and the morning and Colin performing hamstring stretches in the car park with the particular concentration of a man who has been told this is important, and we set off back down the lane.
The fields of Shustoke: Woodland and obstacles …..
The village of Shustoke was left behind within a few fields, and almost immediately the route delivered one of the morning's more charming moments. Dumble Wood was a small and secluded affair, entered through a sunken dell where a brook chattered through the greenery and an ancient fallen tree formed a natural bridge across it. Bluebells grew in profusion along the banks, and a large swathe of ramsons — wild garlic — filled the enclosed space with a scent both pungent and somehow agreeable, trapped under the tree canopy and hanging heavy in the still air. I gave Colin a piece to try. It has a good garlicky flavour with a sweet peppery edge and works well in salads — though I should note, for completeness, that excessive quantities produce what Yorkshire farmers describe, with considerable directness, as scouring of the bowels.
Beyond the wood came the second enormous field of the week. If anything it exceeded the great ploughed plain after Kingsbury in scale, though it offered the very different prospect of an emerald sea of grass disappearing toward distant Shawbury Wood. We crossed it slowly and warmly, rising gently toward a stile on the horizon where we stopped to rest and drink and look back.
The view from the stile was extensive enough to pose a question: could we still make out the
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A secluded dell near Shustoke |
We passed through the farmyard at Solomon's Temple Farm, which had no temple and showed no signs of ever having had one, watched by cows in their pens. The exit from the farm lay along a narrow path between a large barn and some rusting machinery, where we found an escaped heifer had established herself comfortably in the gap, grazing the lush grass growing among the abandoned equipment. She acknowledged our arrival with a single slow assessment from one eye and continued eating. There was not much room. Colin made a tentative attempt to edge past her. She shuffled with the unhurried clumsiness of an animal that is aware of its mass and indifferent to yours. We weighed the prospect of being compressed between cow and rusting machinery and concluded against it. We clambered over the machinery, negotiated several hay bales, crossed a barbed wire fence, and left the heifer to her breakfast. She did not watch us go.
To Meriden: Cityscapes and the reticence of strangers …..
We passed through a place called Green End followed by more fields, and then — without much warning — the M6 motorway. A footbridge carried us across it, and we stopped in the middle to look down at the traffic and out toward the horizon, where the towers of Birmingham were clearly visible. We had been assuming the city was far away and beyond sight. It was not. Seven or eight miles as the crow flies, no more. The familiar skyline sat there in the heat haze, stolid and undeniable.
We descended into sunny meadows on the far side and let the motorway's roar recede behind us.
The valley between Birchley Hays and Meighs Wood was peaceful and green, and I was in the middle of recording a piece of video and asking Colin whether he was enjoying the walk when he offered a considered reply. The weather had helped enormously, he said. Without it, all this field walking might have become a head-down plod. Given the forecast, he observed, that might well be the experience awaiting us.
"You'll see tomorrow," he concluded cheerfully, "what I would have been like today."
I looked up at the blue sky and found it very hard to believe things could be changing so markedly.
Harvest Hill Lane brought me to a halt.
"I know this place," I said. "This is part of one of my local walks."
Colin made a sound that I recognised as the verbal equivalent of nodding while no longer really listening — the response of a man who has heard me say this at intervals throughout the walk and is treating it as a recurring feature rather than new information. He was not wrong to do so. The Heart of England Way had been threading through my local landscape for the better part of a day and familiar ground kept presenting itself around corners like old acquaintances at a party.
Meriden Shafts Wood was genuinely worth stopping for — a handsome woodland descending gently toward Meriden village, particularly pretty in the spring light. I had walked it before, though from the other direction: in the summer of 2006, shortly after completing the West Highland Way,
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Meriden Shafts wood |
Bluebells again, in the dappled shade of young oaks and birches, and at the bottom of the slope a bench placed with the thoughtfulness of someone who understood what walkers need at the bottom of a woodland descent. Lunch. I felt tender spots developing on my feet and performed some ad hoc foot therapy — baring my toes to the breeze in the manner Colin had made his own signature lunchtime habit. Colin, on this occasion, kept his boots firmly on and ate his sandwiches at a slight distance, scanning the trees for birds. I applied talc and plasters and said nothing about the irony.
A man appeared on the path behind us and we held the gate for him as we left. Slightly built, middle years, bob of a nod in thanks. He was going the same way, so conversation seemed natural. He replied readily — told us he had taken early retirement to do more walking, that he was on a twelve-mile circular route — but in short, careful sentences and without much eye contact. He seemed to find the encounter a mild effort. When our ways parted at Eaves Green he appeared, if anything, faintly relieved. Some people find strangers on trails a pleasure. Some find them a mild imposition that courtesy requires them to manage. He was, I thought, of the second kind, and had managed it well.
To Berkswell: Quaintness and blasphemy …..
We followed a lane out of Eaves Green, passing a retired couple tending their neat front garden who seemed the very picture of contentment, to the high street at Meriden. Once again, familiar ground — I had visited the Queens Head pub pub here over many years, and the village's central claim, backed by a Grade II listed obelisk on the green, is that it occupies the geographic centre of England. The Ordnance Survey settled this question in 2002 by identifying a point on Lindley Hall Farm in Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire, some eleven miles to the north, as the actual centre. The obelisk remains. The claim persists. Villages of a certain self-assurance are not easily redirected by Ordnance Survey. The Queens Head was open as we passed. Colin was absorbed in a local information board about the Heart of England Way. The opportunity for a lunchtime beer dissolved in the usual manner and we continued through the village, past St. Lawrence Church — reputedly founded by Lady Godiva — and the Elizabethan-esque Moat House Farm, and out across fields again. Somewhere along these fields we crossed a B-road and a Metropolitan Borough of Solihull boundary sign.
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St. Lawrence Church, Meriden |
"I can't get it all in," Colin said, attempting to frame the church in his viewfinder.
"Said the actress to the bishop," I said.
Colin laughed.
"I shouldn't say things like that in a churchyard," I added.
"Why?" said Colin.
"It's blasphemous."
"Is it?" said Colin, doubtfully.
"I don't know. It would be, if I were religious."
"Are you?"
"No."
"Precisely," said Colin.
We were still concluding this theological exchange when a woman in hiking gear appeared on the path and opened with the reliable conversational gambit about what lovely weather we were having. She was, as it turned out, the only other Heart of England Way walker we encountered during the entire week — walking it south to north, mapping her way via a series of circular walks, expecting the whole enterprise to take the better part of ten days. She was cheerful and brisk and, before disappearing to find her companions, delivered her verdict on the walking fraternity with the confidence of someone who has done the research.
"All walkers are the nicest people!"
I am in no position to argue with this.
The route left Berkswell via a long raised wooden walkway crossing a wide marshy meadow. We assumed the walkway existed because the meadow became a lake in winter, which would explain the infrastructure. On a day like this, with the grass green and lush on either side, it looked slightly over-engineered — a bridge to nowhere in particular, crossing something that didn't currently need crossing. We used it anyway.
The wrong road to Balsall Common and the consequences …..
I knew that the next stop would be Balsall Common and therefore the end of the days walking. I had always found Balsall Common to be an odd sort of place, being too big for a village and too small for a town – a townage if you will. It has little in the way of quaintness or antiquity about it, being largely the product of the 20th century, and only really grew to its present size after the Second World War. It’s unlikely to grow much more however as this would mean developing on the much-protected Meriden Gap (the green belt between Birmingham and Coventry). Of its 7,000 inhabitants little can be said other than, at various times, the population has included footballers Trevor Francis and Peter Shilton. It has a lot of very expensive real estate but, to my mind at least, less character than many of the places we had already visited on the route.
As we approached I began to feel a mild unease. The village centre was to our left, and seemed to be moving in that direction rather than toward us.
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St. John the Baptist Church, Berkswell |
"We'll have to leave the route here," I told Colin. "I thought the Heart of England Way ran through Balsall Common. It doesn't. The car is some distance away."
I had, in truth, only an approximate idea of how far, but this seemed an unhelpful detail to share at that particular moment.
What followed was an unscheduled march into the main village and along its long main street — at least a mile of tarmac, which feet that have been walking since morning find in a category of its own.
Eventually I recognised a side road from the morning and we turned right, and then right again past neat houses and barking dogs and well-tended lawns, and found Colin's car at last.
We returned to Shustoke and my car with the faint hope that the Griffin might be open. It was not. Mick keeps traditional licensing hours and has always done so. We drove home for beers and wine at chez Walford, which, all things considered, was an entirely acceptable alternative.
Footnote:
I would, in fairness, like to offer the following corrective: Balsall Common has heritage sites, a nature reserve, a windmill, and a walking trail. It deserves better than a rotten tomato delivered by a man who parked in the wrong place.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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