| The Heart Of England Way | |
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Dietary dilemma ....
The first day of the Heart of England Way dawned with inauspicious weather and a certain amount of domestic choreography. Sue had generously agreed to house Colin for the week in a home that was not designed with surplus guests in mind, which required some precision in the matter of bathrooms, breakfasts, and kettle access. We calibrated the morning routine quickly enough, however, and it settled into a workable rhythm that would accommodate Bod's arrival later in the week without serious renegotiation.
Sue's single condition was clear and entirely reasonable: she had no intention of acting as resident chef for the duration. We would be feeding ourselves. This suited the particular geography of Sheldon, which is served by takeaway establishments of considerable variety and questionable nutritional ambition. Over the course of the week we sampled the full range, and I was under no illusion that the calories being consumed each evening were being adequately offset by the miles walked each day. Add the beer and wine that constituted the evening's other main food group and the arithmetic was never going to work in my favour. By the end of the week I had actually gained a few pounds. I regard this as an acceptable outcome and stand by the principle that a walking holiday is first and foremost a holiday, with any fitness benefits treated as a bonus rather than an objective.
Cannock Chase: Birds, heath, and rain …..
The sun accompanied us northward, the impressive cooling towers near Kingsbury marking our passage through familiar industrial Midlands territory, but by the time we reached Milford Common at the edge of Cannock Chase, the clouds had gathered and the morning wore a distinctly unpromising aspect. Milford Common sits in Staffordshire — the first of three counties the Heart of England Way would carry us through — within easy reach of Shugborough Hall and next door to the county capital of Stafford. My last visit had been on a hot summer afternoon some years before, all ice-cream vans and posturing teenagers.
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The first (or last) way-mark of the |
He was, to put it plainly, spherically rotund. This would have been unremarkable had he not chosen, for his morning's cycling, a tight black leotard with a ribbed band around the midriff. The overall effect was of a life buoy that had learned to walk and had opinions about parking. He informed us, rather curtly, that the ticket machine was locked, then produced a pen and paper so we could leave a note in the car and save ourselves the two pounds fifty. He then unfolded a bicycle from his boot and began to prepare for his ride with the businesslike efficiency of a man who has a schedule.
I left him to it and went to find the first waymarker of the route — a green arrow on a post at the top of a flight of rustic steps leading into woodland. I had the camcorder out and ready. The rain began at this precise moment, as though it had been waiting for a cue.
"Look out for the Glacial Boulder!" the gentleman called after us from behind his car, in the tone of someone issuing a meaningful instruction.
We set off into the woods.
I noted, taking my first step, that this would be the first of approximately a hundred and eighty thousand. The path went immediately uphill.
A couple came the other way with a dog.
"It's sunny in Rugeley!" the woman offered.
We thanked her for this information and pressed on.
The mixed woodland of Cannock Chase was alive with birdsong, which is where one of the principal pleasures of walking with Colin makes itself known. He has had a serious interest in birds since he was old enough to hold a field guide, and he deploys this knowledge on the move with the easy fluency of someone for whom it has long since become second nature. As we walked through the trees he began identifying species by sound alone — this one a nuthatch, that one a dunnet, the brief bright phrase in the hawthorn that I would have walked past without registering. He had an app on his iPhone that played song snippets from every British species, and he would occasionally step a pace or two off the path to verify a particularly elusive call, holding the phone toward the hedge and comparing.
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Trees against a stormy sky on Cannock Chase |
The rain came and went. The temperature dropped noticeably when the clouds moved in, then recovered when they passed. Eventually we emerged from the trees onto open heathland — wide bridleways crossing rough ground studded with birch and rowan, the kind of landscape that feels entirely unlike the industrial Midlands surrounding it on all sides and yet is separated from those surroundings by no more than a few miles. Cannock Chase has this quality: the sense of having stepped through a door into somewhere else entirely.
The last squall moved westward and behind it came bright sunshine, and the combination of departing storm cloud and sudden light did something remarkable to the spring foliage — the new green leaves of distant trees turned briefly luminous against the bruised cobalt of the receding clouds, glowing with an intensity that suggested a light source somewhere beyond the visible. We stopped and filmed it. The footage does it fair justice, which surprised me, because these things usually don't.
Cannock Chase: Cyclists and rain ….
Doubt arrived at a crossroads where a café marked our first navigational uncertainty. The Heart of England Way signs were absent and we made an educated guess, crossing the road and heading along a promising-looking track into pine forest. The forest grew gloomier. We reached the edge of a paddock. Neither the GPS nor our instincts were happy with the situation. After some dithering we concluded that we had crossed the road when we should not have, retraced our steps, and found the waymarker we had missed — somehow invisible the first time, obvious now.
Just back on route, the path delivered us to the Katyn Monument: a black marble edifice standing in the woodland with the composed gravity of something that has important things to say and intends to say them. The inscription records the murder of twenty-five thousand Polish prisoners of war by the Soviet secret police in 1940, and the fifty years of official Soviet denial that followed. It was a beautiful and imposing memorial, unexpected in the middle of an English forest, and we gave it the time it deserved. The explanation for its location, as I later learned, lay in Staffordshire's substantial Polish community, who campaigned for many years for the memorial's erection against the opposition of a Soviet Union that wanted no such acknowledgement and a British government reluctant to antagonise them.
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Alongside Gentleshaw Water Works |
We moved on through the trees, accompanied throughout by the pervasive scent of horse manure — an olfactory presence that implied a considerable equine population, though we saw precisely one horse during the entire length of Cannock Chase. The manure, by contrast, seemed well represented.
Marquis Drive brought us into contact with the day's other dominant theme: mountain bikers. A large number of cars along the verge were disgorging cyclists in Lycra, some in fancy dress, all operating at a level of enthusiasm that made our measured walking pace feel faintly inadequate. They persisted for several miles — sudden eruptions around bends, excited yells from unseen tracks in the trees — and while I have no objection to people enjoying the outdoors it was a relief when the path eventually moved beyond their principal concentration.
Along this stretch we passed what we momentarily took to be the Glacial Boulder the gentleman at Milford Common had cryptically recommended. It was, in fact, a memorial to RAF Hednesford, — a training camp operational until the mid-1950s and demolished in 1970. We never located the actual Glacial Boulder. It is, apparently, a grey boulder on a concrete plinth, transported from Scotland and deposited here at some point in the 1950s. The internet regards it with the same measured brevity that it deserves.
I’m not terribly upset that we missed it.
Cannock Chase: Woodland, ancient history, and the path to Burntwood …
My hips had begun their first-day complaints — the familiar deep ache of ligaments being asked to remember what they are for after several months of relative inactivity. It was like having a toothache in each hip joint simultaneously, and every step carried its own small reminder. I took paracetamol and applied the patience of a man who knows from experience that this particular ailment is self-limiting. It passed, as it always does, and did not return.
Colin had a birding moment of some significance near the top of a rise — three different warbler species identified within sight and sound of each other. In truth I cannot tell you with confidence which warblers they were. Sedge, reed, and garden would be my best guess, offered with appropriate humility.
We stopped for lunch on the bole of an old sycamore beside a great fallen log that had been returning itself to the soil for what we estimated to be several decades. The tree it had come from must have been a hundred and fifty years old at its fall, at the very least. Colin removed his boots and socks and waggled his toes in the spring air with the contentment of a man who has discovered this activity recently and has become a convert. I ate my sandwiches and drank my sports drink and watched the only horse of the day trot past — a large chestnut mare accompanied by the world's smallest Jack Russell, whose owner waved gaily from the saddle as she went by.
As we prepared to move off, a middle-aged couple appeared asking for directions to Castle Ring Fort. I was demonstrating the GPS app when their German Shepherd, in the spirit of introduction, lurched forward and applied her head to my groin with the precision of a bowling ball finding its lane. I continued with the directions. I did this at some personal cost and through slightly clenched teeth.
"She just likes you," the man offered apologetically.
"Perfectly fine," I said. "I have a dog myself. These things happen"
The path upward looked, from a distance, almost vertical — a steep line through the trees that had us scheduling lunch partly to fortify ourselves against it. In the event it offered only a moderate challenge.
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I enjoy a pint at The Drill Inn |
Castle Ring Fort — the highest point of Cannock Chase at eight hundred feet — retains a circular earth embankment of perhaps ten feet, surrounding a wide depression several hundred feet across. Two thousand years ago it housed several acres of pens and dwellings and commanded unobstructed views across the Midlands to the distant fort at the Wrekin in Shropshire, twenty miles away. The trees that crowd about it now would have been kept clear. Nobody knows precisely why it was abandoned around AD 50, though the Romans, who by that point had firm views about most things in Britain, probably had a contribution to make.
Today it serves as a viewpoint, a dog-walking ground, and a place where tired walkers on the Heart of England Way begin thinking seriously about beer.
We left via the car park, passed through the hamlet of Gentleshaw, and crossed a lane to a fenced path running alongside the Gentleshaw water pumping facility — a curious collection of quasi-Gothic pumping stations and smooth sculpted mounds of turf that bore an irresistible resemblance to Teletubbyland. I did not stop to film it at length, but I wanted to.
The final stretch followed Common Side Lane down onto the outskirts of Burntwood, walking the eastern edge of a large common in warm sunshine under a sky of genuinely cheerful cloud — the kind of ending a day's walking deserves. A few short fields, a lane, and the Drill Inn appeared, almost unexpectedly, as the route's conclusion.
We sat down, ordered the first pint of the week, and waited forty-five minutes for a taxi.
Burntwood, I later discovered, is where a local man found the Staffordshire Hoard — the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever discovered, valued at three and a quarter million pounds. I mention this because Burntwood deserves at least one claim to fame that doesn't involve waiting for a cab.
Back home, first evening …. ....
Eventually The taxi driver was a friendly man who struggled throughout the journey with the central concept of what we were attempting. His questions formed a loose orbit around the same facts without quite achieving resolution:
"So you're walking a hundred miles?"
"Have you had to book today off as a holiday?"
"How long will it take then?"
"How many miles have you done today?"
"So you're taking the whole week off?"
"So how far is it?"
Along the way he pointed out the house of a local footballer — a mock-Gothic pile with castellations, electric gates, and the sort of featureless surrounding lawn that suggests a deep suspicion of the natural world. I nodded politely and kept my architectural opinions to myself.
Milford Common had come to life during our absence. Families embraced the sunshine, an ice-cream van had materialised, and one family had brought the Incessantly Screaming Child that seems to be a mandatory fixture at every British public outdoor space. We bought cornets, watched a young woman skilfully training her dog on the grass, then loaded the car and headed home.
Bod called as we arrived. Five minutes away and true to the pattern established across every long walk we had shared, he arrived bearing an ailment: a stiff neck, in this instance, of recent and uncertain provenance. We prescribed beer. He agreed this sounded like a reasonable remedy.
Colin had disappeared for the evening — to use our parents' bathroom and see off a relative departing for Spain, a combination of errands that, with Colin, always carries the faint possibility of escalation. There is something in his relationship with plans that makes their straightforward execution feel slightly provisional — a quiet readiness for events to take an unexpected turn. On this occasion, however, he came home more or less on schedule. We took an early night.
Tomorrow: Burntwood to Meriden. The walk was properly underway.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
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