| The Millennium Way | |
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By Mark Walford
Day One Route: Middleton Cheney to Upper Boddington Distance: 12m (19.3km) Elevation: 341ft (104m) to 584ft (178m) Climbing (ascent and descent): 604ft (184m) and 571ft (174m) Next 
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An introduction ....
The Millennium Way — the Midlands version, not to be confused with the Bradford or Isle of Man paths that share the name — is a hundred-mile walk through the gently rolling countryside of the south Midlands. Created to mark the millennium by members of the National Association of ex-Round Tablers, it runs from Middleton Cheney in Northamptonshire in the east to Pershore in Worcestershire in the west, describing a broad arc with the village of Meriden at its northern point. For me, this completes what I think of as the Midlands Trinity of long-distance paths — the others being the Centenary Way (completed 2012) and The Heart of England Way (completed 2013). When this one is done I will have walked over three hundred miles along the footpaths and bridleways of the Midlands: my own back yard, walked properly at last. For no scientific reason I elected to walk east to west, and so the journey begins in Northamptonshire, in the village of Middleton Cheney.
Middleton Cheney …..
I started before the church of All Saints on a sunny Sunday morning in May, the bells ringing out for morning service, the old cottages clustered around the churchyard doing their best to suggest that nothing much has changed here for a very long time. Middleton Cheney presents this face convincingly from where I stood — a quiet, mellow settlement of stone and bells and unhurried Sunday calm. In reality it is one of the larger villages in Northamptonshire, with a population of around four thousand, its modern aspects — the housing estates, the shops, the social clubs — screened from view by the pleasantly protective confines of the old church square. The present was out there, but the past was making a persuasive case for itself from where I stood.
The village has a local hero in Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland, who commanded the British naval forces at the Battle of the Denmark Strait in 1941. By any measure a capable commander and sound tactician, he was nonetheless commanding a ship, HMS Hood, that took a direct hit from the Bismarck and exploded, breaking in two. One of the handful of survivors confirmed that Holland was last seen in his admiral's chair, making no attempt to leave. There is something in that image — the stillness of it, the acceptance — that stays with you.
The church also contains stained glass windows designed by William Morris, which I could not get in to photograph as the service was underway. I wandered the churchyard instead — where forty-six Parliamentary soldiers are buried, killed in a Civil War skirmish — filming the old headstones and the morning light and the sound of the congregation inside, and eventually winding my way out through the graves and onto the village street. A footpath behind a row of properties — ancient greenhouses offering an unsightly but interesting aspect — led me quickly to open fields, and within minutes Middleton Cheney and its Sunday morning dog-walkers were behind me and I was alone.
The solitude, on this walk, would be my consistent companion.
Almost immediately my eyes began to itch and my nose to inform me of its sensitivities. I had not taken any antihistamines, because that would have been the sensible thing to do, and the fields ahead of me were ablaze with rapeseed — the vivid canary yellow that signals May in the Midlands and, for me, the arrival of hay fever season. I have this conversation with myself every year: I forget about hay fever during the long months of immunity, and then it returns and I am always faintly surprised. I crossed large fields of it, sneezing and sniffing in a rhythm that eventually synchronised with my footsteps, the strange smell of the stuff — agreeable at first, then revealing a slightly yeasty, faintly feral undertone — filling my nose and it's glowing colour enriching my video recordings in roughly equal measure.
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Middleton Cheney |
I edged around the boundary. A roe deer, dozing in the sunshine at the field's edge, startled and was gone before I fully registered her.
This would not be the last time the day presented this dilemma.
The path climbed perhaps two hundred feet out of the field and across a meadow — not a hill by any standard I had previously enjoyed on Offa’s Dyke or the West Highland Way, but enough of a hill to remind me that my preparation for this walk had been, as usual, somewhere between minimal and notional. I arrived at the top breathing harder than I would have liked and was rewarded by a sweeping view back across the fields I had just crossed, the spire of All Saints at Middleton Cheney already a distant and receding landmark.
Beyond the hill a farm drive offered a junction. I was standing with the guidebook open and my bearings uncertain when I became aware of being watched. A large black Labrador was regarding me from a few yards away with the focused suspicion of an animal that has encountered something unexpected and has not yet decided what to make of it. I kept still and made friendly noises. He began to bark anyway. Seconds later the farmer appeared from a shed with two more dogs, making the consultation considerably more vocal.
He was a genial man, genuinely impressed that I intended to walk all the way to Upper Boddington. He offered useful information: a pub two fields further on, open from ten in the morning, all day.
"That's where I'm goin' as soon as I've stacked this lot," he told me, disappearing back into the shed with his three dogs, with the air of a man who has his priorities in order.
I walked on alone.
Cattles and battles ... ….
Once more I picked up a bridleway that led me between more fields of rapeseed which I left half a mile later to follow a hedge past a long and gently steaming pile of manure, realising too late that I had taken a wrong turn thereby treating myself to a second helping of its unique aroma on the return journey. The only benefit I got from this minor detour was to see the unmistakably long ears of a hare pop out of the hedgerow ahead of me, twitching in curiosity before disappearing back into the brambles.
The bridleway beyond the farm led me through more rapeseed — eyes streaming, nose in open revolt — before a hand-written sign on a metal gate advised caution: cows and calves in the field beyond. I looked over. A herd of brown cows were gathered some way to the left, each one chaperoning a small, unsteady calf. This was manageable. Less manageable was the discovery that the landowner had also installed an electric fence around the field's perimeter, running at precisely the height most likely to be unpleasant to anyone attempting to straddle it, and too low for comfortable crawling. I was, to all practical purposes, stuck.
I threw vexed looks at the distant farmhouse and took a detour into an adjacent field, hoping to rejoin the route at the far end. The adjacent field was two acres of rank grass, bounded at the far end not by a convenient gate but by a drainage pond hidden in thick undergrowth, and on the shared boundary not by a hedge but by a hedge with barbed wire on both sides of it — suggesting that the two fields belonged to different farms with different views about the relationship.
I pushed through the undergrowth. I reached the barbed wire. I retreated up the field. I found a hidden metal gate, overgrown with bramble, climbed carefully over it, and dropped back into the cow meadow on the correct side of the electric fence, which I had to negotiate again in any case.
I delivered my feelings about this to the video camera with some feeling before the sunshine and the birdsong and the general quality of the morning reasserted themselves and restored my equanimity.
A disused railway track cut across my path somewhere near Lower Thorpe, running in from the direction of Banbury to the east and arrowing westwards to an unknown terminus. This section of it had been converted into racing gallops and I crossed it half anticipating the sight of a thoroughbred thundering by, but it didn’t happen. What did happen shortly afterwards was the appearance of a wide and extremely rocky track running along the Millennium Way route.
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The Gallops |
I still walked along in splendid isolation, not having seen a living soul since the farmer I spoke to earlier, and as the day was becoming unseasonably warm I stopped to strip off my t-shirt, walking along with my lightweight fleece unzipped and letting a cooling breeze become my own personal air conditioning system. It was a sight to behold but drew little attention from livestock in the fields on either side of me.
The stony track finally became a grassy bridleway, which was kinder to my feet, and eventually I left it to join a smaller trail at a junction where a number of commercial vehicles huddled together forlornly, abandoned and rusting away to oblivion.
Nearby, a sign informed me of the Battle Of Edgecote Moor, — one of the bloodier encounters of the Wars of the Roses, a decisive Lancastrian victory in which some two thousand foot soldiers and over a hundred of England's nobility lost their lives. I stood in the sunshine listening to the birds and tried to imagine the noise and terror of two armies meeting in these quiet fields. I could not quite do it. The gap between the bucolic present and the violent past was too wide to cross on a sunny morning with nothing more pressing than a blister on the horizon.
Lunch and lost …. …
A stone bridge over a road junction provided a moment's pause while I got my bearings and a pair of horses hung their heads over a nearby fence and examined me with the mild interest of animals for whom interruptions are welcome. My stomach was making observations about lunch. I carried on until, less than a mile further, a stand of young silver birches offered both shade and a makeshift seat of logs, the trees full of birdsong, the morning light finding its way through the new leaves in the particular green-gold way of May. I sat and ate and listened and tried to send a tweet about the morning. Northamptonshire, in this corner at least, appeared to be operating outside the range of mobile data. I gave up on the tweet and ate my crisps and was perfectly content.
It was a genuinely enchanting spot. I was reluctant to leave it, and when I finally did I walked ten minutes before returning to collect the walking pole I had left behind.
Shortly after lunch the path passed a watermill at Home Farm, its great wooden wheel turning in the waters of a small stream, and climbed out of a shallow grassy vale to a stand of oaks at a crossroads of paths. Here a family appeared — parents, two teenagers — the mother clutching a printed map and moving toward me with the purposeful expression of someone who has located a resource.
"Excuse me, are you a walker?" she asked, apparently setting aside the rucksack and the pole as insufficient evidence.
I confirmed it. She confirmed they were lost. I offered to help, and then examined her map and discovered the difficulty:
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Chipping Warden |
I turned to retrace my steps uphill.
Before I did, I noticed a small plaque on a post in the hollow — easy to miss, tucked into the shade, making no effort to attract attention. It marked the location where a Lancaster bomber had come down during the Second World War with the loss of all but one of her crew. The eldest had been twenty-four. The sole survivor had been nineteen.
I stood there for a moment. The wood was very quiet.
The third attempt from the crossroads took me through a hedge over a stile I had walked past twice, across a large sheep meadow, and out, almost unexpectedly, onto the road into Chipping Warden.
Chipping Warden ...
I had a history with this village — it was where I used to collect company cars in a previous professional life, a drive I had made many times along scenic back roads. The village centre had not changed. Places like this, protected by their own historic character and by being too far from anywhere commercially significant, become a kind of time capsule — the old heart preserved more or less intact, the passage of decades marked only by a telephone box here, a satellite dish there.
The Griffin Inn was open. I went in.
Five minutes later I was outside in the sunshine with a pint of cold cider and the quiet peace of a village Sunday. Five minutes after that a large group of local men arrived on bicycles — dusty, cheerful, vocal, and thirsty — and peace and quiet was dismissed, replaced with a lot of good-natured banter and shouted orders for pints, crisps and, for some of the crowd, soft cushions.
I filmed the village's nooks and crannies as I walked its main street, finding the villagers not engaged in cycling were attending the village fête in the rectory grounds. The two ladies on the gate invited me in warmly. I was half-tempted. I had a schedule to keep, and there is also the uncomfortable truth that a man walking alone through a public event with a camera tends to attract a kind of attention he hasn't asked for. I declined the tea, the cake, and the prize vegetable tent with genuine regret.
Chipping Warden has its history. There is an Iron Age fort nearby, and the remains of a Roman villa, and the River Cherwell borders it on two sides. It also has this, from 1744, which I find irresistible:
In May of that year a bill came before the House of Lords to dissolve the marriage of Henry Scudamore, 3rd Duke of Beaufort, and Frances Scudamore. Among the witnesses was one John Pargiter, a farmer of Chipping Warden, who testified that in June 1741 he had observed a man — later identified as Lord Talbot — meeting the Duchess as she walked alone in the fields nearby, and had witnessed between them what he described, under oath, as *adulterous familiarities*. The bill passed. The marriage was dissolved.
John Pargiter's afternoon walk through the fields of Northamptonshire changed two aristocratic lives and provided Chipping Warden with a story it has been dining out on ever since.
Beyond the village a narrow alley squeezed between a high hedge and a workshop boundary. Two young girls were playing in the forecourt — daughters of the owner, I assumed — and spotted me as I passed, seizing on the diversion with the enthusiasm of children for whom a stranger with a rucksack constitutes entertainment. I could sense them following at a distance as I entered a large meadow and began trying to locate the exit, which proved to be elusive.
"You're going the WRONG way!" came a shout from the field's edge. "THE WRONG WAY!"
I snorted internally and continued. I was a grown adult with a GPS. What could two small girls possibly know about the Millennium Way?
But they were entirely correct: I was going the wrong way.
With the distant cackling of the girls floating to me on the breeze I edged, with what I hoped was some dignity, around the perimeter of the meadow and found the exit — clearly marked — that led into a spinney frothy with cow parsley and silver birch, and from there into yet another vast field of rapeseed. I waded through yellow blossoms up to waist height, sneezing continuously, the strange smell of the crop filling everything, until I emerged under the shade of a large oak that stood somewhat incongruously in the middle of this yellow ocean.
I emerged into another meadow, grateful to be free of the cloying rapeseed but not altogether happy to see that I was in the company of cows again. The herd had not seen me coming and became instantly spooked, thundering down the meadow — alarmingly, briefly, directly toward me — before veering off and corralling themselves behind a low hedge where they stood peering back with anxious eyes. Behind me, the bull who had watched all of this from the top of the field resumed his study of the middle distance with the implacable calm of an animal who has decided the performance was beneath his attention.
The Boddingtons …
A B-road came as a considerable relief. Firm ground, forward momentum, no cows.
I had been walking for many hours by now and the combination of warm sunshine, mileage, and several unnecessary detours was beginning to accumulate in the legs. A field of newly-planted cereal crop, absorbing and returning heat in the manner of a low oven, produced a video recording in which I catalogued at some length my aching back, my tired feet, and my ongoing relationship with nettles. Watching it back later I concluded that I have a tendency toward complaint that I would rather address. Less Victor Meldrew. More Alan Titchmarsh. I am working on this.
The test came almost immediately. A dead-end at a disused railway line, sealed by a metal gate. A return along the field boundary. A diagonal path across the wheat visible only as a distant marker post, with no discernible path between me and it. I looked at the young plants. I looked at the late afternoon sun. I thought about the remaining miles.
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Upper Boddington |
I cringed slightly at the sound of the plants under my boots. No irate farmer appeared. I crossed. I did it again across the next field, and the one after that — the same farmer, presumably, the crops identical — muttering at the GPS through several confused junctions before finally reaching a proper path, hot and somewhat unimpressed.
Lower Boddington was a small place of limestone walls and cottage gardens, a welcome sight. Upper Boddington, as villages inevitably named *Upper* tend to be, required a climb to reach and sure enough I was directed through a series of tiny streets, allotments, garages, and finally onto Hill Road, a final ridge walk with one last far-reaching view back across the Northamptonshire countryside I had spent the day crossing. I filmed it, grumbling slightly but genuine in my appreciation. The view, at least, was worth it.
The first buildings of Upper Boddington appeared around a bend. I had dropped my car here that morning and knew the road well enough — including a particularly handsome old house, crumbling Georgian grandeur and a secluded front garden, that was advertised to let and that I had been looking forward to admiring more closely.
I walked past my car without noticing it. Down the road. To the house. Filmed the house. Filmed the thatched pub, eyond it. Turned around and walked back.
The car still sat there, waiting with the abstract patience of all inanimate objects.
Day one: done.
For a full profile of the route (PDF format) click here
See Route on ......
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