London underfoot

London Countryway 12: Welham Green - Broxbourne

2010-06-26T20:28:00.057+01:00

Once there was the wildwood. Around 18,000-20,000 years ago, the world's last glacial period, the Devensian glaciation, reached its peak, with the polar ice sheets reaching as far south as modern Birmingham. This period is often known colloquially as the last "ice age" but geologically speaking we're still in an ice age, just a warmer episode of one. Early humans had already arrived in Britain during the next last warm period about 30,000 years ago but had soon retreated to southern Europe as the land cooled. Now, as the ice sheets receded again, richer vegetation spread northwards, advancing like an animated campaign map across the land bridge of Doggerland that still linked the British peninsula to Flanders and Denmark. Tundra turned to forest, with endless expanses of broadleaf (deciduous) trees -- ash, beech, birch, lime, oak -- carpeting a landscape sculpted by retreating glaciers. These broadleaf forests would have covered nearly all of England, Wales and southern Scotland, with conifers such as Scots Pine taking over in the cooler far north.

The spread of woodland brought not only trees but other species that flourished beneath their shade. Large game animals such as boar, wild cattle and deer, as well as predators such as wolves and bears, spread northwards in the rear of the forest's advance, and close on their tail the hungry humans returned. Then, about 6500BCE, the sea level rose from the melting ice and the old south-facing estuary of the Thames and Rhine cut northwards across Doggerland to the North Sea, marooning an ecosystem that was about to change irrevocably. It's this inundation of the land bridge that defines the biological term "native species" with respect to Britain -- anything that got across before Britain (once more) became an island is counted as native.

From a human point of view, natural woodland is not completely unproductive. Its richness as a source of game was what attracted us to it in the first place, and it also provided grazing for early livestock, with domestic pigs, for example, continuing to forage on the forest floor much as their feral ancesters had done. Obviously it's also a source of timber and firewood, as well as edible wild plants. When early political economists speak of the origin of value and property in humans "mixing their labour" with the fruits of the earth, the imagination likely conjures a hunter-gatherer plundering a tree for a handful of berries or the makings of a spear. But as the technical innovations of organised agriculture began to drive the development of human society, the endless hectares of thick and thorny forest became a barrier to progress.

The conquest of the forest is connected with the very beginnings of industry. The earliest factories known in Britain date from the Neolithic period around 3500BCE. They are located close to sources of workable stone like flint and volcanic tuff, in places like Great Langdale, Cumbria, and the Llŷn peninsula in northwest Wales. A more local site was at Stoke Newington, which we'll later explore on the Capital Ring. Their principal products were fine stone axes, which in some cases were prized far beyond their home territory: stone worked in north Wales found its way as far as Lands End and the south coast. And the principal purpose of a stone axe was to clear woodland for settlement and agriculture.

The various cultures that rose and fell in Britain as the Stone Age gave way to the Bronze and Iron Ages -- Beaker, Celtic and Belgic -- have left marks on the landscape in the outlines of cultivated fields, some of which we'll encounter on future walks. Often farming on high slopes with sometimes poor soils for the benefit of a vantage point over hostile wildlife and human rivals, and not understanding the science of soil fertility, these ancient farmers would simply clear more fields when the old ones became exhausted. By the Roman conquest in 43CE, the landscape of southern England was already shifting from a scattering of villages and farms in occasional forest clearings to something like the agricultural patchwork we know today, where woodland remnants have been reduced to narrow strips separating fields.

When the conquering Norman armies arrived in 1066, woodland cover in England is estimated already to have reduced from near total to a mere 15%. By 1900 it was as low as 6%, and has since increased a little to 8%. In contrast, the European average is 44%. And it shows: Berlin still looks, as it should, like a city cleared from the forest, into which the forest still intrudes, but London still looks far too much like an expanse of concrete and grass dotted with a street tree here and there by an architect that's good at Photoshop.

The term "ancient woodland" is used in Britain for areas known to have been continuously wooded since at least 1600. This might not seem very ancient in terms of human history, let alone geological time, but it marks a watershed in woodland management practice. Prior to this, people worked with naturally occurring woodland; from 1600, deliberate planting of selected species became more common. Most ancient woods therefore date back much further than 1600, and a good few may even be surviving fragments of the original wildwood, their trees the direct descendants of those that spread across the land bridge as the ice sheets receded many millennia ago.

Only 2.45% of England's land surface is "ancient semi-natural woodland" -- only semi-natural since of course it has been managed, even if by relatively benign techniques such as traditional coppicing and pollarding. The rest is planted woodland. This includes a number of ancient woodland sites that have been replanted with other species, notably fast growing conifers, often dating from the immediate postwar period when there was an urgent demand for timber. Several times on the London Countryway we've encountered patches of planted conifers in the midst of broadleaf woods and the contrast is immediately obvious. Conifers form a dense year-round canopy that prevents light reaching the woodland floor, creating an environment hostile to the diversity of flora and fauna that flourishes in native broadleaf woodland.

The Woodland Trust calls ancient semi-natural woodland "Britain's equivalent of the rain forest" -- a piece of marketing spin, you might cynically observe, for an audience more likely to be moved by the plight of the exotic wildlife of the Amazon basin than the need to conserve Britain's drizzly woods with their dog walkers and discarded pornography collections. But the comparison stands -- its long history has endowed ancient woodland with a notably rich and diverse ecology and the development pressures that drove its clearance are comparable to those now threatening the rainforest.

It is also practically irreplaceable. It's true that, left to its own devices, England tends to the condition of woodland: even in a city, a piece of ground left empty will first sprout fast growing weeds, then shrubs and eventually give rise to the saplings of broadleaf trees. Several times on the Countryway we've encountered commons which two centuries ago would have been much more open in character due to communal grazing, where trees have reestablished themselves as grazing has declined. But thanks to soil disturbance from agriculture and development, the fragmentation of wildlife populations and the introduction of non-native species, such new natural woodlands will never be quite the same as the ancient ones. We've seen woodland creation in action on community woodland sites and planned on a grand scale at Heartwood Forest, but these schemes have to be carefully managed to reproduce anything like the environment of the remaining ancient woodlands.

Though the percentage is worryingly small, the extent of land area is great enough that we still have some substantial areas of ancient woodland to enjoy, preserved by historical quirk and deliberate conservation. Some large wooded areas were preserved in the post-Norman period as hunting forests for the use of royalty and the nobility -- the deliberate retention of relatively unproductive land as the ultimate expression of conspicuous wealth. Others, especially those on poor soils, were retained as commons. The emergence of the conservation movement in the 19th century saw some historic battles to retain woodlands, including those near cities like London that were now threatened not by agriculture but by housing development -- Epping Forest, in the next section, is a prominent example.

This section of the London Countryway is notable for its ancient woods, which include the second National Nature Reserve (NNR) we've encountered so far. It's also significant for two more reasons. The first is that we'll notice the Countryway drawing closer to London as it heads into its final quarter turn, encountering its first true piece of continuous ribbon development reaching out from the capital. The second is personal, as the route is now taking me into some very familiar territory. Between 1971 and 1983, and again in 1985-6, I lived with my family in Bayford. Our place was some way north of the route, but today we pass through the southern part of the same civil parish. In the interim, I lived in Hatfield and Potters Bar, and sometimes walked to visit my parents in Bayford. And during most of the later part of this period I had a girlfriend who, when I originally met her, lived in Cheshunt with her parents. Negotiating the network of lanes and footpaths between the East Coast main line and the Lea valley triggered old memories.

The route leaves Welham Green along Bulls Lane, at first a suburban street with the occasional pretty garden until it ducks under an old brick bridge, named Skimpans Bridge, which carries the East Coast main line (discussed in the previous section). The railway is also the eastern boundary of Watling Chase Community Forest, which we now leave, although the environment immediately becomes more rual beyond it. We pick up a footpath that first runs parallel to the lane, actually a diversionary route created when a level crossing further south was closed to accommodate rising speeds on the main line. The path is soon tracking the edge of today's first woodland, Pelpins Wood, through attractively overgrown fields. I've found out little about this oddly shaped wood, but I doubt it has any connection to the abbey town of Pelpin in Polish Pomerania.

The path emerges at a junction with quiet tarmac lanes just south of the hamlet of Bell Bar. The lane running left to right here is in fact a former section of the Great North Road, another in the succession of major northbound routes the Countryway crosses. The original basis for the road was Ermine Street, the Roman route from London to York, northeast England and the Scottish border. Much of the original length of this remained in use well into the last millennium, though not all of it in a good state of repair. This route crossed the river Lee at Ware, and in the 13th and 14th centuries passage on it was periodically disrupted by the rivalry between Ware and neighbouring Hertford over rights to river traffic. So an alternative route developed via Highbury, Highgate, Barnet and Hatfield that rejoined Ermine Street at Alconbury in Cambridgeshire. Inevitably numerous inns and small hamlets grew up along the road, and just north of here it passed the Bell Inn, where there was a barrier or gate, thus Bell Bar.

The Great North Road was an obvious choice for turnpiking. By 1720 the turnpike had reached north from London to the Angel at Enfield Chase, and a decade later it was extended past Bell Bar to Lemsford Mill. This is the route along which Charles Dickens imagined Oliver Twist arriving in London having fled the workhouse in the eponymous 1839 novel, and along which Bill Sykes later made his getaway after murdering Nancy, taking refuge with his dog "limping and lamed from the unaccustomed exercise" in an unnamed pub that's assumed to be the Eight Bells at Hatfield.

Coaches had always struggled up the steep hill to the south of Bell Bar and in 1851 a diversionary route was opened to the east, also diverting the road away from the grounds of Hatfield House, where successive owners have proved adept at deflecting rights of way. Bell Bar itself was bypassed, with a huge economic impact not only on the pubs but on the farms that had provided overnight pasture for cattle being driven to Smithfield market. The project also failed to return on its investment: a year earlier, the Great Northern Railway had opened on the parallel route we crossed near the start of this section, and was soon winning much of the through traffic. The 1851 road, which we cross soon after its predecessor, was designated as part of the A1 when the current system of road classifications was introduced in 1921. Its period as part of Britain's official number 1 road was brief: in 1928 it was succeeded in its trunk road role by the Barnet and Hatfield bypasses further to the west, and renumbered A1000, though as you can see it remains a busy and important part of the local road system. We crossed two generations of successor roads at Water End in the previous section.

As a roadside sign attests, we're now at the edge of the village of Brookmans Park, also once part of the extensive manor of North Mymms traversed in the previous section. A section of that estate was sold off in 1786 to the Gaussen family who created their own distinct estate centred on Brookmans Manor. From the 1920s sections of the estate were sold off for development, boosted by the opening of a new station on the East Coast main line which had originally run through non-stop. Helped by its leafy hilltop location it's become one of London's poshest commuter retreats. One of its quirkier claims to fame is that in the late 16th century it was the home of the original model for the nursery rhyme character Little Miss Muffet, who was frightened by a spider while eating her curds and whey (a reference that puzzles contemporary children). There's little hard evidence for this as the claim wasn't recorded until the early 19th century, but the local school still includes a cobweb on its badge.

Across the road a tree-lined path runs between the transmitting towers and satellite dishes of the Brookmans Park Transmitting Station, taking advantage of the hill's summit which, at 126m, is one of the highest in Hertfordshire. The station was opened in 1929 by the BBC during the original breakup of the estate as the first step in a programme to extend regional medium wave radio coverage across the country, replacing the existing low range transmitters in central London, and was the first such station in the world built to transmit two separate radio channels simultaneously. It's remained as a radio rather than a TV transmitter, though in 1930 it was used for experimental transmissions of John Logie Baird's pioneering 30-line electromechanical television system. When the BBC bought the land it insisted that future purchasers of neighbouring sites must agree not to use them for anything that might cause interference, a factor that probably protected Brookmans Park from industrial development prior to the introduction of the Green Belt. Today it's owned by Arqiva, a privatised successor of the National Grid company, and transmits commercial radio, while a variety of other telecoms companies rent space for satellite and mobile phone applications.

PP Eckersley, the BBC engineer who oversaw its construction, reminisced in his autobiography: "A high-power wireless station is such a lovely thing. The process is silent, there is no gas or smell or fussy reciprocation, no sound except a purposeful humming. One is conscious of power contained and controlled." His words still strike home today. It's a strange and deserted place, still humming to itself as the only outward sign of all the activity going on beneath the surface. The rows of satellite dishes stand with ears cupped heavenwards as if listening to the whisper of distant galaxies. It shatters the illusion a little when you realise what they're actually listening to is the Home Shopping Channel and endless reruns of Only Fools and Horses.

Just past the transmitting station, where a concrete water tower part hidden by trees also takes advantage of the height, the route dodges just over the official boundary of Hatfield town, though with no sign of urbanisation. It then starts descending slowly through fields, finally leaving the Colne side of the watershed for the drainage basin of the Lea. A little way down, some presumably very well off person is creating a new formal tree-lined avenue sweeping down from Kentish Lane Farm on the right, which we cross at right angles. All along the Countryway we see farm buildings transformed into luxury dwellings -- this one seems to aspire to manor house status.

From a very rural crossroads on Kentish Lane just south of the hamlet of Wildhill, an old lane linking several farms takes the Countryway by a satisfyingly direct route to Newgate Street. Passing a rather incongruous mock Classical temple in a back garden, it first dips down into a valley cut by the Essendon Brook, which joins the Lea near Essendon a little to the north.

Then it climbs up again to Barbers Lodge Farm where, rather irritatingly, it's been deflected, apparently unofficially, away from the farmyard and around three sides of a barn. Instead of sheltering tractors and combine harvesters, the big barns here act as dry docks for small yachts. A satisfying stretch across an airy plateau follows, through fields dotted with giant plastic-wrapped bales looking like puzzling modernist monoliths.

After a while the Hertfordshire Way rejoins us, having followed a lengthy loop up to Royston since it left us at Sandridge Church in the last section. Then the lane develops into a residential street and emerges in the centre of the village of Newgate Street.

This is certainly familar territory -- schoolfriends had friends round here and sometimes the coach would pass through on school trips to the sailing base at Cheshunt, which we pass on the next section. The 308 bus, the second nearest bus service to our old house, still passes through two or three times a day except Sundays, not much less frequently than it did in the 1970s. Newgate Street is one of those places that challenges writers of directions, as the village has the same name as its main street, so you end up writing "At Newgate Street, turn right along Newgate Street", and the highway that approaches it from the east is even knowns as Newgate Street Road. The fact that it shared its name with a well-known street in London used to confuse me further. It's a small but pretty village that supports two pubs and a 1960s village hall, used twice a week by the mobile post office.

The village is wedged between two old manors. Tolmers Park to the south was once connected to Hatfield Park and passed through various owners before being used as a military hospital and a girl's school in the 20th century. Since 1940, 40ha of it has been a scout camp, one of a planned but never quite realised ring of such camps around London, while the rest, having spent some time as an NHS geriatric hospital, is now luxury flats. The Bath stone church in the village was built to serve the estate in 1848 and was originally known as St Mary's Tolmers. In 1912 it was renamed St Mary's Ponsbourne, transferring its allegiance to the northern estate through which the route now passes.

The Hertfordshire Way, meanwhile, heads south and will eventually curve round to where we last left its southern reach just east of Abbots Langley -- but our encounters with this complex route are still not quite over. And as the HW leaves we pick up another route, this time unwaymarked though shown on OS maps -- the Hertfordshire Chain Walk. Developed by the East Herts Footpath Society in the 1980s, it's cleverly designed as a chain of circular walks that can also be followed as several alternative linear routes linking Crews Hill, just within the London boundary, and Royston, on Hertfordshire's northern boundary with Cambridgeshire. It provides the first mapped footpath link in a while direct to the London Loop at Clays Hill.

Ponsbourne Park was also carved from the manor of Hatfield and was in the hands of the family of the same name by the 13th century. 400 years later it was one of the extensive possessions of the Ferrers family, and came to be owned and later sold by Katherine Ferrers, married name Fanshawe (1634-60), whose alleged alter ego, the highwaywoman known as the Wicked Lady, terrorised travellers near Markyate. The house, perched dramatically on a steep hill rising up from a stream, was built in 1761. Since 1932 it's been a catholic boarding school, a country club, a management training centre for Tesco, and is now a hotel, restaurant and conference centre with sports facilities. Our way through follows an estate drive past tennis courts, an old walled garden and former service cottages.

Past the buildings, the track reaches the corner of a woodland, Calves Grove, where the Countryway crosses into the largest of Hertfordshire's district subdivisions, East Herts, a 1970s creation based on the towns of Bishops Stortford, Buntingford, Hertford, Sawbridgeworth and Ware. This is also where we dip into a corner of my own home parish of Bayford.

The route turns east to follow White Stubbs Lane, an old and still leafy country lane of some local importance, linking several villages. A short distance along, a low round brick structure in a field to the left reveals the route is crossing over the Ponsbourne Tunnel, in its day one of the biggest engineering challenges of one of the last great projects of the railway age. In 1871 the Great Northern Railway (GNR), whose original East Coast main line we have already crossed at Welham Green, opened a branch from Alexandra Palace to Enfield, and in 1910 this was extended to Cuffley. The intention was to continue this line via Hertford to rejoin the main line at Langley, south of Stevenage, including the 2.45km tunnel under the hill of Ponsbourne Park, to provide not only a further branch line but a relief route for expresses.

Work started in 1912 but progress was slow, interrupted by World War I, and the full loop didn't open until 1918; five years later, the GNR was incorporated into the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) as part of the government backed Grouping process that marked the start of large scale public intervention in the railways. The relief route function has remained an important one: in the late 1970s, before main line services were electrified, I remember noting InterCity 125 High Speed Trains diverted at weekends atop the splendid viaduct across the Lea on the edge of Hertford. The remarkably rural Bayford station, once my local station, is a relatively short walk off-route using a pleasant byway.

The Hertfordshire Chain Walk splits here on another link of chain, with one section going left along White Stubbs Lane towards Bayford and the other right on a returning link. We could follow the lane right all the way to Broxbourne, but then we'd miss our walk in the woods.

Broxbourne Woods National Nature Reserve (NNR) is the second NNR we've encountered on the Countryway, following Chobham Common. It's an impressively large, irregularly shaped sprawl of woodland -- the NNR itself, which is also designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), comprises 237ha in four separate patches, two owned by the county council and two by the Woodland Trust, but additional non-designated woodland, much of it also council owned, creates continuous tree cover over a much wider area. There's been some modern conifer planting, but there are deliciously extensive swathes of rich broadleaf woodland, with many old and often coppiced trees -- the reserve's signature tree is the squat hornbeam, which doesn't grow much further north than this, but there are also sessile oaks. The rich wildlife includes bluebells and other flowers in spring, and the rare Purple Emperor butterfly. A good footpath network includes the newly waymarked 17.5km Broxbourne Woods NNR Trail, a circular route linking all the important sites.

The Countryway joins that trail briefly as it cuts off White Stubbs Lane into the calm of the Woodland Trust's Wormley Wood, the largest of the four NNR patches. This is indisputably ancient woodland in the definition given above, but some of it may well not have been continuously wooded since the ice receded -- recent archaeological research has found much evidence of Roman settlement off Ermine Street, which runs nearby, and back then the area was likely a patchwork of agricultural fields and small woodlands coppiced for timber and firewood. Sometime after the retreat of Rome agriculture was abandoned and the trees recolonised the fields, surviving farming and development pressures until the present day. The current use of coppicing in the woods is known to go back at least three centuries.

The path crosses three steeply cut streams that feed a minor Lea tributary, Wormleybury Brook -- on the steepest of these I trip and twist my ankle on the wooden steps. The voice recorder I use to take notes as I walk is switched on at the time -- I consider uploading the audio file at this point in the text but decide I'd rather keep this blog as suitable for family audiences. Our route is a shorter one than the NNR Trail, but you could stick to the latter if you wanted to view the City of London coal post. The Chain Walk also continues on the NNR Trail, heading south for Goffs Oak and Crews Hill. The woodbanks where we cut off from the NNR Trail are thought to be the remains of a Bronze Age field system.

The two routes cross again at the southeast corner of Hertfordshire council's Bencroft Wood, also part of the NNR, but notably less dense and more dappled than Wormley Wood, with more spindly birch. Our route follows the wood's southern edge, here briefly picking up yet another section of the wandering Hertfordshire Way, part of an additional loop of that trail between Cuffley and Hertford via the Lea Valley. The Countryway soon leaves the NNR and the Hertfordshrie Way to cut across a field to the hamlet of Wormley West End, with its appropriately named pub, The Woodman. A post box and a village notice board form a catching composition along the lane, while the pub advertises a Country and Western evening, the sort of thing that might have caught the eye of film maker Patrick Keiller. Given the most common associations of the phrase "West End", the place is almost comically isolated, and yet, as the coal post testifies, it's well within the capital's shadow.

We leave the West End eastwards along its only lane -- the first path heading north looks useful on the map at first glance but is actually a dead end, and, thoughtfully, labelled as such on the ground with some additional wording on its waymark. A sign then welcomes us into another Hertfordshire district, the Borough of Broxbourne, "hosting the canoe slalom events for the 2012 Games." Note the conspicuous absence of the word "Olympic", which is jealously protected by the International Olympic Committee. I'll say more about the Games on future walks -- the next section of the Countryway passes right by the venue for the canoe events referred to on the sign.

The hedged-in byway that does take us north is more significant than it looks -- as a sign attests, it's part of the historic route of Ermine Street, the Roman road from London to Lincoln and York, and one of the earliest of the northbound trunk routes we've encountered on the journey so far. The original Latin name for the route isn't known -- the current name is Saxon and refers to a tribe, the Earningas, whose home territory was around Royston. Some sections of Ermine Street, which starts out from the City along Bishopsgate, continue in use as trunk roads the A10 and A1, but here the mediaeval Old North Road gravitated away from the Roman alignment onto a lower route along the Lea Valley, as we shall see.

Ermine Street will lead you out onto White Stubbs Lane again not far from Paradise Wildlife Park, formerly the notorious Broxbourne Zoo which was once condemned as the worst zoo in Britain for the conditions under which its animals were kept, though since 1986 much improved under new owners. But the Countryway cuts off eastwards again at White Stubbs Farm through the hamlet of Carneles Green, wiggling along cinder trails in small fields overlooked by a very posh looking new red brick mansion. It reaches the fields above Baas Manor Farm, right on the lip of the Lee Valley with airy and distant views across to Essex on the other side. Along the way I pass a rather worn waymark for a Broxbourne council circular walk, which although non-standard cleverly incorporates the black pointed stripes of a badger's face, echoing the borough logo -- the name, of course, means "badger's stream".

From here we descend to the informal open space of Baas Hill Common with its woods and grassland, nowa popular local picnic spot. It was one of a number of parcels of land from the former Broxbournebury estate which were dedicated for public use under an 1890 Act of Parliament, presumably after a local struggle against overdevelopment, and since then has been managed by trustees, now in partnership with the council. I always used to assume the name was something to do with the Dutch word baas, 'boss', but it actually derives from the name of a 13th century Lord of the Manor, Henry de Baa.

The route emerges onto White Stubbs Lane again just where it crosses the A10 on a road bridge. This sunken dual carriageway is the current successor to the Old North Road. When the principle route from London to the northeast shifted westwards through Hatfield a few centuries back, as described at Bell Bar above, the old alignment through the Lee Valley, paralleling and sometimes following the southern stretch of Ermine Street, remained in use as a through route, but with its main destination deflected to Cambridge and on through the Fens to Kings Lynn. When the trunk route system was introduced in the 1920s, this route was designated A10, and in the next decade a lengthy section south of here, between Tottenham and Turnford, was deflected slightly westwards onto a new dual carriageway named the Great Cambridge Road. In the late 1970s this bypass was extended to north of Ware via the road that's now beneath our feet -- this section is sometimes also referrred to by the 1930s name.

The A10 neatly marks the edge of town and country here, and on the other side, we're in London, if London is defined as the area of continuous urban development centred on the City and Westminster. The housing here is part of a long finger of built up area that reaches up the west side of the valley from Enfield as far as Hoddesdon, where a sliver of countryside separates it from Hertford and Ware. It's a textbook example of the phenomenon of ribbon development along a line of communication -- in this case the Lee and the roads and railways that parallel it -- which so offends the champions of good town planning. Indeed it was one of the examples used to spur the introduction of stronger planning laws in the postwar period that have since constrained the capital's growth. It's also the only stretch of continuous London sprawl on the Countryway, though in a close-run contest: the open country that separates West Byfleet and Kings Langley from London is painfully thin.

Officially, London stops at the edge of Enfield, just south of Waltham Cross, where the boundary roughly follows the M25. North of there is the Hertfordshire borough of Broxbourne. But, as hinted by the presence of a coal post in Wormley Wood, earlier attempts to draw the limits of London's administrative power have reached out further, and the remnants of historic boundaries persisted round here until the creation of the Greater London Authority in 2000.

At the beginning of the 19th century, England still had a post-feudal system of local administration evolved to suit the needs of a mainly rural country dotted with market towns and cathedral cities. The land was divided into counties based on feudal ownership and old tribal boundaries, but without the general administrative powers counties have today. The historic urban settlements were largely self-governing boroughs and cities, surrounded by but largely independent from the counties. Public life and work in the countryside was largely down to the Lord of the Manor or the church-based parishes and parish vestries.

London, meanwhile, was already a couple of centuries into its characteristic pattern of infill and ribbon development, spilling from the square mile of the City, already the economic hub, across the bridge and along both sides of the Thames and decisively filling the gap with Westminster, the royal and administrative capital. On John Rocque's famous map of 1745 the sprawl reaches to Rotherhithe, Walworth, Nine Elms, Chelsea, Marylebone, Sadlers Wells, Mile End and Shadwell, with tendrils already extending off the map along main roads such as Knightsbridge (A4), Upper Street (A1), Kingsland Road (A10) and Mile End Road (A11). By the early 19th century it had overtaken Paris to become the biggest city in the world, but though functioning de facto as a single metropolis, still lacked a single coordinated authority. The Cities of London and Westminster and the Borough of Southwark (the last two then considerably smaller than the modern local authorities of the same name), retained their traditional self-governing status.

The rest fell within the counties of Middlesex, Surrey and Kent, where public services remained the responsibility of parish vestries, now struggling from the increasing burdens placed upon them not only by their inhabitants but by increasing obligations under government social legislation such as the Poor Laws.

Other than the national government at Westminster, the only institution powerful enough to flex its municipal muscles across the whole urban area was the City of London. The City Corporation had long held some powers outside its own boundaries, for example controlling the Port of London along the length of the river from its upper tidal limit, for centuries at Staines but moved to Teddington when the lock at the latter opened in 1811, to a point way out in the estuary that was once reached to the mouth of the Medway but was fixed in 1851 at Gravesend. The City was interested in creating flourishing conditions for trade and industry; the government was more concerned with law and order. It's significant, given the building social pressures of London's growth and the emergence of dense areas of urban poverty, that the government got there first with a classic social containment measure: the creation of Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police as a professional, state organised police force for the capital in 1829.

The Met were initally empowered to police an area roughly corresponding to a 7-mile/11km radius from Charing Cross, but only a decade later this was extended to 15 miles/24km. The actual boundary itself was an irregular one, largely following parish boundaries, and was tweaked several times, but it already extended out to Erith, Orpington, Epsom, Staines and Bushey, and included Cheshunt. In 1974 it was extended to the whole of Broxbourne. But in the matter of policing, the historic rivalry between the City and the Palace of Westminster went the former's way: even today, the Met's powers don't extend to the city, which has its own City of London Police, founded in 1839.

In 1845 the City got its own opportunity to draw a line round London using its rights of taxation, which dated back to mediaeval times. Historically, important bulk commodities like coal had been delivered mainly by boat, with very few practical landing points, making shipments relatively easy to control and tax. But with the development of alternative modes of transport, the possible entry points multiplied enormously. An 1845 Act gave the City Corporation the power to tax coal entering within a radius of 20 miles/32km as the crow flies of the Post Office headquarters at St Martins Le Grand. This is an extensive area stretching to Northfleet near Gravesend, Redhill, Staines, Slough, St Albans and Brentwood, in places not far off the line transcribed by the Countryway. The Corporation set about demarcating this territory by erecting marker posts -- the now familiar coal posts -- where roads, railways and canals crossed its boundary. The exact definition of the boundary proved controversial, with the City sometimes accused of exceeding its powers, and in 1861 Parliament got the last laugh when the line was redrawn to match the notably smaller but better defined Metropolitan Police District. The coal posts were moved correspondingly and new ones installed -- a total of around 280, of which 210 survive, not all in their original locations.

Back at Westminster, the need for some more unified and rational public approach to managing London was becoming increasingly apparent, and especially the need for an infrastructure appropriate to this step change in the scale of urbanism. While the City was happy to collect taxes far out into the shires, it resisted all moves to expand the traditional boundaries in which it provided general public services. In 1835 local government reforms saw all other major towns and cities in England and Wales becoming municipal boroughs with elected councils, but attempts to extend this to London were resisted by the wealthy inhabitants of Westminster and Marylebone, no doubt fearing the swamping of their interests by those less fortunate than themselves.

The true forerunner of modern local government in London finally arrived in 1855, with the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works, an appointed rather than elected body with powers limited to infrastructure projects such as roads and sewers. In the latter case it came too late to save London from the Great Stink of 1858 when a combination of warm weather and the concentration of untreated sewage in the Thames made life in central London near unbearable. The sewage system and some of the landmark structures that contained it, including the Victoria and Albert Embankments, were ultimately one of the MBW's greatest achievements and we'll encounter plenty of evidence of them later in London underfoot.

The boundary chosen for the MBW had a curious origin -- it encompassed the area defined on a parish basis as the 'Metropolis' by the General Registrar's Office for birth and death statistics, which had been collected regularly in London since an outbreak of plague in 1602, under a system originally known as the Bills of Mortality. It had a rather irregular shape, stretching on the south bank beyond Woolwich to modern-day Thamesmead, and encompassing Sydenham, Tooting, Putney, Hammersmith, Maida Vale, Hampstead, Finsbury Park and Stoke Newington before following the Lee downstream to the Thames again at Blackwall. It just about enclosed the urban area as it was at the time, but London was already starting to grow beyond it -- 1855 also saw the opening of the first phase of the Royal Docks on Plaistow Levels east of the Lee.

As the MBW was being created, an entirely independent but ultimately highly pervasive definition of London was being devised right at the hub of the City's original Coal Tax area at Martins Le Grand. The Royal Mail was one of many agencies struggling with London's lack of clearly defined boundaries and its ever-growing web of streets, not all of them uniquely named. In 1856 the Postmaster General first introduced the London Postal District, originally an area of 12 miles/19km radius from St Martins split into ten divisions lettered after the initials of compass points and 'C' for Central. A decade later, the District boundary was revised into a more defined but irregular shape, the original NE division was merged with E and the S division split between SE and SW to give the still familiar eight London postal districts of E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC. In 1917 these were further split into numbered sectors, creating the now common verbal currency of WC1, E17, NW3 and the rest. Familiarity with these is one of the things marking out the true Londoner, but I doubt the people who drew them up ever considered that young men might be beaten up, stabbed or shot for living in the wrong one.

This system allowed much more spreading room for London, stretching considerably beyond the MBW area to Norwood, Wimbledon, Barnes, Ealing, Southgate, Chingford, Walthamstow and East Ham. But although it made things easier for posties, its lack of correspondence to municipal boundaries ultimately had the effect of confusing the public even further about where London started and ended, as we shall see.

The MBW survived until 1889 when, dogged by corruption scandals and challenged by the glaringly obvious need for a more general purpose muncipal body, it was replaced by the first London-wide elected body, the London County Council, the biggest such authority of its day, with housing, planning, education and the tram network added to the remit it inherited from its predecessor. Despite the fact that the urban area had grown considerably further in the intervening decades, the LCC inherited the MBW boundary, with significant chunks of the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, and a smaller chunk of Kent, now completely transferred to LCC control. However the full introduction of an elected two tier system of local government, largely complete throughout Britain by the end of the 19th century, came late to London. The patchwork of parish vestries and local boards responsible for delivering many routine public services persisted until 1900, when they were replaced by 28 Metropolitan Boroughs. The City still held out successfully for its own privileges, remaining largely immune from the imposition of authority from the LCC's new County Hall on the south bank just downstream of Westminster Bridge, though inevitably having to work with the LCC in practice.

But continuous urban development had already spread well beyond the LCC's territory, shaped by nothing more than the convenience and maximum profit of private developers, and the council had neither the teeth nor the will to check it. The term 'Greater London', to designate the effective extent of the metropolis in terms of continuous urban growth and internal communication, came into common use. By the beginning of the new century this Greater London had a population of 6.5million, only a million less than today, extending not only further into Middlesex, Surrey and Kent but into Essex and Hertfordshire. By 1914 it was reaching out tendrils towards Croydon, Kingston, Hounslow, Enfield and Romford, and threatening Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. The Lee Valley was for long the most outstanding example of ribbon development: look at maps of the growth of the builtup area over the 19th and early 20th century and in all of them you can see that spike sticking straight up from the northeast like a broken finger from the capital's fist. And with the rapid development of good, fast transport that enabled commuting and the free movement of goods, the metropolis exerted its influence on a hinterland that now extended far beyond its own brick and tarmac.

The need to coordinate and integrate that transport network, originally developed by private and local initiative, now threw up yet another view of the capital's reach. In 1933, the Underground, trams and buses, but not the main line railways, were placed under the control of a publicly appointed body, the London Passenger Transport Board, the first of several such bodies that operated under the more familiar name London Transport, normally written in the distinctive Johnston typeface in the bar of the familiar roundel logo. The board had powers in an area roughly 30 miles/48km from Charing Cross. Stretched like a rough oval on its north-south axis, it reached far beyond not only the County of London but the much bigger Met Police District. LT had a monopoly of services from almost as far north as Buntingford to almost as far south as Horley, in an area that included Gravesend, Sevenoaks, Guildford, Slough, Amersham, Harpenden, Harlow and Brentwood, and was empowered to run services beyond this area to Horsham, Tring and Bishops Stortford, and along spurs to places as far out as Maidenhead, West Wycombe, Aylesbury, Royston and Tunbridge Wells. The outer section of this, from places like Dartford, Chelsham, Slough, Watford and Epping outwards, was operated from the post-war period as London Transport's "Country Area", with green-liveried vehicles rather than the familiar urban red.

By this time the growth of London was becoming a popular concern. The newly minted conservationist and countryside movements bemoaned its blight on the surrounding landscape. Reformers, social campaigners and conscience-stricken medical professionals drew attention to the apalling environments of its dense inner districts and their impact on public health, the quality of life and social cohesion. Between the wars development had spurted again, but the state was beginning the struggle to control it: the earliest Green Belt legislation dates from 1938. In the world of planning as in so many areas of life, World War II changed everything, first interrupting all existing trends and, as peace approached, offering the opportunity to start again.

Patrick Abercrombie's aspirational Greater London Plan of 1944, a characteristic document of its time, considers the current structure of London as a series of concentric rings. In the centre is the London County Council area, by then unchanged for almost a century. Around is a rather fragmented "inner urban ring" of development as dense as the LCC zone, filling out Stratford, East and West Ham and the Royal Docks and Tottenham, reaching out to Willesden, Southall and Mitcham and with an exclave around Croydon. Next comes a "suburban ring", the rim of which attempts to pick its way alongside the inner edges significant remaining areas of open space like the sliver of farmland between Chadwell Heath and Romford or the Yeading Valley between Northolt and Hillingdon. These areas are included in the next ring, the Green Belt ring, which includes some substantial towns in their own right such as Dartford, Sevenoaks, Redhill, Watford and Romford and almost washes to Woking, Windsor, St Albans, Hertford and Brentwood.

Beyond this Abercrombie considers an "Outer Country" ring that falls within London's shadow, incorporating the rest of Hertfordshire and Surrey; Windsor in Berkshire; Buckinghamshire out to Eton, High Wycombe and Amersham; Luton in Bedfordshire; Essex out to Epping, Ongar and Billericay and downriver to Thames Haven; and Gravesend in Kent. Within this extensive region Abercrombie imagines a rational and planned metropolis with populations redistibuted from dense and unhealthy inner areas to greener suburbs interspersed with countryside, knitted together with a coherent transport network, even including a web of trunk footpaths drawn up by the Ramblers, of which more in a later piece.

While Abercrombie's blueprint was almost entirely abandoned due to lack of resources and political vision, London did stop growing, and the urban edge today is largely as it was when prime minister Neville Chamberlain made his fateful broadcast announcing war with Germany in 1939. But London's local government remained locked within a long outgrown boundary for several more decades. Not for the last time, a decision to tinker with London boundaries was driven by party politics. The Conservative governments of the 1950s were irritated that the solidly urban complexion of the LCC's territory appeared to guarantee a perpetual Labour majority, which might be broken if the more middle class suburbs were brought in. For some of the inhabitants of those suburbs, the opportunity to bolster the vote of metropolitan Tories paled under the imagined threat of subsidising the great unwashed of Lambeth and Stepney with hiked-up rates, and they fought hard to resist it.

The political horse trading with the representatives of concerned ratepayers and agressively sentimental advocates of historical boundaries explains why the Greater London that emerged in 1964 has such a peculiar boundary. The original proposals had included most of the continuous builtup area but chopped off a few ribbon extremities, including Broxbourne. Others that really ought to have been in, like Sunbury, Staines and Potters Bar, successfully campaigned to stay out. Dartford, Caterham, Ewell, Weybridge and Watford were excluded for other reasons, while significant swathes of genuine countryside south of Bromley and north and east of Upminster were in. Middlesex was wiped entirely from the map as an adminstrative entity, with a few remaining oddments handed to neighbouring counties. Hertfordshire got Fortress Potters Bar but lost territory elsewhere to London for the first time. Sunbury and Staines, despite being on the north bank for the Thames, went to Surrey, a county previously wholly south of the river. But Surrey lost much more ground to London, including even its administrative centre of Kingston -- the anomaly of Surrey County Council being based outside its own territory persists to today. London also took a major bite out of Essex for the first time, and a further bite out of Kent.

Within Greater London a new patchwork of internal boroughs was created, with much amalgamation in the old LCC boroughs, to create 32 new ones, with the City doggedly remaining a special case. The boroughs' responsibilities were upgraded while the new Greater London Council was a more strategic body. But the distinction between the old Inner London boroughs and the new Outer London ones persisted in terms of differing responsibilities. Most notably, a new body, the Inner London Education Authority, took over the education responsibilities of the LCC independenty of the GLC, while the Outer London boroughs had to establish their own educational provision.

There have been two major changes since. The GLC in turn became too dominated by Labour politicians for Tory tastes and Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government abolished it in 1986, its functions taken over by the boroughs and various quangos -- for a while London was only defined on the map as a single place by not being part of the counties around it. ILEA went shortly afterwards, and now all the boroughs do their own education. In 1999 Tony Blair's Labour government restored a unified authority to London but in a unique form, and with broad strategic responsibilities, with an elected London Assembly and directly elected Mayor. The official boundary of London has remained unaffected, as have the borough boundaries, though the City has been better integrated into the system than it was before. Yet there are still minor statutory differences between the Inner and Outer London boroughs: of particular interest to walkers is that the former are the only remaining authorities in England with no duty to produce definitive maps of off-road footpaths. Apart from the odd tweak here and there, the old plague monitoring line can still be traced around the Inner London boroughs on the official map.

For all its problems, the 1964 boundary has proved remarkably resilient and some of the other lines around London have since been adjusted to correspond to it. In 1970 the GLC was given control of the core of London Transport -- the Underground and the 'London' bus operations. The 'Country' buses became London Country, a new subsidiary of the publically-owned National Bus Company. The division between red and green buses already corresponded remarkably closely to the GLC boundary, but it's rarely operationally convenient simply to stop transport services at boundaries so numerous cross-boundary arrangements with surrounding counties have operated since. This is notably the case with the Underground: the Metropolitan Line extends far out to Amersham and Chesham, the legacy of its private predecessor's main line ambitions as discussed at Great Missenden a few sections back. The Central Line spills into the Epping Forest district of Essex, as we'll discover in the next section.

In 1981 LT's area of operation took on a very public face on the introduction of the zonal fare system with its bus passes and Travelcards. The outer boundary of the system corresponded fairly closely to the GLC boundary with the odd tweak to accommodate a stray bus stop, but tube travel on the entire Central Line including the Essex bits was included. The outer reaches of the Met line had special fares: they've long been treated as extra mini-zones. The GLC 'Fares Fair' policy launched with the zones placed transport at the heart of London's politics, making a household name of then-GLC leader Ken Livingstone, and it's remained there since. LT was removed from political control post-GLC and forced to privatise its bus operations (though mercifully permitted to continue regulating them), but is now, as Transport for London (TfL), an agency of the Mayor, with much enhanced responsibilities, including strategic development of walking and cycling and a long-coveted role in National Rail. The Met's mini-zones have since extended with the incorporation of Watford into the London Overground network of former National Rail local lines.

The 1964 boundary still didn't quite fill the Metropolitan Police District, except in Romford and Hornchurch, now in Greater London but previously not in the MPD, which was extended to incoporate them. The anomaly of the Met policing areas outside Greater London persisted so long as the Met continued to be unique among police forces in Britain in directly answering only to the UK Home Secretary with no local authority involvement. This changed in 2000 with the creation of the Metropolitan Police Authority, part of the Greater London Authority, chaired by the Mayor and appointed partly from London Assembly members, at which point the MPD was brought into line with the GLA boundary and its former territories outside London transferred to the relevant county police forces. The City, of course, continues to have its own force.

The Royal Mail, meanwhile, persisted in confusing us all. The current two-part postcode system, capable of pinpointing a delivery point to a short stretch of street or even a single building, was launched nationally in 1967 and completed in 1974, but rather than adapt it to match the newly enlarged Greater London, the Royal Mail clung to its exising London postal district, incorporating all the old codes as the first "words" of the new system. In the areas of Greater London outside the district new "post towns" were created with no reference to the London boundary. The Enfield EN code, for example, extends to Broxbourne, while many parts of the London Borough of Bexley have a DA code for the Kent town of Dartford. To make matters worse, the Royal Mail insisted quite unnecessarily that "correct postal addresses" for post towns considered to be outside big cities included a county name. In the case of Greater London outside the London postal district, the old county names were to be retained, including the now-abolished Middlesex.

During the 1990s when several further county councils were abolished in the process of creating unitary authorities outside big cities, the Royal Mail finally admitted that there was no need for a county name so long as a full postcode was included in an address. But old habits die hard, and there are still many inhabitants of Outer London boroughs with one part of their brain that believes they live in Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex or Surrey no matter what it says on their council tax bill. Contrast this to a more rational country like France, where postcodes match administrative communes and even car registration plates follow a nationally recognised local authority numbering system.

And so back to Broxbourne, no longer perhaps as much a part of London as it once was now it's lost its London buses and London coppers, but still a place in which the capital very much shapes everyday life. On the other side of the A10 there's yet another encounter with the Hertfordshire Way, heading down into the valley after its own exploration of Broxbourne Woods. Soon the route temporarily dodges back into green again, another improvement since Chesterton wrote his guidebook. Top Field and Cozens Grove Local Nature Reserve (LNR), dedicated in 2005, is a wildflower meadow sweeping down to a small strip of ancient hornbeam woodland, and where we enter at its highest point there's a spectacular view towards the valley. In 2009 it won a Green Pennant award, the equivalent of a Green Flag for community managed open spaces. A plaque records that on 5 December 2009, local people planted over 200 trees in one hour here. The earth bank you follow in the woodland is thought to be the remains of an old drove road.

Emerging from the wood, the route joins the New River Path, and shortly afterwards crosses the New River itself. There will be lots more to say about the New River and its rather dreamlike environs, with their odd little buildings and green railings, when we explore the path that follows it on a future London underfoot walk. But I can't resist saying what all tour and walk leaders and guidebook writers love saying about the New River -- that's it's neither new nor a river, but an artificial watercourse opened in 1613 to bring drinking water from springs near Hertford to London. Between Hertford and Stoke Newington the watercourse remains in use as part of London's water supply system. Beyond this it's been abandoned, though most of the its course survives as a green strip and the occasional water feature. The 45km New River Path, developed in stages from the 1990s, follows the full original length, often using waterside maintenance paths and a southern "heritage section" on streets and park paths, to the original New River Head at Thames Water's headquarters at Sadlers Wells near Islington. Here it gives another link to the London Loop at Hilly Fields Park, Enfield.

The route turns north along High Road Broxbourne, the route of the mediaeval Old North Road or Cambridge Road, until the late 1970s the A10 trunk road between London, Ware and Cambridge but now a relatively busy local road numbered A1170. Broxbourne may now give its name to the whole district but it was once a relatively small settlement along the main road and has largely been lost in the sprawl, without a single, clear focus. The Norman manor belonged to the Knights Hospitallers and was sold to a man named John Cock after the Dissolution -- his name survives in local street names.

This stretch of the road runs through he New River Conservation Area, which boasts a number of noteworthy old buildings -- a short heritage trail is downloadable from the council website. On the left we pass the 16th century Yew Tree Cottage at number 172, and next door but on at number 168, the 17th century Bridge House. Both are timber framed buildings that are now Grade II listed. The latter stands immediately beside the bridge taking the High Road over the New River, dating from the 1840s though subsequently strengthened.

At the bridge the Countryway picks up the waterside path along the New River itself, through pleasant playing fields lined with rows of mature trees, now in the Broxbourne Conservation Area. There's a curious benchmark alongside the path reading "ft ins" with no indication of the actual measurement -- I'd guess this is a 1950s vintage Ordnance Survey mark. The most prominent feature is St Augustine's Church, probably the oldest building in Broxbourne, with its chunky three stage tower: this mainly dates from the 15th century though there is a 12th century marble font from an earlier church inside. This section of the Countryway ends on the edge of the playing fields, where the New River goes under Station Road, just before this road crosses two bridges over the railway to Nazeing in Essex.

Broxbourne station is only a little further along the New River Path, or the step-free approach road. The original station here dates from 1840 when the Northern and Eastern Railway opened the first stage of a line along the Lee and Stort Valleys from Stratford, on the Eastern Counties Railway line from Bishopsgate, to Bishops Stortford and on to Cambridge. For over a year Broxbourne was the northern terminus until the line was extended, with a branch continuing along the Lee towards Hertford opened in 1843. In 1862 the NER and ECR were united into the Great Eastern Railway, and a decade later the GER opened a connection from its Lee Valley lines via Hackney Downs and Bethnal Green to its City terminal at Liverpool Street. As the lines split both to the north and south of Broxbourne, the station as an interchange between services, and though most trains now serve Liverpool Street, a regular service to the original terminus at Stratford has been running again in recent years. This group of lines is often known by the rather clumsy name "West Anglia" to distinguish them from the "East Anglia" lines continuing east and northeast from Liverpool Street and Stratford t0 Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich, but all these services are now operated by National Express East Anglia.

The station was rebuilt on the present site, a little back from Station Road, in 1959-1960, in the clean, rectangular modernist architecture of the time, and is one of the few post-war stations to earn a listing for its distinctiveness. I've long memories of the waiting room, conveniently placed for spotting connections on the bridge above the platforms, though the murals have changed, with beat age abstracts replaced by colourful depictions of train travel around the world.

At the end of this section the Hertfordshire Way follows the New River Path northwards towards Rye House, then on along the Lea Valley Path to Hertford -- finally the last we'll see of this complex trail. We're now literally a few metres from the Hertfordshire/Essex boundary, the valley floor and the river Lee itself, and the extraordinary Lee Valley Regional Park, all of which and more we'll be exploring in the next section.

View London Countryway in a larger map

Download a route description (PDF)

More information

Hertfordshire County Council http://www.hertsdirect.org

Hertfordshire Tourist Information http://www.hertsdirect.org/com/directory/comvol/infoad2y/intour3y/

Hertfordshire countryside and rights of way http://www.hertsdirect.org/envroads/environment/countryside/

lovetomove lovetowalk - getting Herts moving http://www.lovetomove.org.uk/love-to-move/love-to-walk

Walking in Herts http://www.walkinginherts.co.uk/

Friends of the Hertfordshire Way http://www.fhw.org.uk/

Welwyn Hatfield Council http://www.welhat.gov.uk

Welwyn Hatfield Cycling and Walking http://www.welhat.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=331

Welwyn Hatfield Landscapes and Countryside http://www.welhat.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1025

Welwyn Hatfield Tourism and Travel http://www.welhat.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=320

North Mymms Parish Council http://www.northmymmspc.org.uk/

Watling Chase Community Forest http://www.hertslink.org/cms/getactive/placestovisit/watlingchase

Welham Green http://www.welhamgreen.com

East Coast main line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_Main_Line

A1000 (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1000_road

Brookmans Park http://www.brookmans.com

Brookmans Park transmitting station (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookmans_Park_Transmitter

Hatfield Town Council http://www.hatfield-herts.gov.uk/

Hertfordshire Chain Walk (LDWA) http://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?path_id=208

East Herts Footpath Society (Herts Direct) http://www.hertsdirect.org/comdirectory/comvol/sport2y/spoutb3y/spwalk4y/545371

St Marys Church Ponsbourne (Hartford Hundred West) http://hartfordhundred.org.uk/ponsb.php

Ponsbourne Park http://www.ponsbourne-park-hertford.co.uk/

East Herts Council http://www.eastherts.gov.uk

East Herts Walking http://www.eastherts.gov.uk/index.jsp?articleid=9768

East Herts Parks, Open Spaces and Countryside Access http://www.eastherts.gov.uk/index.jsp?articleid=10072

East Herts Tourism http://www.eastherts.gov.uk/index.jsp?articleid=9495

Bayford Parish Council http://www.begesford.co.uk

Hertford Loop Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertford_Loop_Line

Brickendon Liberty Parish Council (including footpath map) http://www.brickendon-liberty.org.uk

Paradise Wildlife Park http://www.pwpark.com/

Broxbourne Woods NNR (Natural England) http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/designatedareas/nnr/1005000.aspx

Broxbourne Woods NNR (Hertsdirect, including walkers' map) http://www.hertsdirect.org/envroads/environment/countryside/placestovisit/13060152/

Wormley Wood & Nut Wood (Woodland Trust) http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/our-woods/Pages/wood-details.aspx?wood=4067

Borough of Broxbourne http://www.broxbourne.gov.uk

Borough of Broxbourne Walks http://www.broxbourne.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/walks.aspx

Borough of Broxbourne Parks http://www.broxbourne.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/parks.aspx

Borough of Broxbourne Visit Broxbourne http://www.broxbourne.gov.uk/community_and_living/visit_broxbourne.aspx

Ermine Street (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ermine_Street

Baas Hill Common, Wormley Top Field and Cozens Grove See Broxbourne parks under Smaller parks

A10 (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A10_road_%28England%29

New River (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_%28England%29

New River Action Group http://www.newriver.org.uk

New River Path (LDWA) http://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?path_name=New+River+Path

New River Conservation Area (Borough of Broxbourne) http://www.broxbourne.gov.uk/PDF/PP%20-%20NewRiverConservation-Leaflet.pdf

St Augustine's Church Broxbourne http://www.broxbournewithwormley.org.uk/

Lee Valley Park http://www.leevalleypark.org.uk/

Lee Valley Park walks: Ware to Waltham Abbey http://www.leevalleypark.org.uk/en/content/cms/leisure/40_routes/ware_to_waltham_abbe/ware_to_waltham_abbe.aspx

Lea Valley Walk http://www.leavalleywalk.org.uk/

West Anglia Main Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Anglia_Main_Line

London Countryway 11: St Albans - Welham Green

2010-05-31T11:19:00.051+01:00

I apologise for the temporary lack of photos on this post. This was due to bad file management, but it does at least give me an excuse to do the walk again.

One way of looking at the London Countryway is as an exploration, and even a celebration, of the Metropolitan Green Belt, one of the package of post-World War II planning innovations that shaped contemporary England. The Green Belt, more than any other measure, has locked London within the physical limits it had reached by the outbreak of war in 1939. Until then, growth of urban areas in Britain was largely unconstrained, driven by individual landowners and developers, spreading out from the centre to engulf formerly separate towns and villages and then shooting out tendrils of "ribbon development" along lines of communication into the countryside of surrounding counties. This unchecked tumour-like development continued into an era in which comparable European countries had long reined in such tendencies through planning controls to create more rational cities -- the resulting difference in character is obvious today.

The idea of a green belt around London goes back to at least the 17th century, when it could have run a mere 3km out from the centre, and was also championed in the early 20th century by members of the Garden City movement and the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE, now the Campaign to Protect Rural England). The then London County Council adopted a tentative scheme in the 1930s, but it was following 1944's Greater London Plan and the inclusion of green belts in the 1948 Town and Country Planning Act that they became established as a key planning tool not just for London but for other British cities. Subsequent legislation has refined and strengthened Green Belt principles and they have been extended not only to the other big conurbations like Birmingham and Glasgow but to smaller historic cities like Oxford and York.

Green Belts are an apparently simple idea that have captured the public imagination -- they probably enjoy the widest public awareness of any planning tool, but they're also widely misunderstood. Ask most people what they know about Green Belts and they will probably say something about protecting countryside around cities, and perhaps mention something about "green lungs" or conservation and recreation. But the original and still the first purpose of Green Belts is much more about the shape and form of the cities they encircle than the inherent value of the land they enclose. As stated in the current government planning advice to local councils, Green Belts have five purposes:

to check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;
to prevent neighbouring towns from merging into one another;
to assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;
to preserve the setting and special character of historic towns;
to assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land.

The purpose of safeguarding countryside was a late addition, added in 1988. From the start, Green Belts were much more about "shaping the expansion of a city on a regional scale", as a government planning leaflet put it in 1962, initially in line with a model that envisaged limiting further development of big cities within existing bounds on the expectation that populations would disperse to those New Towns beyond the Green Belt which, as I remarked when we first entered Hertfordshire, the Countryway has so studiously avoided. The urban regeneration purpose, another addition from a later era that witnessed the decline of city-based heavy industry, reflects an often unfulfilled hope that developers prevented from building in the Green Belt will turn instead to brownfield post-industrial sites within the city itself.

So no matter what the public might think, the planning philosophy behind the Green Belt is one that has little positive to say about green belt land as such, only that it's open and rural, probably agricultural and not put to "urban" uses. The principle virtue of designated land is that it's non-urban, a thick boundary of "un-city" defining the form of the city it encloses with the certainty and clarity of a fat green highlighter pen. The compelling need to define that urban boundary with such certainty seems as much an aesthetic and psychological need as a practical planning one -- towns and cities become what they are through their boundaries, and a city like London has splurged too far, leading us to agonise over which bit is London and which bit is not. This reaches a new level in the "setting and character of historic towns" purpose, written for the likes of Oxford and York, where the surrounding countryside is reduced almost to a painted backdrop, offsetting a city forever fixed as a composition in built heritage.

Note there is no mention in the purposes of recreation, biodiversity, public health or other potential benefits of Green Belt land in itself. There have been various proposals to extend the guidance -- in the early 1990s, for example, then Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine suggested including supporting quiet recreation and enhancing the natural beauty of the countryside, but this was rejected. There's no argument that in practice the Green Belt has protected huge swathes of land, including pretty much everything we've enjoyed on the London Countryway, which otherwise would undoubtedly have been inundated with ugly suburban sprawl. This in turn has supported city dwellers' access to the benefits of green space, as I'm encouraging you to exercise on this walk. But these outcomes are almost incidental to a process that's more focused on establishing city boundaries.

At worst, the Green Belt could encourage vacuous bands of bland and unwelcoming countryside that's minimally open and green, a tendency exacerbated by changes in agriculture and the rural economy that has seen the emergence of large and intensive farms owned by big commercial groups and tended by only a handful of workers. This has resulted not only in depopulation but in big demographic changes which are immediately obvious when walking the route -- the farmhouses, farm workers' cottages and even many former commercial buildings such as pubs and shops have mutated into luxury homes guarded by 4x4's and, too often, nasty dogs, with inhabitants that spend most of their working day in London. Big stretches of farmland have been converted to serve this market, becoming stables and -- worse -- that ultimate suburbanised countryside, the golf course, the most intensive of land uses permitted by Green Belt policy. The best-looking villages have been preserved not as vibrant mixed communities but as monuments to be admired by the sort of well-heeled, cut-glass-accented nimby that stereotypically supports the CPRE. The public transport network has withered, especially since privatisation in the 1980s. The descendants of farm labourers have been squeezed by declining social housing, rocketing propery prices and lack of work: most have moved to the city, while those that remain, are squeezed into "pockets of rural deprivation" on crumbling old council estates, looking forward to the twice-weekly bus.

It's been left largely to other projects to put green belt land to more positive and human use in the interests both of recreation and conservation: the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the Community Forests, the Regional Parks and various nature reserves, Country Parks, Environmental Stewardship schemes and National Trust and Woodland Trust properties. Of course there are those that insist the countryside is a workplace, not a giant park for gawping townies -- but their assumptions are the best part of a century out of date. 90% of us now live in towns and cities, and the countryside immediately adjoining them simply wouldn't be here today if it hadn't been for planning policies that blocked development. What countryside remains, in common with all the other agricultural land in Britain, has long been subsidised to the hilt with both direct payments and tax breaks, even before the UK signed up to the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy. I'm personally of the view that private land ownership is something of an ethical obscenity, but even a staunch Daily Telegraph reader would find difficulty resisting the argument that the average taxpayer has paid their admission charge many times over. And I'm not saying I'd want all of it to look as managed and interpreted for the public as, say, the Lea Valley Park, which we'll be traversing in a couple of section's time, but the remaining bland and unwelcoming bits do enrage me.

The Green Belt has also been criticised for being ineffective in reinforcing rational development within the urban area. Rather than redeveloping urban sites, some developers have preferred to leapfrog the Green Belt and create dispersed, car-dependent communities beyond it. There have long been calls for a more rational and integrated planning policy, but it's more likely to come under attack by piecemeal attrition. The latest proposals by the current Coalition government are to allow small developments within the Green Belt without a planning enquiry if they are supported by 80% of a local community -- which sounds a good idea, and might result in some increase in affordable rural housing, better local services and economic sustainability, but commercial vultures with their eye on the executive commuter market will also be circling.

The fetish for a clear division between urban and rural zones, the yearning for a city outline seen so clearly in Green Belt policy, also deserves some examining. I suspect it has helped delay and muffle the realisation that cities too can and should be green and liveable places, and has contributed to the appalling record on looking after and investing in urban green space and parks. We have a poor record of making good use of space in cities. Postwar development plans, written when the stench of atrocious slums had only just been covered by dust raised by the Luftwaffe's bombs, start from the premise that urban "overcrowding" is a problem in itself and envision displacing populations to garden cities with much lower densities, not realising how this in itself fed social dislocation and, eventually, car dependency. In recent years the realisation has finally dawned that dense mixed use neighbourhoods provide some of the vital qualities of city living, so long as the quality and amenities are high. But there's still plenty of wasted space. In an ideal world I would like to see much more mingling of urban and rural and a blurring of those lines, with large and even farmed green spaces within historic cities, and denser and better connected development in rural areas. London isn't a city with mountains in the middle of it, like Edinburgh or Hong Kong, but still the occasional discovery of a fragment of countryside within the urban space itself will provide one of the highlights of future walks.

The London Countryway's creator Keith Chesterton chose to navigate St Albans by relentlessly tracking the Green Belt: the route approaches through Verulamium Park, clips the edge of the built up area and tracks a roughly bell shaped curve through the Green Belt around the north and east of the city, avoiding the centre. There are more direct possibilities including crossing the historic centre on a street-based route, or picking up the Alban Way, the disused railway line that starts near St Albans Abbey station and meets Chesterton's route again at Smallford. Here I've stayed faithful to Chesterton's decisions, with a note to return to explore the Alban Way some other time. As we shall shortly see, besides its Green Belt logic there is now a further major attraction on the published London Countryway route, established only recently and set to become even more important in years to come.

From pretty St Michaels the route climbs slightly from the Ver along residential Branch Road, with some interesting art deco houses and wooden barns on the left, to an encounter with the next of the series of northbound roads mentioned in the previous section, although it's one users of the station links will already have crossed. Verulam Road is part of the old turnpiked section of the A5 Shrewsbury road, here numbered A5183 in an effort to discourage through traffic, and lined with housing estates. A little way along it, Down Edge Open Space, a small and modest green rectangle with a play area doubtless much appreciated locally, provides a convenient cut corner to Batchwood Drive, marking the western boundary of development. Across it we're into fields along an old lane, also used by the Hertfordshire Way, from where, looking left and back, the valley slopes gently down to the A5183, Watling Street and the river. In the distance, on the opposite bank, you can see the remains of the Roman theatre, which was once in the heart of the city -- it's difficult to imagine the now quiet fields of Lord Verulam's estate covered with fine villas and temples.

A little further on the route reaches one of those classic Green Belt developments, a golf course, although this is a council-owned one now operated under contract, the Batchwood Golf and Tennis Centre, which makes me more kindly disposed towards it. The mansion of the old Batchwood Estate at the centre of the course now also functions as an 'exclusive niteclub' featuring retro disco nights and A-level results parties on its programme. The path that crosses the course is well waymarked and several lengths of old hedgerow have been preserved. It takes us to another small green patch on the edge of New Greens, one of the city's outlying housing estates that date from before the early 1970s, when the London Green Belt was extended to include almost all of Hertfordshire. From here the route runs along the edge of the old coppiced woodland of Batch Wood or Batchwood, a surviving fragment of what in Roman times would have been a much bigger wood, the location of the original Catuvellauni settlement and of a long vanished mediaeval manor.

The path then tacks around the edges of playing fields and woodlands and across a field of fruit canes to the south of the hamlet of Childwickbury to emerge at Hawkswick Lodge Farm, on another important road. Harpenden Road is part of another turnpike route north, linking London with Manchester and Carlisle, generally designated A6 but , similarly to the A5, renumbered A1081 at this point to encourage through traffic to use the motorway. Here we rejoin the Hertfordshire Way, which left us at the golf course to follow a slightly less direct route via Childwick Bury. Across the main road we pick up a good farm track through rollling fields which in turn takes us over yet another key transport route, the Midland Main Line, on Cheapside Bridge, a lovely old brick bridge which presumably dates from the 1860s when the line was first opened – its history has already been considered briefly at St Albans City Station in the previous section.

Over the railway, a fine track continues ahead, now on high airy farmland with wide views towards the Colne valley. To the north of the track is the slowly developing major attraction alluded to earlier. The fields to the north of the path, and the patches of ancient woodland they surround, are part of the 347ha site of Heartwood Forest, a Woodland Trust project to create “the largest new native forest in England”, with plans to plant over 600,000 trees, alongside creating new wildflower meadows, open spaces and paths, eventually encircling all of the north of Sandridge to create a new public space bigger than the post-Games Olympic Park planned for Stratford, and still only 40km from central London. It’s the Trust’s biggest project in England, the flagship of their current tree planting programme.

Currently much of the site is still farmland and they’re busy raising the money to plant it, but there are already some public areas – the biggest one is accessed via a wooden gate from our path – and a busy programme of events including an impressive array of community and arts-related projects. The name, incidentally, is a multiple pun arrived at following a competition among staff, referencing Hertfordshire, the heart-shaped leaves of the small-leafed lime trees found in the wood, the “heartwood” found at the centre of the trunks of broadleaved trees and the connection with individual, social and environmental health.

As a land management and conservation charity, the Woodland Trust is a relative newcomer, dating only from 1972, when it was created by a Dorset farmer to protect small local woods. Clearly its aims and approach resonated – there’s something reassuringly long term about woods and trees which encourages people to invest for the future. The Trust has grown rapidly into a major organisation with 200,000 members, over 200 staff, an annual income of over £25m and 20,000ha of property. It’s been canny with its brands, partnering with supermarkets, and exemplary in its community work, encouraging local people into its woods – one of the best examples of how people can be encouraged to care about environments they have access to. I wish it luck with its project at Heartwood, and look forward to viewing the site in a decade or so’s time.

Sandridge is a relatively large village, today barely separate from the city's sprawl, supporting several pubs, shops and even a football team, straddling another old northbound road, this one a relatively minor one linking St Albans to Wheathampstead and the upper Lea valley. Further downstream, the river Lea and its valley have played a key role in shaping the growth of London as well as forming star attractions in its walking network, as we'll see both further along the London Countryway and on other London underfoot walks. The Lea is only 4km or s0 from Sandridge Church here along the village high street, but we now travelled to the furthest point north of the Countryway and here, on the watershed of the Lea and the Colne, we'll start to work our way back south again.

Although some way outside the village, the river was long a key feature of the old Sandridge Manor, which included mills strung along it. The name wears its etymology on its sleeve: a sandy, or rather gravelly, ridge between the Lea and the Ver. Unsurprisingly the village's history is closely connected to St Albans Abbey -- on the death of the abbey's founder King Offa in 796, his son Egfrid gave the extensive manor of Sandridge to the abbots. It remained ecclesiastical property until Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century, when it was sold to a London banker for £400. Eventually it passed to the Spencer family who finally auctioned it off to smaller landowners in 1951, retaining only Nomansland Common, a strip which now abuts the northern boundary of Heartwood Forest west of the road -- this is now leased to the council as a public space. The most famous Spencer is of course Diana Princess of Wales (1961-97) whom we've encountered before on the walk -- her brother Charles (b1964), the current Earl Spencer, is still officially Lord of the Manor.

The route takes us right to the front of pretty St Leonards Church, mainly dating from around 1119 but with masonry thought to be older -- there was no doubt a wooden church on this site since shortly after the manor was handed to the abbey. Like most churches it's been subject to numerous additions and rebuildings and the current appearance is largely down to a major restoration in 1887 -- the current bells, popular with bell ringers, date from 1890. The Hertfordshire Way forks left of the church, leaving us for a while -- we'll encounter those white waymark arrows again in the next section, just outside Newgate Street. On this occasion, however, it doesn't offer a more direct route, instead travelling via a long inverted U into the far northeast of the county via Royston, Bishops Stortford and Hertford.

The Countryway meanwhile tracks the edge of a pleasant green and cuts through residential streets to run out of Sandridge along a lane. Here there's the more pleasant option of walking along the generous field headland parallel to the lane on the other side of the hedge, to which there is informal access. Although clearly appreciated by local walkers, I suspect this feature is primarily for the benefit of owls. These birds tend to hunt along roadside verges, flying low and parallel with the hedgerow to avoid the wind, and consequently are often killed in collisions on narrow but fast country roads. A broad headland attracts similar wildlife to a verge and provides the owls with an alternative hunting ground, safe from traffic.

An old track, in places a charming sunken green lane, then takes the route further south. Looking to the right, you'll see the edge of the large housing estates on St Alban's eastern flank. The core of this residential sprawl is Marshalswick, once an historic country estate and park with a history dating back to the 1100s, but developed for housing from the 1920s. In the 1970s the housing spilled over further into the farmland of Jersey Farm and it's these houses we see from the trail. Here is the Green Belt in action, the limits of development clearly dileneated by the enclosing fields.

Approaching pretty Oak Farm I encounter a path problem, the first notable one on my whole walk so far. Chesterton's route follows a bridleway forking off southeast across a field, away from the farm, but though this is clearly shown on the OS map and actually waymarked on the ground, the field is solid with crops, and no sign of any line along the right of way. So I continue on the clear path which rounds the front of the farm and joins the farm drive to reach Coopers Green Lane. Here the map shows a more direct bridleway ahead towards Smallford, but Chesterton has chosen a footpath further east to minimise disruption from gravel workings. So far the previous problems he mentions have been solved in the intervening decades since the last edition of his guidebook was published in 1981, so I investigate this more direct route, but end up struggling along a rugged and unwelcoming field edge with no obvious way ahead, and a gravel pit clearly still in operation, so I backtrack and catch up again with the recommended route. If you're walking the route from my directions, don't worry about any of this, as I've taken account of it all in outlining a hopefully seamless walking experience.

On the other side of Coopers Green Lane the route re-enters Watling Chase Community Forest, as discussed in the previous section, although there's nothing to mark the fact. The ground now traversed does indeed show signs of past and present gravel workings -- the inevitable side-effect of development, with demand from construction fuelling the excavation of vast swathes of Home Counties farmland, particularly in Hertfordshire, for the pebbly subsoil deposited by past rivers. But the path isn't unpleasant: it's well-defined and easily walkable and the roughly restored land surrounding it has something of the wildness of a heath. A young oak tree just before an aluminum gate commemorates the aggregates company's forestry officer, Roger Mould, who died in 1996. Unexpectedly, the route crosses a conveyor, a ribbon of machinery stretched across the fields, though sadly not in operation during my walk.

A long, straight path ends in a pair of old gates that hang open, revealing another apparently derelict green space ahead. This is actually a key site in the history of aviation: a couple of decades ago these gates would have been firmly shut with good reason, for anyone walking ahead would find themselves on the western end of the runway of Hatfield Airfield. The pioneer aircraft maker Geoffrey DeHavilland, seeking an undeveloped rural site within easy reach of his existing factory in rapidly urbanising Edgware, bought some farmland here in 1930, converting it into what was originally known as Hatfield Aerodrome. Art deco factories were developed at the opposite end of the extensive site, and such was their importance in their prime that a whole suburb, Hatfield Garden Village, was created to house their workers. The site saw the launch of the world's first commercial jet airliner, the celebrated Comet, in 1949. The company became part of Hawker Siddeley in 1970 and was in turn absorbed into British Aerospace when that then-nationalised company was created in 1978 in an attempt to perpetuate the flagging UK aerospace industry. BAe finally quit Hatfield in 1993, and much of it has been redeveloped, as well as being used for films. The devastated French town of Ramelle was famously recreated here in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998).

Currently this end of the field is a piece of waste ground on which locals walk their dogs unhindered, but the official route turns with the field edge and cuts between fences by Notcutts Garden Centre to reach Hatfield Road at Smallford. Notcutts are one of the biggest garden centre chains, developing from a nursery established at Woodbridge, Suffolk, in 1749. The big centres started to evolve in the late 1950s, benefitting from increased prosperity, more houses with gardens and increased car use making it possible to shop for bulky items at out-of-town sites; the company's official history also attributes its growth to early 1970s postal strikes that decreased the popularity of mail order. It's a curious feature of suburban England that what are essentially garden shops have become visitor attractions in their own right, a weekend trip with fun for all the family in a controlled environment, complete with children's play area, displays, exhibitions and catering. You might be grateful for the refreshment opportunities -- the cream teas pictured on the website look very alluring.

There was indeed a small ford at Smallford, on a stream west along the Hatfield Road. Today it's one of a number of scattered clusters of housing estates and services in between St Albans and Hatfield. Across the Hatfield Road, down the side of a bean field and through a few residential streets there's another improvement to the route, Peggy's Path, running alongside but segregated from the busy but narrow Station Road. Peggy Hughes was a former director of St Albans Centre for Voluntary Service, a keen community campaigner and sometime district councillor and the path is here thanks largely to her work.

The path brings us to a junction with the Alban Way, the former route of the St Albans branch of the Great Northern Railway, built in 1865, closed to passengers in 1951 and finally dismantled closed and dismantled in 1969. A few metres to the right along the Way, under the railway bridge, you'll find the platform of the old Smallford station, originally known as Springfield; a derelict ticket office is adjacent. Subsequently the trackbed, now owned by the council, became an informal off-road route, the eastern part of which was formerly known as the Smallford Trail, but over the last decade the whole route has been improved and named the Alban Way throughout as part of National Cycle Network route 61 from Maidenhead to Hoddesdon.

Following the Alban Way from St Albans Abbey station to here would be an obvious way of cutting off the hump in the trail around the north of St Albans if you preferred, and in the other direction the Way provides the obvious route to Hatfield, about 4km east. The route takes you past the new town centre and straight to Old Hatfield and the station. This is just across the road from the entrance to Hatfield House, an extensive and handsome Jacobean mansion set in grand parkland, and the adjoining late 15th century Old Palace where the young Elizabeth Tudor was living when she was told she'd become Queen in 1558. Still the residence of the Cecil family, it's long been open as a popular visitor attraction, and Chesterton goes into some detail about it in his book, but in my view it's too far off route for a visit.

The route now finds its way between a couple of other scattered settlements in the slice of Green Belt between St Albans and Hatfield, all part of the parish of Colney Heath, relatively flat countryside straddling the very upper reaches of the river Colne. Approaching the edge of Sleapshyde across fields, there's a rare overt sign of the Community Forest as the Countryway joins for a short time the Watling Chase Trail. When this was first developed in the 1990s it was known as the Watling Chase Timberland Trail, as footwear manufacturer Timberland sponsored trails in all the Community Forests. The sponsorship has now ended but cannily the company had their distinctive tree logo used as a waymarking device which is still visible. The trail runs north to south through the centre of the Forest area. We encounter very near its northern end, at Wilkins Green a couple of kilometres north of here and also on the Alban Way; to the south it stretches to Elstree where it links with the London Loop, giving the most direct link in some time between the Countryway and the Loop, and you could continue south along the Dollis Valley Green Walk and through Hampstead Heath and Regents Park to central London, as suggested in previous postings. We'll be returning to this route in a future London underfoot.

Sleapshyde boasts a village pump and its southern side is lopped off by the A414 North Orbital Road. Built by the Ministry of Transport in the 1930s as a result of some of the earliest plans to rationalise and expand Britain's trunk road network, and originally numered A405, as its name suggests it was originally envisaged as part of an orbital highway route round London, a grand plan interrupted by war. Over the decades a whole succession of planners set about drawing successive concentric circles round the capital in an effort to meet the challenge of increasing motor vehicle use, and the road formed a part of several of these. Patrick Abercrombie's 1944 Greater London Plan envisaged it as one section of the "E Ring", the outermost of five ring roads which together with the Green Belt would help define that all important edge of the capital. Interestingly Abercrombie didn't see the E Ring as primarily a fast traffic route but as a "Parkway", including "a strip of open space which gives it a positive amenity value...at once part of the communications and part of the park system." His grand plan for postwar London soon stumbled on severe lack of funds but the vision of concentric ring roads persisted and the North Orbital was even extended west to meet the M1's M10 spur, now the A414 and crossed in the last section, in 1960 shortly after the M1 opened.

In the 1960s the London County Council, its successor the Greater London Council, and the Ministry of (now the Department for) Transport produced radical and sometimes conflicting plans for further circular and orbital routes. Under these, Abercrombie's E Ring was redubbed Ringway 4, but this time public horror as well as underfunding and internal politics scuppered the plans. Instead we got the M25, opened between 1975 and 1986, and while some sections of the motorway do follow planned alignments of the North Orbital, here the completed ring runs some way to the south. The old orbital was left as an isolated length of road which was then renumbered A414 in an effort to discourage longer distance traffic. Even so it remains a busy road which the Countryway is now obliged to cross via a very minimally formal crossing point. As you dodge through dual lanes of fast cars to zigzag around the gap in the crash barriers on the central strip, try to imagine Abercrombie's positive amenity value.

Woodland and field paths lead through to Roestock, a hamlet in the triangle of an old road junction, where our path winds through houses to reach Tollgate Road, taking us towards North Mymms. Where the houses of Roestock end the Countryway leaves St Albans district and enters the borough of Welwyn Hatfield, although the boundary, which appears to go right through the middle of a house, is a relatively new one, dating from an extension to the boundaries of St Albans in 1913. Tollgate Road is one of the least satisfactory stretches of the route so far: the footway soon runs out and the traffic is relatively frequent and fast, so it's a case of walking determinedly on the right of the carriageway and staring out the drivers.

Thankfully it's not too long before we reach the grazed parkland of North Mymms Park. This is the core of the ancient Manor of North Mymms (or Mimms) which dates back to pre-Conquest times and was once much bigger than the still extensive park of almost 50ha which survives today. It's recorded in Domesday as belonging to the See of Chester but over the centuries it's seen numerous changes of ownership. In 1599 the then owner, Ralph Coningsby, built the impressive Jacobean mansion you can glimpse through the trees, allegedly in anticipation of a visit by Queen Elizabeth that never happened. Among its important features is an early 17th century mural on the traditional theme of the "Nine Worthies" -- Hector, Alexander, Caesar, Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon. Coningsby's son Thomas retained his father's royal-pleasing tendencies: he was arrested and imprisoned for raising an army against Oliver Cromwell in 1642, and the house was sequestrated. The last private owner, Major General Sir George Burns, sold the house in 1979 to an overseas corporate investor. It's now owned by the drug company Glaxo, but the Burns family still retain the park which they rent out for events.

As often in this sort of environment the line of the right of way is a little unclear. As I'm standing puzzling over the map to work out whether to go left or right of a stand of trees, I notice movement off to the side. Turning, I notice that a herd of bullocks, about 20 of them, are standing a few metres away looking at me curiously. As I start to walk, they follow, getting closer behind me each time. I start to feel rather uncomfortable. Remembering the advice for dealing with cattle, I stop, turn round and wave my arms at them, trying to look firm. They stop too and back off a bit, but of course as soon as I turn around and continue walking they're behind me again. Several attempts to wave them off achieve the same unsatisfactory result. Spotting the gate on the opposite side of the field I foolishly attempt to run, but they just speed up too, and this time they're getting closer. This time when I turn and wave, they look more restless and aggressive -- some are even salivating. A stretch of hummocky ground gives me an advantage, but the whole herd goes round the side and is catching up with me again as, with some relief, I get through the kissing gate. While it's unlikely if I'd stood my ground they would have trampled me, it's still an unnerving experience for an adult on their own, and would have been very worrying had I had young children with me, or a dog. It's a difficult balance -- livestock fully deserve their place in the working countryside, but when they behave like this they certainly reduce the amenity of public paths. A report about the incident, and about the path problem mentioned above, to Hertfordshire's public rights of way office has not yet received a response.

I'm so relieved to leave the field that I barely notice the dry ditch the path croses on the other side of the hedge. This is actually the line of the river Colne, just a short distance from its source, and these days almost always dry. The Colne is one of the larger tributaries of the river Thames, which it joins at Staines, having gathered waters from several tributaries of its own, including the Ver, and tangled for some distance with the Grand Union Canal. In this lower section, the Colne forms something of a bookend to west London, complimented in the east by an even more important tributary, the river Lea. Both rivers are now the basis for Regional Parks and signed trails and the Lea's will play a significant role in the section after next; the Countryway misses the Colne Valley Park and Path but it'll be explored on a later London underfoot walk.

The location of St Mary's Church, North Mymms, reaffirms the importance of the manor -- it's one of those churches in the heart of the parkland rather than in a village, as if it's primarily intended for the squire's private worship, and indeed it includes a separate chapel for the Lord's use, where the Coningsbys are now interred. The first parish priest is recorded in 1237 but the core of the stone church standing today was built by then Lord of the Manor Simon Swanland in the 1330s. There were extensive restorations in 1859, 1871 and 1992. In 1998 a new octagonal "parish room" was bolted on which frankly looks rather tacky.

Beyond the church and some pretty cottages a path strides through fields to cross another in the succession of major roads north, the A1(M) to Peterborough, York, Newcastle and Edinburgh. I discussed the A1 in the previous section in connection with the M1 and M6, which now provide between them the route of choice from London to most of industrial Yorkshire and Scotland, but the line of the A1 itself is still a major link in its own right. Since the 1930s there have been plans to upgrade it all to motorway standards but while never fully realised, significant sections now bear the affixed bracketed M, including this one which was opened in 1979. Descending from the footbridge to Water End, you'll immediately encounter a parallel road, Swanland Road, notably broad and straight but now strangely quiet. This is one of the original improvements to the A1 in the modern era of motor transport, part of the Barnet and Hatfield bypasses built by the Ministry of Transport in 1928. Shortly into the next section we'll encounter the road it replaced.

Running along the old road now is the Great North Way, part of National Cycle Network route 12 which will eventually link London and Grimsby. This section runs from Hadley Wood to Stotfold on the Bedfordshire border and although it's mainly intended as a cycle route with some significant road-based sections, there are also enough off-road sections to keep the dedicated walker intrigued. Amazingly, the little transport café at Water End has managed to survive despite being robbed of its motorists' landmark status by the A1(M). Past some vintage traffic bollards a concealed path leads behind the cafe: behind it is a forest of lifting platforms making for a rather surreal sight.

The water that ends at Water End is the river Colne. In the little meadow behind the café there's a cluster of swallow holes or sinkholes, where an outcrop of underlying chalk meets the London clay and water circulating below has eroded the chalk -- uniquely they are the only major permanent sink holes of this kind. The place is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest managed by the Country Trust, an educational charity. One of the sinkholes is right by the path and quite a curiosity it is too; the surrounding woodland, rough ground, an overgrown stream called the Mymmes Brook and rich hedgerows also make for a pleasant walk.

Field paths well used by local walkers now head up to the overgrown village of Welham Green, originally a tiny Hertfordshire hamlet just off the Great North Road but now really a southern extension of Hatfield, linked by light industrial sprawl. It's a plain looking place dominated by 20th century residential development. The Countryway route misses the village centre, but if you walk up Station Road and Dellsome Lane you'll find plenty of shops, and a memorial marking the site of the first landing of the first passenger hydrogen balloon flown in England, piloted by Vincenzo Londardi in 1784. Londardi had a dog, a cat and a pigeon with him when he took off from Moorfields, London, but the cat got badly airsick, so he landed in Welham Green and handed it into the care of the locals. The flight finally terminated at Thundridge near Ware, off to the northeast.

I've decided to make a diversion here from Chesterton's 1981 route, which finishes at Brookmans Park station. Since then, not only has a path been diverted inconveniently to avoid a stopped up railway crossing, but an entire new station has opened much closer to the route. In 1850 the Great Northern Railway opened the London to Peterborough section of its planned main line from Kings Cross to York, built under the direction of the great civil engineer William Cubitt (not to be confused with the near contemporary politician William Cubitt who built Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs). The line ran from Potters Bar to Hatfield on an alignment roughly parallel with but to the west of the Great North Road, originally with no intermediate stops. Eventually the line extended to Edinburgh and points north, in partnership with other railway companies that merged to form the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) as part of the government sponsored Grouping in 1923. It was the LNER that added the station at Brookmans Park in 1926, in response to suburban development, but Welham Green only got its station in 1986. Originally I recall it had wooden platforms; it's now a little more substantial but still modest, with a simple ticket office.

The line remains one of Britain's busiest and most important. The East Coast expresses whizz through, of course, while 1970s electric multiple units provide the local services to Kings Cross, Moorgate and Welwyn Garden City. A lot of metal has passed under the railway bridge since the Grouping and Welham Green is just 2.5km south of a site that played a major, if tragic, role in that story. After the war the Grouping evolved into the full nationalisation of what became known as British Rail, which survived until privatisation mania in the 1980s. In 1994, a private company, Railtrack, took over ownership and maintenance of the former British Rail infrastructure as part of a complex system involving numerous privatised operators and rolling stock companies. The company was always controversial, still subsidised by government but paying huge shareholder dividends while performance dragged and safety got sloppier. Then, at 1223 on 17 October 2000, a Leeds-bound express travelling at 185km/h derailed due to poor track maintenance in between Welham Green and Hatfield, killing four passengers. The subsequent fallout led to Railtrack being placed into administration and to the renationalisation of railway infrastructure under the not-for-profit company known as Network Rail.

Download a route description PDF http://dl.dropbox.com/u/884833/londonunderfoot/11-stalbans-welhamgreen.pdf

View Google map
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&start=323&num=200&msa=0&msid=117966169375523396049.00046414d40d8252e7b70&ll=51.707134,-0.706859&spn=0.001599,0.00478&t=h&z=18

More information

Hertfordshire County Council http://www.hertsdirect.org/
Hertfordshire Tourist Information http://www.hertsdirect.org/comdirectory/comvol/infoad2y/intour3y/
Hertfordshire countryside and rights of way http://www.hertsdirect.org/envroads/environment/countryside/
Friends of the Hertfordshire Way http://www.fhw.org.uk/
St Albans City and District Council http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/
St Albans Parks and Open Spaces http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/environment-and-planning/land-and-premises/parks-and-open-spaces/
St Albans Tourism and Travel http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/tourism-and-travel/
Abbey Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Line
A1081 (A6) (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1081
Alban Way map http://www.stacc.org.uk/albanway/
Alban Way (Sustrans) http://www.sustrans.org.uk/sustrans-near-you/east-of-england/easy-rides-in-the-east-of-england/alban-way
Verulamium Park (St Albans council) http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/parks-and-green-space/parks/Verulamium-Park/default.aspx
Friends of Verulamium Park http://www.fvp.org.uk/
VERVLAMIVM http://www.roman-britain.org/places/verulamium.htm
Westminster Lodge Leisure Centre http://www.harpersfitness.co.uk/gyms/westminster-lodge-leisure-centre/
Abbey Theatre http://www.abbeytheatre2.org.uk/
Watling Street (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watling_Street
Ver Valley Society (Alban Trail, Ver Valley Walk) http://www.riverver.co.uk/
Alban Trail map http://www.walkingbuddies.org.uk/alban.html
Midland Main Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_main_line
A5 (A5183) (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A5_road_%28Great_Britain%29
St Albans Cathedral http://www.stalbanscathedral.org/
Sandridge Parish Council http://www.sandridgeparishcouncil.org/
Batchwood Golf and Tennis Centre http://www.harpersfitness.co.uk/gyms/batchwood-golf---tennis-centre/
Heartwood Forest (Woodland Trust) http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/our-woods/Pages/wood-details.aspx?wood=5622&site=Heartwood-Forest
St Leonards Church Sandridge http://www.achurchnearyou.com/sandridge/
Colney Heath Parish http://colneyheath.org.uk/
Watling Chase Community Forest http://www.hertslink.org/cms/getactive/placestovisit/watlingchase
Hatfield Aerodrome (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield_Aerodrome
DeHavilland Aircraft Heritage Centre http://www.dehavillandmuseum.co.uk/
Notcutts Garden Centre St Albans http://www.notcutts.co.uk/Content/Information/Garden-Centres/St-Albans/
Watling Chase Timberland Trail http://www.hertslink.org/cms/content/15474094/15488274/15488278/timberlandw.pdf
Ringways (cbrd) http://www.cbrd.co.uk/histories/ringways/
A414 (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A414_road
Welwyn Hatfield Council http://www.welhat.gov.uk
Welwyn Hatfield Cycling and Walking http://www.welhat.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=331
Welwyn Hatfield Landscapes and Countryside http://www.welhat.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1025
Welwyn Hatfield Tourism and Travel http://www.welhat.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=320
North Mymms Parish Council http://www.northmymmspc.org.uk/
North Mymms Park http://northmymmspark.com/
St Marys Church North Mymms http://www.stmarysnorthmymms.org.uk/
A1 (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1_road_%28Great_Britain%29
Great North Way http://www.greatnorthway.org.uk
Water End Swallow Holes SSSI http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/geodiversity/englands/sites/local_ID42.aspx
Country Trust http://www.countrytrust.org.uk
Brookmans Park http://www.brookmans.com
Welham Green http://www.welhamgreen.com
East Coast main line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_Main_Line

London Countryway 10: Kings Langley - St Albans

2010-05-05T22:42:00.053+01:00

The political leaders of ancient Rome were remarkably active in fronting personally the armed force of their state, despite living in an era in which travel in Europe was measured in weeks rather than hours. The first major documented figure to appear on Britain's historical stage is none other than Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44BCE), historian, First Consul and key architect of the Roman Empire although never an emperor himself. In the summer of 55BCE, having led his legions in the conquest of Gaul (roughly, modern day France and Belgium), Caesar stepped ashore at Deal at the head of a small expeditionary force -- the likely landing place is passed on the Saxon Shore Way walking route, part of European Long Distance Path E9, although it's considerably outside the scope of this project.

Caesar had driving ambitions to expand the frontiers of Roman power as well as amassing personal wealth, and Britain was regarded as rich in silver and other valuable items, but it may be that his initial interest in Britain was more to do with securing power in Gaul. The territory on both sides of the Channel was dominated by a tribal people known as the Belgae. Links between mainland and island-based Belgae remained strong and Britain provided a potential safe haven for troublesome insurgents opposed to Roman power. On that first visit, Caesar achieved a couple of local victories. He returned the next year and succeeded in establishing his Belgic ally, Commius, as king of powerful tribe the Atrebates, with a promise of tribute to Rome, but Caesar never returned and the arrangement didn't last. Nonetheless the wet island in Europe's northwest corner was now very much on Rome's radar, and trade and other links between the island and the Roman world flourished over the following decades.

Almost a century later, in the year 43, Rome's fourth emperor, Claudius (10BCE-54CE, a figure probably now best known through Robert Graves' fictionalised portrait in I, Claudius and the legendary 1970s BBC miniseries based on it), newly acceded to the throne, launched a more serious military initiative that eventually resulted in the annexation of most of Britain. Once again Belgic politics was involved - Commius' successor Verica had fled to Rome asking for help after being deposed by the rival Catuvellauni. Four legions led by General Vespasian, who later became emperor himself, landed at Richborough on the Walney channel, also now on the Saxon Shore Way and E9. The legions pushed on across the Medway and then the Thames, and in another example of hands-on leadership, Claudius himself arrived with reinforcements including elephants, routing the Catuvellauni stronghold at Colchester which, as Camulodunum, became the Roman capital for a while.

The emperor spent 15 days in Britain before returning to the mainland; meanwhile Vespasian set out to subdue the southwest. Originally the Romans planned only to occupy the south and southeast of the island but the need to establish secure borders saw the occupying forces push further north over the succeeding decades, reaching its furthest extent by the 140s when the Antonine Wall was built between the Clyde and the Forth in Scotland's central belt to mark both the northern border of Britannia and the northernmost boundary of Roman power. This high tide mark was only held for relatively short periods, with Hadrian's Wall between the Solway and Tyne some way to the south forming a more enduring and better known boundary. Both walls are now the basis of walking routes.

When the occupying forces first met the Thames, they established a crossing at one of the lowest practical points of the tidal river. There's evidence that the original crossing was roughly along the line of today's Vauxhall Bridge, but the permanent crossing was established downstream, from the marshes of Southwark towards a small hill east of the Thames' confluence with the Walbrook, where a military pontoon bridge was quickly replaced by 55 with a permanent piled bridge. Unusually for what became a major Roman town, there was no existing indigenous settlement on the site, but there was a Celtic placename for the area, possibly for a local farm, borrowed into Latin as LONDINIVM.

It appears originally there was only a small fort to the north of the bridge, and the settlement grew up from around 47-50, not as the result of military decisions but of spontaneous commercial enterprise, with businesses serving military and other travellers using the strategic river crossing and a port that took advantage of the relatively wide and deep tidal waters. A decade later London, Colchester and several other Roman cities were burnt to the ground in the rebellion led by Iceni queen Boudica, and when they were rebuilt, the centre of provincial adminstration was moved from Colchester to London.

Though Britain bears many visible traces of life before the Roman occupation, it's in the Roman period, with its written records, roads, walls and cities, that the first clearly legible and coherent layer of history was etched onto our physical and cultural maps. Before the Romans there was a Celtic Iron Age culture which was relatively sophisticated and complex, with a rich oral literary tradition, but which didn't do books, hard copy databases and big centrally planned civil engineering, so it's come down to us largely through a Latin filter.

Roman historians such as Tacitus speculated on the origins of Celtic culture in Britain and their conclusions influenced the longstanding consensus that it had arrived as a result of mass migration or invasion of Celts from central Europe about 600BCE. But this view has recently been questioned as genetic studies suggest it was the culture, rather than the people, that migrated, with the existing indigenous pre-Celtic people adopting Celtic language, technology, religion and social organisation rather than themselves being displaced or exterminated. The Belgians that Caesar encountered in southeast England were however recent settlers from the mainland whose cultural affinities seem mixed. Caesar described them as a distinct group of Celts that had been influenced by adjoining Germanic peoples, or they could have been Germans influenced by Celts, a mixture of both cultures or a distinct ethnic group of their own. Whatever, it's fairly certain they spoke a Celtic language.

And the complexities of cultural assimilation and absorption continued during the Roman period, in ways that are probably not generally appreciated. The popular view of the Romans is often influenced by more modern totalitarians, some of whom consciously adopted Roman iconography, and by their sporadic but well-publicised persecution of Christians which suggests a propensity to religious intolerance. But the Roman empire was not a homogenous entity intent on clamping its ideology on the known world. As we've already seen, the force that drove on the legions was the quest for wealth.

Today, the use of politics as a means to personal wealth, while far from unknown, is generally frowned upon, but in Rome it was simply the way things worked. In a pre-capitalist slave-owning society, the only long term means to forward the accumulation of wealth was through conquest. The key interests of government were taxes and ensuring the conditions to collect them effectively, and occasional religious persecutions would be driven by the latter, directed against troublesome folk whose beliefs prevented them swearing allegiance to the Emperor. Roman religious and philosophical beliefs were pragmatic and generally tolerant, with a propensity to absorb local deities and forms of worship in a way that astonishes those brought up in a monotheistic tradition with a tendency to deceive itself about its own history of theological flexibility. Besides which, before mass communication, there simply wasn't the means to impose ideological uniformity on a territory that stretched from Britain to North Africa and the Middle East.

At the same time the military and economic needs of the empire drove a mass mobilisation of people within its boundaries, precipitating multiculturalism on a grand scale. We speak of the "Romans" in Britain, in the sense of non-natives who came to the island to serve the Empire, but the overwhelming majority would not have come from Rome, or even from Italy -- they were drawn from anywhere from Flanders to Morocco to Palestine to the Ukraine. The existing inhabitants, meanwhile, didn't disappear but became largely assimilated into Roman society, creating a unique Romano-British culture heavily influenced by the existing Celtic way of life. And it is this culture, rather than anything specifically Roman or Celtic, that left that first coherent layer on the landscape of England and clung to survival down to the present day in parts of Wales.

One of the most obvious and better-known features of that layer, and one of the most relevant to the walker, is the network of roads, with London as both the hub of the national system and the gateway to the mainland, the crossing point of the Thames for traffic to and from points north and the Channel, accessing the easy ferry crossing to Gaul from whence all roads led, of course, to Rome. Two millennia later, the routes have been modified and the scale is vaster: the big trucks are diverted round the M25 to cross the river at Dartford, rail passengers changing at St Pancras to the Eurostar cross even further downstream at Ebbsfleet, while millions of people a year transfer at the world's biggest international airport at Heathrow on their way to continents Casear never knew existed. But London's role as hub and gateway remains, and it's comforting to think you can still cross London Bridge, turn left at the Borough and follow the line of Watling Street to reach the ferries at Dover.

Today we think of our main radial roads starting and ending at London, an assumption reflected in their numbering, but Watling Street, the line of which predates the Romans, runs through and out the other side. We've already crossed it south of the Thames, very soon after the start of the walk on the edge of Gravesend. At London it turns northwest on its way to Wroxeter (Viroconium) in Shropshire. In Roman times, the first major settlement it reached north of the Thames, 40km out of London, was Verulamium, on the gentle slopes of a hill to the west of the river Ver. Originally the capital of the Catuvellauni, in the year 50 it was granted Munipicum status, and became one of the four biggest Roman cities in Britain. A mediaeval town known as St Albans, after the first Christian martyr in Britain, who lost his life there, grew up around an abbey on the opposite bank, eventually becoming a cathedral city. This is the destination of today's walk.

If the London Countryway had a "natural" course at this point, it would probably run some way south of St Albans, perhaps along something like the alignment chosen by the Hertfordshire Way, which shortly diverges from our route. But having entered the hinterland of St Albans, Keith Chesterton, the original deviser of the Countryway, found its gravitational pull irresistible, resulting in a considerable detour northeast and then southeast again. The resulting bump may be inelegant, but I'm fully in accord with the way it places the city as the northernmost extreme of London underfoot. To the Romans it was easily the most important settlement within easy reach of London and it's still the closest urban area with city status outside the Greater London boundary and the only city on the London Countryway.

The start of the walk at Kings Langley seems a long way from ancient Rome, but it was itself originally a settlement on a more minor Roman radial road, from which modest paths would have run across the gently rolling countryside towards Watling Street and Verulamium, through what must then have been dense woodland. There's a more surprising and degraded echo of Latin, though, very soon after leaving the station. The route turns under the railway along Egg Farm Lane -- the egg farm in question is the old Ovaltine Egg Farm, the old Ovaltine factory is nearby, and the brand name Ovaltine partly derives from the Latin "ovum" meaning egg.

Ovaltine, a powdered drink for making up with hot milk, was invented in Switzerland in the 1860s by a Dr Georg Wander, and originally named Ovomaltine, reflecting its original formulation of eggs and malt. When introduced into the UK in 1909 the name was miscopied at the trade mark registry, gaining its familiar English language form. The Kings Langley factory was opened in 1913, and expanded in 1929 when the current imposing art deco-cum-Arts and Crafts building opened as a self-conscious showcase landmark, clearly visible to rail passengers on the West Coast main line.

The company originally had a policy of self-sufficiency in supplies and about the same time as building the new factory bought two local farms. The one on the hillside on the opposite side of the railway became a model egg farm while the one in nearby Abbots Langley was turned into a dairy farm. Both were given showcase architecture on a more modest scale, inspired in part by Marie Antoninette's farm at Versailles -- not, you'd have thought, the most auspicious reference point, but it's a cute idea. I wonder how much it reflects on the dynamism and confidence of capitalism that the age of iconic company headquarters appears to be well and truly over -- most of them are now housed in anonymous boxes by the side of motorways that would not provide much scope to the label designer.

Demonstrating that the sophisticated understanding of brand value was around long before Soho creatives started blithering and brainstorming constantly about it in the 1980s, images of the factory and farms were used to promote the product, with building and packaging design and advertising all feeding into Ovaltine's image as homely, healthy product suitable for packing off well-behaved pyjama-clad children to bed with while mummy and daddy got ready for an evening around the wireless in their Metroland manse. Regular drinkers could sign up as Ovaltinies, with their own special song. Personally I always thought it tasted of old socks and sawdust dosed with sugar, but like Marmite it has its devoted fans.

By the 1990s the farms had fallen into disuse, and in 2002 manufacturing operations in the UK also ceased, with the company, now linked to the Twinings tea group, moving production back to Switzerland. The listed factory building has been converted impressively for residential use -- the landmark façade remains, but behind it all has been rebuilt. The dairy farm had already gone over to flats, known as Antoninette Court, and in 2003 the egg farm, now known as Beaufort Court, became the headquarters of renewable energy company RES. Their wind turbine has become a new local landmark, and they also offer a visitor centre and guided tours. It's worth detouring from the route slightly by continuing along Station Road to look at the factory; the route itself then goes right past the egg farm, where there are fine views back down the Gade valley to the factory.

Just past the West Coast main line we've lost the Hertfordshire Way for a while: it takes a more roundabout route via the village of Bedmond, birthplace of Nicholas Breakspear (c1100-1159), later Adrian IV, so far the only English-born pope and a distant ancestor of the family that ran and later asset-stripped the Brakspear Brewery in Henley-on-Thames. Breakspear's father Robert became a monk at St Albans Abbey, the owner of Abbots Langley since 1045 when a Saxon thegn, Ethelwine, had split his territory of Langley into King's and Abbot's, granting the latter to the monks. Kings and abbots...the reason why Brakspear is usually now described as the only ever English pope is that since King Henry VIII refused to accept the authority of Rome, creating an Anglican church that may not be Roman Catholic but is still a long way from being Protestant, the likelihood of there being another English pope is relatively low. As to the abbot, that post too fell victim to monastery dissolving Henry, one of history's foremost asset strippers.

Continuing past the wind turbine a farm drive sweeps across the M25, finally bringing our route back within the orbital motorway for the first time since Merstham, at least for a while. Beyond this I walk through fields on the north edge of Abbots Langley where lots more paths not shown on the map as rights of way seem freely used by local people. Presumably the fields were once used for growing barley destined to satisfy Ovaltinies' craving for cloying maltiness, and are now part of RES's estate. After a brief dip into a corner of the built-up area of Abbots Langley we're back into fields and apparently heading straight for the M25 again, but a hedge interrupts us, deflecting us along a well-defined track along a field edge. The hedge here marks the district boundary: we're still just inside Three Rivers but the other side is already the City and District of St Albans.

The Hertfordshire Way converges again but only for a short distance along a lovely old bridleway that soon becomes a surfaced lane. As suggested above, the HW offers a more logical and direct route for this leg of our circumnavigation as its white waymarker arrows keep straight ahead. If you were following the route into London from the north mooted in previous sections, this would be the point at which you'd leave the Countryway and follow the Hertfordshire Way, the Watling Chase Trail, the London Loop and the Dollis Valley Greenwalk towards Hampstead Heath. It's by no means the last time we'll see those white arrows, but for the moment, having accepted Chesterton's argument for the detour, we leave them left on a footpath, plunging decisively into St Albans district and heading not just for one motorway but for two.

This was always the place where the Countryway crossed the M1, but I can imagine the groans among the early champions of the walking route when it was also chosen as the place where the new orbital motorway that became the M25 would cross the M1 too. The slightly dingy, heavily graffito'd tunnel through which I now walk is the first of a succession of motorway crossings on today's section and also the first and westernmost of a long series of encounters with various incarnations of Britain's big road north.

Given the shape of the island, you'd expect to start with a north-south spine road when drawing the surface transport network in broad strokes, perhaps followed by one down the southwest peninsula and another much shorter one from the Thames to the channel coast. But in prehistoric times the great highways yielded to the physical geography by following the lines of chalk ridges, which, as we've seen in the Chilterns, ran predominantly diagonally, southwest to northeast. Britain's geological north-south spine, the Pennine range, was too rugged and boggy to form a natural highway, though it's now the basis of a famous walking route, the Pennine Way, for those who appreciate a challenge. The Romans, with their more advanced technology, better disciplined labour force and centralising drive for military convenience and tax collecting efficiency, asserted human geography over physical and built networks of roads that prioritised linking major settlements directly rather than allowing natural features the upper hand in determining economic and cultural relationships. They built the first great roads from London north to link other important centres like York and Shrewsbury to the capital.

The Roman roads continued in use for millennia, though some of them became redundant as the places they linked declined in importance -- London, interestingly, remained an exception to this and is still the hub of the modern network. The Roman legacy wasn't really bettered until the 18th century when the inadequacies of road transport infrastructure became economically intolerable and the turnpikes began to supersede the deteriorating patchwork of highways maintained by parishes. But no subsequent road builders ever had the license of the Roman engineers to drive highways along alignments of their own choosing -- now there were hosts of vested interests to satisfy. Turnpikes generally covered only limited stretches of road, and were often improvements of existing routes rather than wholly new ones, sometimes buffeted off course by reluctant landowners. Travelling long distances still involved following a succession of shorter, more local routes, rather like many long distance walking routes today.

The new age of grand road building came in the 20th century -- it's tempting to say under pressure from the development of the motor car but this ignores the very active role of governments who decided to support and encourage that development by transforming the road network into a highway network for cars. The politicians adopted the enduring "predict and provide" policy, a self-reinforcing cycle in which new roads encouraged more cars which would in turn be used as the argument for still more roads. For the first time since the Roman occupation road building became a national, strategic matter backed by government clout, and a new network of trunk roads, and later motorways, began reaching out from London.

One result of this has been the creation of skeins of parallel roads all running roughly in the same direction. Sometimes capacity has been enhanced by widening a road on its existing alignment but this isn't always that easy and the advent of the bypass has seen major routes diverted out of towns and villages which in many cases owe their original existence to the road. One of the most dramatic examples of this bundling of new, detrunked and obsolete roads can be seen with the northerly routes out of London. Over the next couple of sections we'll cross, in succession, the M1 (to Leeds, and via the M6 to Birmingham, the northwest and Scotland, 1959); Watling Street (A5183, formerly A5, to Wroxeter and Shrewsbury, ancient and later Romanised); the A1081 (formerly A6, to Manchester and Carlisle, partly Roman, later turnpiked); the A1(M) (to Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, 1979); the original Barnet bypass (formerly A1, 1927); the Great North Road (A1000, formerly A1, 1720s turnpike); Ermine Street (to Lincoln and York, Roman); the A10 (to Cambridge, Kings Lynn, 1970s) ; the Great Cambridge Road, also known as the Old North Road (A1170, formerly A10, turnpike connecting with Ermine Street); and the M11 (to Stansted Airport and Cambridge and connecting to the M1, 1977). There's a clear pattern here, with the main north road moving westwards over time.

The preponderance of 1's in these road numbers reflects the primacy with which this north-south axis was viewed when Britain's road numbering system was first established in 1923. Six major routes radiating from London were chosen to divide England and Wales into segments, and of these the Great North Road was quite literally picked as Britain's number 1 road and designated A1. The other five followed clockwise, and other roads were given numbers with first digits determined by the segment in which they began, with a similarly clockwise radial theme to many of the two-digit numbered roads. Scotland got 7, 8 and 9, radiating out from Edinburgh, but the A1 was too important for that and kept its number all the way to Princes Street in the Scottish capital, where it's still glowered over by the impressive bulk of the North British Hotel. The principal north-south motorway was quite logically given the number M1 but it's also primary in another sense, as when the first section between Watford and Crick near Rugby opened in 1959 it was Britain's first proper motorway, although the Preston bypass, now part of the M6, had predated it by a year.

The idea of a special class of road optimised for fast and continuous long distance motor travel had been around since at least the 1920s. Italy was first with its autostrade, a new generation of Roman roads: the first opened in 1921, just before Mussolini's rise to power, but the network underwent major expansion under his government. Then in the 1930s the idea was taken up in another fascist state now much more famously associated with it, with the launch of a programme of Autobahn building in Nazi Germany, self-consciously echoing the Roman military imperative. British politicians, still on speaking terms with Hitler, visited to see this programme in operation and were inspired to draw up their own plans, but developments were interrupted by World War II. Motorways soon came back onto the agenda in the postwar period, with the enabling legislation passed in 1949.

A recently released DVD collects the transport-themed instalments of the long running Look at Life series of short documentaries, made by Rank from 1959 to pad out cinema programmes. These films show a fascination for the way technological innovations in transport are changing our lives, and several of them deal with the new motorways. One shows the M1 under construction, not yet covered with blacktop, a thick gravel ribbon rolling across the Hertfordshire countryside like a bloated farm track. Another features overnight hauliers. "Not all drivers use M1", barks the commentary in clipped, plummy tones, the definite article having not yet become obligatory, "and some ban their drivers from using it." From an age where Stobart, Dentressangle and their colleagues are frequently jammed end to end on the M25, I'd like to ask these Teddy Boy era truckers what the issue was. Was it safety concerns, in the face of evidence that for drivers motorways are much safer than the fast but narrow and twisting A roads they superceded? Or was it simple neophobia, like those early 19th century opponents of rail travel who were firmly convinced the human body couldn't withstand such terrifying velocities as 50km/h?

At first our footpath tunnelled beneath a two-lane highway, but since then it's been widened and in 1986 acquired a three level junction with the M25, itself now the subject of a widening scheme. The right of way has been maintained, threading through the junction like a wisp of cotton caught up in a couple of knotted tow ropes. On the map it looks complicated and unpromising, but on the ground it’s easy to follow and quite fascinating in its own way. It delivers an early surprise: through the subway you’re immediately into a corner of well-kept woodland, Winch Hill Wood, filling in the gap between roads. On my springtime visit it’s carpeted with bluebells. The traffic roar, though dulled, is inescapable but the quality of this little refuge is enhanced by its unexpectedness.

Winch Hill Wood also provides a welcome to Watling Chase Community Forest, one of the original pilots for a scheme originally championed by government agency the Countryside Commission, predecessor to Natural England, in 1990. The Community Forests are large areas on the rim of big towns and cities, where partnerships of local authorities and other agencies work to deliver social and economic benefits through environmental improvements, not only forestry but other conservation and public access initiatives. Though the term "forest" is slightly confusing in modern usage, it's a pleasing echo of the earlier meaning of a designated area, usually reserved for royal or aristocratic hunting, that included both woodland and more open space. There are two of them in the London area, both of them overlapping the Greater London boundary and both of them on the London Countryway -- Thames Chase is still to come.

Watling Chase is, of course, named after Watling Street, which it flanks -- our name for the Roman road is in fact Saxon, originally Wæcelinga Stræt, the Road of the Welsh, with its eventual destination in Holyhead. Chase, too, refers to land reserved for hunting. Its 18,840ha is in a rough square shape, with the M1 in the west, St Albans in the north, Hatfield and Potters Bar in the east and Barnet and Edgware in the south. Most of it falls within Hertfordshire, mainly in Hertsmere but also in St Albans, Three Rivers, Watford and Welwyn Hatfield, with bits spilling into the London boroughs of Barnet and Harrow. The core funding for the forests having long expired, the project seems to have declined in recent years, and is no longer listed on the Community Forests website, though it's still has a modest page on Hertfordshire County Council's information website. There's little evidence on the ground that you're in such a designated area, though in the next section we will encounter its Timberland Trail -- all the Forests have one of these promoted routes, originally sponsored by the footwear manufacturer.

From the wood the path runs along and above the southbound carriageway of the M1 and then bends along the westbound M25, still high above the traffic, before climbing a bridge across the orbital with a view back to the interlacing concrete of the junction. Once again I’m struck by the feeling of moving in an entirely separate, if parallel, universe to the speeding traffic, through infrastructure specifically reserved for moving at a fraction of the speed. From the path you can see a sign on the M1 that announces "Services 17 miles". For a driver that's a mere 15 minutes or less before a loo break and an overpriced cup of tea. For me it's pretty much a day's walk.

I’m greeted by an elderly man who has installed himself on the bridge with binoculars and a thermos – perhaps there are birds to watch here but I’ve already powered past him when I think to stop and ask. One final bridge across a slip road and I’m back into fields, walking outside the ring of the M25 again.

It’s amazing how quickly the roar of traffic recedes. Only a few minutes later I’m passing idyllic old buildings at Holt Farm, site of an ancient moat, then wandering deserted Noke Lane between silent farms. My path from here is shown on the map as running on a farm drive but it’s been diverted through paddocks before you get to the farm and is easy to miss. This is clearly a longstanding situation, judging by the patient and polite but evidently well-practised way a driver I meet turning into the farm gate puts me right.

From here the route climbs to a surprisingly exposed ridge with the rather chilly name of Bone Hill, where I can see groups of people behind a fence, strolling around earthworks. The hill, just outside Chiswell Green, is the longstanding site of the Royal National Rose Society’s Gardens, generally known as the Garden of the Rose, which Chesterton rhapsodises about in his book. The path runs right past the garden entrance, but this rather genteel visitor attraction has recently been upstaged by another, much bigger, one next door, and the people I saw are patrons of the newer site.

This is Butterfly World, a £27million project conceived by lepidopterist Clive Farrell to create “the biggest butterfly experience in the world.” Opened in 2009, so far it consists of a few smallish but unusual buildings – such as the beehive-shaped toilet block visible from the main entrance -- and a lake set in gardens laid out in the shape of a butterfly’s head, but 2011 should see the construction of a 17.5m high, 100m diameter “rainforest biome” with “Maya caves and ruins” populated by insects, spiders and hummingbirds. I assume it’s ended up sited here as the hilltop is also the HQ of the Royal Entomological Society.

I ponder whether interest in butterflies was widespread enought to sustain a multimillion pound theme park, but they do have a certain fascination, particularly in concentration. Butterfly houses in botanical gardens always arouse oohs and aahs. Some of the appeal is in the mythic narratives we build around their life cycles, those tales of astonishing metamorphosis from dowdy earthbound caterpillar to a brief but brilliant life as a spectacular winged creature. Though I didn’t go in, the place seemed busy for a bright but rather chilly spring day. The rose gardens, in contrast, seem to have declined. Though rebuilt in 2007, they’re currently only modestly promoted and open for only a limited season.

North of Bone Hill a new woodland is being created, with straight fenced paths running between saplings along a route more convenient than the one that appears on the map. Beyond this I round an older-established and bluebell rich woodland, Park Wood, with one more big road to cross. Until very recently this was one of Britain’s shortest motorways, the M10, a 5km spur between the M1 and the road now numbered A414. This latter was a legacy of an earlier pre-M25 scheme to encircle London with ringways, still known locally in places as the North Orbital Road, but the scheme was abandoned superseded by the M25 project in the mid-1970s. The M10, opened in 1959 at the same time as the main M1 as the main distributor road at the southern end of the new motorway, retained its motorway status even after the M25 opened in a bid to lure traffic between central and east Hertfordshire and the M1 away from the already congested orbital. As such it probably would have featured in my list above, but following various widening schemes, congestion is no longer such an issue (at least for the time being), and in 2009 the M10 was downgraded to become a mere extension of the A414

On the other side of the A414 the housing estates of St Albans lie before us at the bottom of the hill: reaching them, we leave the Community Forest for a while. An old path, preserved through the residential sprawl of Westfields as both street and alley, takes the route straight to the corner of Verulam Park, the modern day public park that now encompasses most of the site of old Verulamium. The London Countryway makes a fine entrance along one of the best preserved sections of Roman wall, on a path following the line of the flat berm which runs between the wall on the left and defensive ditch on the right, giving an excellent view of the city’s defences.

The current wall dates from the early 3^rd century, but the ditch is older, and would have been overrun when Boudica’s Catuvellauni burnt the city to the ground.

Today it’s a pleasant, leafy place, well kept and well provided with council litter bins, difficult to imagine as the site of a bloody and ferocious assault.

The path leads us to the edge of a large open green area, where a busy pedestrian fingerpost at a junction of paths is now the most prominent marker of the former London Gate, the city gate onto Watling Street in the London direction. Several sources claim that there are markers in the ground at this point indicating the extent of the gate, but I looked hard and couldn’t find anything conclusive. Much has been lost: the city was abandoned following the departure of the Romans and the masonry was eventually reused to build the abbey and the mediaeval town on the opposite bank of the Ver. The site became farmland, until it was donated to the council by the Earl of Verulam in 1929 as a public park. Excavations in the 1930s uncovered many of the remains visible today.

I won’t go into too much detail about the city and its remnants as it’s very easy to find information from more expert sources, including the Verulamium Museum, a little to the north of here. One of the biggest visible remains is the famous mosaic and hypocaust (underfloor central heating system) dating from around 160 that once formed part of a big, posh house on the shallow hillside to our left. To this day you can appreciate the delicate, pleasing abstract design, which should be symmetrical except that one of the roundels is at an angle 45° off what it should be. I’m not sure what the appropriate Latin or Celtic expletives would have been, but I imagine several were spoken when, having painstakingly laid down a few thousand tiny tesserae the wrong way, they finally spotted the error.

The other major survivor is the theatre, which now lies outside the park to the north. Here, sufficient masonry survives to give an idea of how the building might have been in its prime, though the prominent pillar by the stage is a modern addition intended to give an idea of scale. Within the theatre’s precincts, a set of rectangular foundations that once belonged to shops have been labelled rather poignantly: Fishmonger, Carpenter, Baker. Layers of ash found here attest to the vengeance of Boudica.

The theatre is still owned by Verulam, and Watling Street runs past it as a private drive, though there’s permissive access. The gravelly trackway has the look of a very old road but in its heyday it would have been paved. It didn’t run in a straight line through the city’s street grid but instead forked by a temple just beyond the London Gate. Its alignment through the park, along with pretty much all the rest of the original street pattern, has been lost to view: though known to archaeologists, for the casual visitor it’s obliterated by swathes of featureless mown grass and football pitches. Crossing these, I’m walking through ghost walls, crossing ghost kitchens, and paddling in ghost baths, trying hard to imagine the bustle of a once important city. I’d be grateful for a bit more on the ground to honour those vanished structures and the people whose lives they once shaped.

From the London Gate you could take the slow route back to by rail. A path roughly approximating Watling Street leads past the 1960s Westminster Lodge leisure centre with its peculiar exterior flumes, currently marked for redevelopment, and the Abbey Theatre, home of one of Britain's leading amateur theatre companies The Company of Ten, to St Stephens Hill (the A5183, of which more later) and St Albans Abbey station. This is now the smaller of the city’s two stations but was in fact the first, opening in 1858 as a branch from the London and North Western Railway (the West Coast Main Line) at Watford. In 1865 it was also linked to the Great Northern (the East Coast Main Line) at Hatfield, but this route closed to passengers in 1951 and to freight 18 years later. The station is now a mere single platform with a shelter, enlivened only by some cheerful murals by local schoolchildren depicting locomotives through the ages, installed to mark its 150th anniversary; its Abbey Line services to Watford are a curious appendage to London Midland’s outer suburban services. A poster was on display inviting users to contribute to a consultation on the future of the service, with one possibility being conversion to a tram line operated by the council.

Meanwhile the Hatfield link has found a new life as a footpath and cycleway known as the Alban Way, part of National Cycle Network route 61 from Maidenhead to Ware. This can be accessed a little southeast of the station, and provides another more direct alternative to the Countryway’s bell-shaped detour around the north of the city.

Sticking to Chesterton’s route brings you into a more formal part of the park, where the 1930s designers took advantage of the river Ver, and the former abbey fishponds, to create a fine collection of water features and a promenade that remains popular today. It now comes complete with a Quack Snack Spot for bread-free regulated duck feeding.

The river, which formerly powered numerous mills, rises at Markyate, to the north, from the edge of the Chiltern chalk, and Watling Street tracks its valley all the way to where it joins the Colne at Bricket Wood, its waters eventually feeding the Thames. Two other walking routes track it, joining us at the lake in Verulam Park. The Ver Valley Walk began life as the Ver-Colne Walk, championed from the 1970s by the Ver Valley Society: as shown on OS maps, it runs 24km from Watford to Redbourn but only the Ver section is now consistently waymarked. The Alban Trail, which isn’t consistently waymarked, starts at London Colney and ends 15km later at St Albans Abbey: it’s a later invention, also supported by the Ver Valley Society, linking sites connected to the history of the saint.

The Countryway shares the promenade with these two routes as well as with huge numbers of strollers who aren’t aware of any of these trails’ existence, then leaves the park to encounter another spike of the Hertfordshire Way, this time detouring down from the northern stretch of that wiggling circular route. We’re now in St Michaels, a village within the city and a gobsmackingly pretty one too, with some old inns and a wonderful Victorian school building lining a village street. One of the Ver mills, Kingsbury Mill, which has a claim to an entry in Domesday Book, is still working, though the building is currently operated as a waffle restaurant. Subsequent development has blocked the course of both Watling Street and the riverside walk straight ahead, but the London Countryway adopts a different solution to this than the other routes. We’ll consider this in the next section, as this one officially ends here in St Michaels on a street corner.

Reaching the big station on foot will take you deep into the mediaeval and modern city, which you wouldn’t want to miss anyway. You can either U-bend back from St Michaels along picturesque Fishpool Street, or drop out at the bridge, past one of the city’s most photographed sights, Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, with foundations dating from 793 and a superstructure that was installed here in 1539, currently the official Guinness record holder for the oldest pub in England, though not without its challengers, and head up Holywell Hill. By either route, you’ll come to the cathedral.

There are numerous variants of the story of Alban, the first British martyr, supposedly sacrificed by beheading to the Roman gods after he sheltered a persecuted Christian priest who converted him, perhaps in 209, 251 or 304. It was Bede who first claimed Alban lived in Verulamium, and was executed on the hill across the Ver where the cathedral now stands. Alban is credited with having parted the waters of the Ver on the way to his execution as the bridge was too crowded, and of carrying his head in his hands after it was chopped off. He’s been suggested as a replacement for St George as the patron saint of England.

An abbey was founded on the alleged site of Alban’s execution at the behest of Mercian king Offa II in 793, though much of what we see of the abbey church today is a late 11^th century rebuild. It’s big Gothic, with a massive crossing tower, but its lengthy 84m nave, the longest in England, gives it a slightly squat appearance. The Roman city isn’t the only long vanished structure here – in its glory days, the abbey’s buildings stretched over much of the Ver’s left bank, with outbuildings cascading down the now-grassed hillside, but as we know, Henry ended all that in 1539 and much of the site fell into decay. Besides the cathedral, only the chunky 1365 gatehouse still stands. The 19^th century saw much restoration work to the church, much of it under the direction of the great George Gilbert Scott of St Pancras fame. The building was upgraded to cathedral status when St Albans was created a diocese in its own right in 1877. The main entrance is now through the Chapter House, a 1980s addition which I think achieves a good balance, fitting the context without resorting to slavish pastiche.

Anyone doubting my earlier questioning of the Protestant nature of the Anglican church should take a good look round St Albans Cathedral. The holy of holies, the saint’s shrine, is behind the high altar: it’s mainly 13^th century work that was destroyed and discarded during the Reformation, then retrieved and rebuilt in Victorian times, and lovingly restored as late as 1993. In 2002 a rather grisly aspect of Christian tradition was upheld when an alleged piece of Alban’s corpse, a fragment of a shoulder blade, donated by St Pantaleon’s church in Köln, was placed in the shrine. Burning candles now surround it in an atmosphere that almost reaches Russian Orthodox levels of mystic.

The route from here through the city centre also has much to gawp at, including secluded former vineyard and graveyard Vintry Garden, the early 15^th century clock tower, pretty French Row with its corner where a sign prohibits what the French call “urine sauvage”, and the wonderful 1831 Palladian town hall, built on the site of the old Moot Hall. You cross two turnpiked north-south routes. The High Street is the later reworking of Watling Street, originally numbered A5, while St Peters Street is the Manchester road, originally numbered A6. To dissuade drivers from using them as through routes now that the motorways are opened, these sections of both have for several decades been renumbered A5183 and A1081 respectively.

A stretch of the legs down Victoria Street, past an ugly and blocky 1970s police station that's not really redeemed by the floral display outside it, brings you to the biggest and busiest station, St Albans City, usually called simply St Albans. This was opened in 1868 by the Midland Railway when it extended to Scott’s St Pancras, giving St Albans links to all three main lines north from London. The current building is now a rather dull 1960s affair but the services, now operated by First Capital Connect, are excellent: since the reopening of the Snow Hill tunnel in 1988 most trains have run through London as Thameslink services to Croydon, Gatwick Airport and Brighton.

Growing up in Hertford, St Albans was one of those day out places, one of the choices for major shopping and the nearest choice for sightseeing apart from London. I didn’t appreciate it properly at the time, and it was a delight to rediscover it on this walk. Chesterton says that if you find this section of the walk itself too short, you’ll find plenty in the city to occupy you, and I couldn’t disagree.

Download a route description PDF http://dl.dropbox.com/u/884833/londonunderfoot/10-kingslangley-stalbans.pdf
View Google map
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&start=323&num=200&msa=0&msid=117966169375523396049.00046414d40d8252e7b70&ll=51.707134,-0.706859&spn=0.001599,0.00478&t=h&z=18

More information

Hertfordshire County Councilhttp://www.hertsdirect.org

Hertfordshire Tourist Information http://www.hertsdirect.org/comdirectory/comvol/infoad2y/intour3y/

Hertfordshire countryside and rights of way http://www.hertsdirect.org/envroads/environment/countryside/

Three Rivers District Council http://www.threerivers.gov.uk/

Three Rivers Parks and Recreation http://www.threerivers.gov.uk/Default.aspx/Web/ParksRecreation

Three Rivers Tourism http://www.threerivers.gov.uk/Default.aspx/Web/TourismTravel

Abbots Langley Parish Council (including walks) http://www.abbotslangley-pc.gov.uk/

West Coast Main Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Main_Line

M25 motorway (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M25_motorway

Friends of the Hertfordshire Way http://www.fhw.org.uk/

Ovaltine http://www.ovaltine.co.uk/

Ovaltine (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovaltine

RES http://www.res-group.com/

St Albans City and District Council http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/

St Albans Parks and Open Spaces http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/environment-and-planning/land-and-premises/parks-and-open-spaces/

St Albans Tourism and Travel http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/tourism-and-travel/

St Stephen Parish Council http://www.ststephenparishcouncil.gov.uk/

M1 motorway (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_motorway

Watling Chase Community Forest http://www.hertslink.org/cms/getactive/placestovisit/watlingchase

Royal National Rose Society http://www.rnrs.org/

Royal Entomological Society http://www.royensoc.co.uk

Butterfly World http://www.butterflyworldproject.com/

M10 motorway (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M10_motorway_%28Great_Britain%29

Verulamium Park (St Albans council) http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/parks-and-green-space/parks/Verulamium-Park/default.aspx

Friends of Verulamium Park http://www.fvp.org.uk/

VERVLAMIVM http://www.roman-britain.org/places/verulamium.htm

Watling Street (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watling_Street

St Albans Museums http://www.stalbansmuseums.org.uk/

Westminster Lodge Leisure Centre http://www.harpersfitness.co.uk/gyms/westminster-lodge-leisure-centre/

Abbey Theatre http://www.abbeytheatre2.org.uk/

A5 (A5183) (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A5_road_%28Great_Britain%29

Alban Way (Sustrans) http://www.sustrans.org.uk/sustrans-near-you/east-of-england/easy-rides-in-the-east-of-england/alban-way

Abbey Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Line

Ver Valley Society (Alban Trail, Ver Valley Walk) http://www.riverver.co.uk/

Alban Trail map http://www.walkingbuddies.org.uk/alban.html

St Albans Cathedral http://www.stalbanscathedral.org/

A1081 (A6) (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1081

Midland Main Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_main_line

Roman Theatre of Verulamium http://www.romantheatre.co.uk/

Kingsbury Watermill (Waffle House) http://www.wafflehouse.co.uk/st-albans.html

London Countryway 9: Ashley Green - Kings Langley

2010-02-21T16:15:00.043Z

It's been a while. Five months ago I arrived on the grassy ramparts of Berkhamsted Castle at the end of my last London Countryway walk. Until now, other commitments, travel and illness have kept me from taking up the trail again. Not that I haven't enjoyed some good walks in that time, including a long loop of San Francisco taking in the Pacific coast and the length of Golden Gate Park, a venture out from Manchester city centre along the Medlock valley to Oldham, and a challenging but exciting day leading 100 people along the Jubilee Greenway between Angel and Hackney Wick. Those last two trips benefited from coinciding with some of the few glimmers of better weather in what's been a cold and gloomy winter. My luck holds out today too -- after weeks of rain, sleet, snow and frost, here are blue skies, a sun that's more out than in, and temperatures that in context feel almost indecently balmy.

The trip begins with a minor irritation. I've decided not to retrace my steps on foot from Berkhamsted to the main route at Ashley Green, but to catch the bus instead. Having checked the timetable on the Traveline website the night before, I turn up at the stop outside Berkhamsted station to find a scrappy handwritten notice half-obscuring one of the timetables: "No buses until the road under the rail bridge is opened again." No date or indication of currency, no suggestion of alternative stops or services, and no clue as to which bridge, although I assume the writer meant the railway arch visible from the stop, next door to the station. I phone Traveline to check and am assured services are running as normal. Shouldn't someone take the notice down then? "That's not our job, it's the council's," replies the operator rather testily. I'm still not convinced until the bus actually appears, five minutes late and indeed through that arch next to the station. Living in London, the only place in Great Britain where the buses are properly regulated and where most bus stops now have a wealth of clear and reliable information, you forget with quite what level of contempt local public transport users are still treated in real life, driving a vicious circle of declining usage and declining level and quality of service. It's not surprising that, once the two elderly people who join us in the town centre have disembarked in the residential outskirts, I have the bus to myself all the way to Ashley Green.

I might have taken a break but the world hasn't gone away. The sight of Ashley Green with its quaint little well house and gravel path leading out into the meadows somehow makes me feel it was only yesterday I was last there. Retracing a little of the previous section, I spot the Thames Water signs by a works entrance to the side of the path -- the fenced woodland with its "Danger: Deep Water" signs is presumably part of the sewage treatment works. I'm soon at the path junction with the clear path ahead rolling across fields into Hertfordshire, back towards Berkhamsted, but this time I take the narrower field edge path uphill on the right, continuing with the main route of the London Countryway for the last few kilometres in Buckinghamshire. This is also the route of the elusive and meandering Chiltern Heritage Trail, for which I've since obtained a photocopy of the out-of-print leaflet: the walk was a millennium project but Chiltern council's support for it hasn't even lasted a decade.

The path climbs up a relatively shallow hillside and down into a dry valley, a gentle echo of the previous sections' rollercoaster rides, then gains a little more height across the shallow shoulder of the next hill. After this, as Countryway inventor Keith Chesterton assures us, the route will level out, leaving the Chilterns to cross a broad upland between the Chess and Bulbourne valleys. In fact the whole of this section is outside the boundaries of the Chilterns AONB though the beginning shares its geography, and looking back from this hill gives our last airy view of the characteristic rolling pastures dotted with wooded clumps.

Then the going turns muddier underfoot as the Countryway sets out across flatter country, passing the attractive Gothic-styled cottage of Sales Farm, the first of three farms that punctuate this first part of the section. Beyond this farm, a straight and sticky path leads across the centre of a huge flat field towards Hemmings Farm, swinging southwest along a hedge-hugging bridleway and doglegging through a woodland. Here I encounter the worst mud hotspot of the day, finding myself tiptoeing precipitously on a sliver of dry verge while clinging gingerly to the barbed wire doing its utmost to force me into the water. The way emerges in the large farmyard of Moors Farm, passing cattle byres before another bridleway, a fine and thankfully relatively dry green lane between thick hedgerows, cuts southeast again to the B4505 Chesham Road and the county boundary.

The bridleway emerges at a place with the picturesque name of Pocketts Dell, near a bend where a number of old lanes converge. Looking at the map and seeing the ground, I'd guess the current bend is a result of work at some point to smooth what was a right angle in the B4505: a bridleway continues ahead on the line of the road, with the remains of a hard tarmac surface underfoot. It runs alongside a low earth bank lining a strip of wood, marking the boundary between Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. A few metres on, while the Chiltern Heritage Trail continues ahead, our route turns left across the boundary along another broad bridleway, also with the remains of a hard surface underfoot, guarded by posts bearing vandalised Hertforshire County Council "no motor traffic" signs.

I spent my later childhood and teenage years in Hertfordshire and must confess I always regarded it as a rather bland county. I remember my mother, a south Londoner, being excited about moving there not only because it was in easy reach of London but also because of the glamour she imagined must shine out from the film studios in Elstree and Leavesden. Of course that was quite a way from the rural outskirts of Hertford, where we lived, and by the early 1970s the British film industry had been reduced to the decidedly unglamorous production of exploitation films and spinoffs from TV sitcoms. Instead we found a county which, in terms of landscape outside the Chilterns in the west and the southern metropolitan sprawl that frequently bursts across the Greater London boundary, is mainly rich but muddy and undistinguished farmland. Few great historical events played out here, though the synod at Hertford in 673, the first in England, is a milestone in British religious history. The city of St Albans, with its rich Roman heritage, is admittedly a gem which provides the destination of the next section. There are some pretty market towns and villages, but the most remarkable major settles are the 20th century New Towns orbiting London: the county includes two pre-World War II pioneer Garden Cities at Letchworth and Welwyn, and two major post-war examples at Hemel Hempstead and Stevenage. It strikes me that London's New Towns would provide a fascinating theme for a walk, but unsurprisingly the London Countryway studiously avoids them. The towns were supposed to be self-contained communities, where people relocated from London could live and work locally, but of course like all the other settlements within the throw of our route they are now dominated by commuting, acting primarily as dormitory suburbs of the capital.

Crossing into Hertfordshire also takes the London Countryway into its second English region, leaving South East England and entering the East of England, at least as far as government and administration is concerned. The nine English regions don't figure much in the popular consciousness -- indeed, if you believe the Daily Mail, they're part of a plot hatched by Brussels bureaucrats to undermine national sovereignity by fragmenting the power of the big member states (I must admit if I was an EU official tasked with the challenge of achieving consistent governance in the face of squabbling member states, such a thought might well have crossed my mind). But England is a big country with a large population, and running anything on a national basis is highly likely to require geographical divisions that the historic pattern of counties is just too small and fiddly to supply. Attempts to meet such needs date back at least to Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate in the 1650s, when the country was carved up between ten Major Generals, but there was no official, unified government scheme until very recently -- instead, different regions were used for different purposes, making it difficult to compare like with like. In 1994 John Major's government finally put in place a unified scheme of Government Office Regions which would henceforth be used to structure both statistics and the local activities of central government, originally based on 10 regions but in 1998 reduced to nine with the merger of Merseyside into North West England. By then the move was indeed supported by EU policy, and specifically the Maastricht Treaty which established a Committee of the Regions.

There is an argument for subdivision for administrative convenience, but there has also been a longstanding pressure for an English regional structure in terms of democratic participation in government which, oddly enough, arises most sharply from the demands of parts of the British Isles with a more distinct separate identity. The process of implementing "home rule" in Ireland early in the last century also saw the first proposals for self-governing regions in other parts of the UK. More recently, devolution in Scotland, Wales and the six counties of Northern Ireland, and to a more limited extent in Greater London (which is counted as the ninth English region although it is the only one with a directly elected political body) has raised the question not only of consistency, as all these bodies have varying powers, but of what should happen to resolve the anomaly that the rest of England remains governed directly from Westminster, where the UK Parliament is also a de facto English parliament, allowing MPs from the devolved countries and London to influence decisions that don't apply to their constituents.

The problem, as anyone from Whitehall and Brussels mandarins through broadcasters to people compiling lists of Wetherspoons pubs soon discover, is that England just doesn't break neatly into roughly equal parts, and while there are strong feelings in certain places about local and regional identities, equating these to hard-drawn boundaries that also make sense in terms of practical factors like population size and transport accessibility is a huge challenge. John Prescott was very keen on the regional agenda when he held his extended brief as Deputy Prime Minister -- the 1997 Labour government created regional assemblies and regional development agencies that began as appointed bodies but were planned to grow into directly elected assemblies with devolved powers. Referenda were planned but the first to be held, in North East England in 2004, uncovered an embarassing lack of popular enthusiasm for the idea. Since then the assemblies have been replaced by Local Authority Leaders' Boards and new models of City Regions inspired by the system in London have been proposed for the more metropolitan areas.

Which brings us back to the boundary we've just crossed, a good example of the messiness of the regional divisions. For all the issues with the Greater London boundary already mentioned in this blog, it has at least established itself as a recognised and sensible subdivision of England, but dividing up the surrounding territory is more of a problem. Traditionally the counties immediately adjoining London are known as the Home Counties, a usage probably derived from the former "home circuit" of an itinerant 19th century law court. The term is sometimes confined to those counties that touch the London boundary -- Kent, Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Essex and, since 1994, the former Berkshire unitary of Slough -- and is sometimes extended to cover West and East Sussex. Another term heard informally is "southeast England", which might also reach out into Oxfordshire and Hampshire and maybe even beyond. All these places are well within the commuting hinterland of the capital -- the former British Rail division of Network SouthEast got as far as Exeter, Peterborough and Kings Lynn.

The problem is that this well-stuffed donut around London would simply be too big and too rich to function as a single region. The rather uncomfortable solution chosen in 1994 and still with us today is to divide split the London hinterland between two regions. South East England, through which we have walked up to this point, is a rather untidy L-shape, stretching from Oxfordshire in the northwest south through the Berkshire unitaries to Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, then east between London and the sea -- West Sussex, East Sussex, Surrey and Kent. The remaining Home Counties of Hertfordshire and Essex, along with Bedfordshire, have been put together with Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk to form the East of England region. This makes a sort of sense for Essex, which is separated in the south by the Thames and much of which geographically forms part of that rump on England's eastern seaboard also known as East Anglia, but with Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire it's a bit of a stretch.

Hertfordshire was one of the smallest traditional counties but still retains its two tier district and county structure -- in fact it's now the smallest of the remaining "shire" counties. The first of its districts we enter is Dacorum, officially known as a borough, although the difference between boroughs and districts as subdivisions of shire counties is purely ceremonial. The borough name rather self-consciously invokes several periods of pre-Norman history, perhaps to offset its origin as a thrown-together administrative convenience around the new town of Hemel Hempstead in 1974. It's derived from a Roman term for "Danish" which once graced an old Saxon hundred, referring to the proximity of the boundary of the Danelaw, the area ceded by the Saxons to Danish rule in the late 9th century.

The broad and well-surfaced leafy track along which we enter the district, shown on street maps as Pocketsdell Lane, presents an intriguing anomaly for connoisseurs of such things. A few hundred metres along, the reason for the "no motor vehicles" signs becomes apparent -- a fingerpost indicates its bridleway status is upgraded to a byway open to all traffic. But there's no apparent reason for the change at this point: theres no junction, no difference in the physical character of the track, only a field boundary on the other side of the hedge. Presumably when the right of way was classified it was only possible to demonstrate vehicular rights to that point.

Towards its end the path does indeed become more of a surfaced drive, emerging onto Hill Lane at Pudds Cross on the edge of Bovingdon. From here Chesterton found the shortest route to the Countryway's next objective, Bovingdon Green, unacceptably disrupted by sand quarrying, and recommended a dogleg detour for some distance along Shantock Hall Lane opposite. As on the approach to High Wycombe, I hazard that these problems will have been sorted out in the intervening three decades and aim to follow the obvious more direct footpath route shown on the Explorer map. A newish foothpath sign bearing the destination Bovingdon Green and pointing along a path that starts off parallel to the lane looks promising, and sure enough the path turns out to be clear and easy to follow. There's no current quarrying in evidence though the trail does wind through a brickfield, Bovingdon Bricks, which may well have made use of this local supply of rich red sand, still to be seen underfoot. Founded in the 1920s, the brickworks is now the county's last, and specialises in traditional and specialist bricks, some of which are hand made. "Beautiful bricks," claims the website, which also explains how the company's original clay extraction site at Boxmoor, now on the edge of Hemel Hempstead to the northeast, has been restored as public space now in the hands of a trust.

Bovingdon Green is a big village green to the south of Bovingdon itself, presenting a stereotypical English rural scene with cottages, gravel paths and white railings around a triangle of mown grass, with a small pond in the corner. It has a preservation society but it's surprisingly underpromoted given its size and it's not obvious from the OS map that this remarkably pleasant wedge of green is there at all. The Countryway wanders along the southern edge of the green and stops just short of the Royal Oak, the big pub that overlooks it, which makes a point of selling beer from small Chiltern and Hertfordshire brewers, as well as local food.

From the eastern corner of the green a field edge path heads northeast to a T-junction with a path that carries two signed trails. One is an old friend, the Chiltern Way, which we encountered just past Marlow: this follows a more southeasterly route than the Countryway via the Chalfonts and Chorleywood, and northwards wanders in a long and straggly U-bend past Hemel Hempstead, around Dunstable and Luton and down to the Thames at Goring before heading back towards Marlow again. The other is the Hertfordshire Way, a 305km circuit originally devised by local Ramblers members -- you can't help but thinking with a certain amount of defiance to received wisdom about the attractiveness of the county -- and now promoted by a separate Friends group. The route it follows is often quite roundabout and meandering, deliberately taking in all corners of the county and a range of rural environments while avoiding most of the bigger towns, though we join it for a relatively straight stretch which, having descended from the Chiltern ridges into the Bulbourne valley to skim the east of Berkhamsted, is soon to turn roughly east, paralleling the London boundary. Although devised after the Countryway, its developers have clearly made many of the same choices here, and the distinctive white waymarks will accompany us for the rest of this section and much of the next.

A broad but rather muddy path between thick hedgerows emerges on Flaunden Lane, with the obvious alignment continuing ahead on another picturesequely named lane, Holly Hedges Lane. Here the Chiltern Way leaves us briefly, preferring to save a little tarmac walking by following three sides of a square, but the Hertfordshire Way and the Countryway press ahead along the lane. A good decision in my view -- it's a very narrow and quiet lane that forces the few cars using it to crawl along, and a hard and well-drained surface underfoot is rather welcome after all that mud. Rather pleasingly, it lives up to its name as it is flanked by holly hedges. Passing a few other walkers, we're rejoined by the Chiltern Way temporarily, before it heads off south to Chorleywood and back towards Marlow. I reach the corner of a woodland and find myself already in the second Hertfordshire district of the walk, Three Rivers. The district is another 1970s creation covering the suburban sprawl to the west of Watford, so this is an uncharacteristically rural corner of it. The three rivers in question are the Gade, the Chess and their main stream, the Colne -- both confluences are in the district. We'll soon cross the Gade and pass close to the source of the Colne, and will encounter the Chess on a later London underfoot walk. We're in the parish of Sarratt, location for a fictitious M16 interrogation centre in the novels of John Le Carré -- and if that doesn't stretch the bounds of imagination, it might be because the countryside round here is familiar from so many paranoid cold war TV thriller series produced from Hertfordshire studios.

Woodman's Wood, named after a nearby farm, is managed by the Forestry Commission, and therefore open for public access, though other information on it is sparse -- it's listed on the register of surplus public sector land and I've also seen mentioned in documents relating to the Highways Agency so perhaps it was once blighted by a road scheme such as one of the various ringways proposed in the long and tortuous development of the M25. Whatever, it's a very pleasant old beech woodland on the Chiltern fringe. The lane narrows further as it penetrates deep into the wood, then the tarmac suddenly bends away, but a quick shimmy through a barrier reveals a clear path continuing ahead in the same direction, presumably once part of the original lane. This emerges from the wood and tracks a field edge towards the hamlet of Belsize, and if at this point it is indeed still Holly Hedges Lane, it's still obligingly living up to its name.

The view ahead is a feint echo of the rolling landscapes recently traversed, as I'm descending to a lane that tracks a dry valley with a slope rising up opposite, but this time it's terraced with cottages, and the slope leads not to a chalk ridge but to to the clay and flint Sarratt Plateau and the extensive 47ha of woodland and green space of Chipperfield Common, the star feature of this section of the walk. A few paces along the pavement to the right and I'm back in Dacorum again, with a clear gravelly bridleway leading me up onto the common. Just opposite is a pleasing composition that could have come from the sepia plates of a 1930s motor touring guide: the pretty lodge to Woodmans Farm with its dormer window and gothic front door, and outside it an old-fashioned roadside fingerpost.

Chipperfield Common was once the property of a Dominican friary at Kings Langley, and commoners continued to exercise grazing rights on it into the 20th century. It was given to the local authority in 1936, by which time traditional grazing management had declined and the woodland seen today had started to develop. It boasts eight sweet chestnut trees allegedly planted to delight Isabella, the Castillian infanta who was the first wife of the first Duke of York, Edmund of Langley, when she rode over from the couple's home in what's now Kings Langley -- though as the trees are thought to be about 350-400 years old, this doesn't quite add up, as Isabella died in 1392. There are also some bronze age tumuli and a historical link to former US president Jimmy Carter, whose ancestors came from Chipperfield village.

Once again the paths have evidently been improved since Chesterton researched his 1981 guide: he reports that the most direct route, the bridleway that traces the southern edge of the common, is best avoided as it gets churned up by horses. It's now a good, broad, gravelly surfaced track, well signed with wooden fingerposts that indicate it's part of an easy access route, providing a good stretch of straight walking with a few houses and then glimpses of fields on the right and the pleasantly wooded common on the left. Nearing its end you reach Apostles Pond, so called because of the twelve tall lime trees that surround it, where I stop for lunch. Once the friars' fishpond, with its benches and numerous paths it's now a nexus of strollers and dog walkers. The sun has gone in temporarily and winter is back for a while: the pond is still, sombre and slightly gloomy, and children's voices in the nearby woods seem to come from far away. One of the sweet chestnuts looms nearby, and a notice announces a new plan to improve the environment around and raise awareness of these veteran trees, including a competition for the public to suggest individual names for them all.

At the pond our trail leaves the bridleway on a path striking northeast, which turns out to be a notably straight and direct footpath to Kings Langley. Just before leaving the common, waymarks in jolly primary colours of traditional narrowboat liveries announce we've also joined the Kings Langley and Hemel Hempstead Grand Union Canal circular walk, an 18km loop that's left the canal at Hemel to cross Roughdown Common and various local woodlands before tracing the edge of Chipperfield Common here. Then the sunshine returns, brightening what Chesterton rightly describes as a "fine striding path" between what is now much more of a typical Hertfordshire landscape of rolling fields, and bringing a spring to my step. I reflect that one of the pleasures of today's walk has been that at least since the Hertfordshire boundary every path has been relatively direct, giving a real feeling that you are progressing straightforwardly from A to B on a genuine alternative car-free route, rather than wiggling around from one short footpath to another in an effort to dodge the growup transport network, as is so often the case on walking routes of this kind.

The fine striding path encounters but one interruption, the near-motorway-standard A41, already discussed when I crossed it just outside Berkhamsted in the previous section. Adjoining the embankment that takes the path up to the footbridge across the road is the Centenary Community Woodland, planted in 2008 to celebrate the centenary of Hertfordshire council's rural estate -- its own farms and countryside holdings, which total 4,000ha including working farms as well as recreation sites. There's something compelling about the long term vision of such projects -- today just saplings in plastic tubes rather overwhelmed by the deafening roar of the road.

From the footbridge there's a clear view back towards London. I spot a pedestrian walking towards me down the hard shoulder from an obviously broken down car. He looks incongruously and unhappily marooned, still locked into the enclosed that runs like an entirely separate tranche of reality from my footpath, slowed to a snail's pace on a surface built for speed. It's almost embarassing as he catches my eye, as if we shouldn't be sharing the same space.

On the other side of the A41 the route starts to descend, still on the clear and broad field edge path, from the lip of the Gade valley, revealing a fine prospect with physical and human geography clearly laid out before you. Kings Langley's buildings cluster in the valley's crease, where the Grand Union Canal hides, and trains on the West Coast main line trace a course a little above the floor on the opposite bank. On the green hillside beyond, in direct line of sight, a single wind turbine towers 36m above the old Ovaltine Egg Farm at Beaufort Court. The M25, spotted for the first time since Merstham, sweeps in from the right, flying against the grain of the landscape on a lengthy concrete viaduct, while off to the left, in the distance, traffic on the north-south M1 is just visible, though the M25/M1 junction is hidden behind a hill. Doubtless many walkers on this path will decry the motorway viaduct and even the wind turbine as carbuncles and blots but there's a stark elegance to both and from this angle the accidental composition is quite striking. They also say as much about the interrelationship between humanity and the physical environment as the canal and the railway, both in their day equally intensive attempts to overcome natural challenges that are now regarded as unintrusive and even picturesque.

Kings Langley owes its existence to the valley's capacity to facilitate easy passage through the Chilterns -- a Roman road, the same one we encountered in Berkhamsted, passed this way and there is a villa site nearby. The Plantagenet dynasty had a palace here, founded by Eleanor of Castile, Edward I's wife, thus the royal ephithet, and the aforementioned first Duke of York, Edmund of Langley, lived here with another Castillian royal consort, the infanta Isabella, related by marriage to the famous Jan van Gent or John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster -- both rose houses, but a generation before they went to war on one another. Richard II was buried here for a while. It remained a relatively small place until the modern age of communications -- first the Sparrows Herne turnpike road (later the A41, now diverted along the bypass we've already crossed), then the canal, then the railway, all of which also ran via Berkhamsted, so much of the discussion of these phenomena in the previous section applies here. Today it's probably best known as the former home of Ovaltine, that bedtime soporific of many a bourgeois English childhood, of which there will be more to say in the next section.

A 20th century sprawl of housing, light industry and offices has turned Kings Langley into a substantial settlement of over 5,000 people, easily enough for a small town, but the place is still officially a village, as testified in signing that indicates the village centre. And indeed our final approach is a rural one as the fine striding path runs its final metres past a pond, a black clapboard cottage and through the authentically cowpatted farmyard of Wayside Farm, at the southern end of the village street.

Here we turn away from the village centre and continue east down an old lane, now supplanted by a newer, broader parallel road serving the industrial estates, towards the Home Park Mill on the valley floor. This soon crosses the Grand Union Canal, here supplanting the course of the Gade, by the pretty Home Park Mill lock, where the circular walk picks up the towpath left to complete its loop towards Hemel Hempstead. The canal, and the Grand Union Canal Walk, will form the basis of more than one future London underfoot walk, so there will be much more to say about them beyond the brief notes in the previous section.

Continuing beyond the canal, and now on the modern Home Park Mill Link Road, I very shortly cross the millrace, where a sign announces the rather dull surrounding light industrial and office units include "Imagination House". The station, at the end of this section, is a short hop down Station Road. It's a modest building, in a 1980s mock vernacular cottage style, although there's been a station here since 1839, originally known as Kings Langley and Abbots Langley. It's actually just over the Dacorum boundary in Three Rivers -- the canal marks the boundary, and the M25 thunders on its viaduct right over the London end of the platforms. The traffic above is heading round but for the time being at least, I'm heading back.

Download a route description PDF http://dl.dropbox.com/u/884833/londonunderfoot/9-ashleygreen-kingslangley.pdf

View Google map
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&start=323&num=200&msa=0&msid=117966169375523396049.00046414d40d8252e7b70&ll=51.707134,-0.706859&spn=0.001599,0.00478&t=h&z=18

More information:

Buckinghamshire County Council http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/
Visit Buckinghamshire http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org/
Walking in Buckinghamshire (Visit Buckinghamshire) http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org/site/walking-in-buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire Walks and Rides (Bucks CC) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/row/getting_out_on_the_network.page?
Buckinghamshire Leisure & Culture (including parks) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/leisure/Leisure__culture.page?
Chiltern District Council http://www.chiltern.gov.uk/
Chiltern tourism and walks http://www.chiltern.gov.uk/tourism
Ashley Green Community Association http://www.ashleygreen.org.uk
Ashley Green Stile Free Walk http://www.chilternsaonb.org/site_details.asp?siteID=474
Ashley Green Chesham Walk http://www.chilternsaonb.org/downloads/publications/CheshamWalks6AshleyGreen.pdf
Hertfordshire County Council http://www.hertsdirect.org/
Hertfordshire Tourist Information http://www.hertsdirect.org/comdirectory/comvol/infoad2y/intour3y/
Hertfordshire countryside and rights of way http://www.hertsdirect.org/envroads/environment/countryside/
Dacorum Borough Council http://www.dacorum.gov.uk/
Dacorum Tourism and Travel http://www.dacorum.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=1542
Dacorum parks, countryside and open spaces http://www.dacorum.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=77
Dacorum Heritage Trust http://www.dacorumheritage.org.uk/
Bovingdon Parish Council (including walks) http://www.bovingdon.org/
Bovingdon Bricks http://www.bovingdonbricks.co.uk
Bovingdon Green Preservation Society http://bovingdon-green.org/
Royal Oak, Bovingdon Green http://www.royaloakbovingdon.co.uk/
Chiltern Way (Chiltern Society) http://www.chilternsociety.org.uk/about-ChltnWay.php
Chiltern Way interactive map http://www.chilternsaonb.org/place_details.asp?siteID=219
Friends of the Hertfordshire Way http://www.fhw.org.uk/
Three Rivers District Council http://www.threerivers.gov.uk/
Three Rivers Parks and Recreation http://www.threerivers.gov.uk/Default.aspx/Web/ParksRecreation
Three Rivers Tourism http://www.threerivers.gov.uk/Default.aspx/Web/TourismTravel
Sarratt Parish Council http://sarratt.hertsparishes.gov.uk/
Chipperfield Parish Council http://www.chipperfield.org.uk/
Kings Langley Parish Council (including walking map) http://kingslangleyparishcouncil.hertsparishes.gov.uk/
A41 (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A41_road
Grand Union Canal http://www.waterscape.com/canals-and-rivers/grand-union-canal
Grand Union Canal walking http://www.waterscape.com/canals-and-rivers/grand-union-canal/walking
River Gade (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Gade
Abbots Langley Parish Council (including walks) http://www.abbotslangley-pc.gov.uk/
West Coast Main Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Main_Line
M25 motorway (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M25_motorway

London Countryway 8: Great Missenden - Berkhamsted

2009-09-23T21:20:00.020+01:00

The London Countryway leaves the A413 and the South Buckinghamshire Way on the edge of Great Missenden to climb the east side of the uppermost reach of the Misbourne valley, tracing the edges of arable fields to continue its relatively uneventful journey across the rolling chalk ridges of the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). Some sort of outdoor event is taking place in the fields just off the main road as I pass, with an assemblage of inflatable recreation facilities. So today's walk starts with a bouncy castle, and ends at Berkhamsted with a real ruined one.

The path runs uphill relatively gently, with views behind to the Misbourne valley, to cross the first of a series of lanes running along the flat ridgetops.

It emerges at a little collection of houses and farms at Potter Row, where by allotments there's an old style metal footpath sign pointing back the way we came.

Just where the next section of path strikes out across the fields is a small grassy square with a bench and a well head topped by some old mechanical lifting gear, looking serious enough to belong in a mine or quarry. Wells were a serious business up on these ridges: the porous chalk makes ground water scarce and the water table low, necessitating deep digging to reach it.

The next path cuts diagonally across more fields on clear paths, emerging onto a bridleway at Field Edge Grange where a bench tempts you to linger and enjoy the spot. then wiggles around a pretty farm and cottages at Field End Grange. The bench commemorates Emily Morris (1891-1976) and her three children, all now dead, of the Lee, the settlement just a little over to the left.

Beyond this the route descends slightly towards a strip of woodland which is presumably all that remains of Lee Common. Here the Countryway picks up a path that tracks the wooded strip, joining not only another section of the meandering Chiltern Heritage Trail but one of Buckinghamshire County Council's network of walking routes, the Chiltern Link. This short 13km trail was created to plug a strategic gap between the Chess Valley Way at Chesham and the Ridgeway at Wendover, and is based on an ancient trade route that used to link the two. In fact you can pick out a whole skein of almost parallel northwest - southeast roads and paths: the ridges and the routes fan out northwest from Chesham towards the main Chiltern dip.

Unlike many other European countries, no central organisation has yet emerged in the UK to oversee the development of a long distance walking network, but if ever anyone did set about sorting out the current sprawl, and conceived, for example, a long north-south route between Scotland and the south coast via London, their gaze might well fall on this little stretch of path through a pleasant but modest ancient Buckinghamshire woodland. Northwestwards, the Chiltern Link connects not only with the Ridgeway but the Aylesbury Ring, a circular route through the countryside around that town. A little way along that route, past Great Kimble, there's a junction with the North Buckinghamshire Way towards Milton Keynes. As mentioned in the previous section, the North Bucks Way is the first link in a longer chain of routes, the Midshires Way, connecting to the Pennine Way and the Pennine Bridleway National Trails that take ambitious walkers a long way north to the Scottish border. There are various options of shorter trails to close missing links in the Scottish Borders and Southern Uplands but you could reach Edinburgh, or Glasgow which has a continuous link to Inverness via the West Highland and Great Glen Ways.

Southeast the Countryway provides a link to the Hertfordshire Way; in turn this links to the Watling Chase Trail, the London Loop and the Dollis Valley Greenway, with the potential of a link through Hampstead Heath, along the Belsize Walk and through Regents Park to central London, a trajectory I'll eventually explore in more detail in this blog.

The Chiltern Link reaches a lane at Ballinger Bottom, a cluster of pretty cottages in a well-wooded dip, and from here there are several parallel routes tracking the edge of a ridge. The Countryway chooses a pleasant bridleway that hugs the northern edge of another strip of rich beech woods, with fields sloping steeply up to the left, leaving the Link past a tree house, though take care as the junction is narrowly angled and the fingerpost points between the two options. After a more open section the bridleway zigzags around the edges of blocks of woodland adjoining at right angles -- the paths here are very well kept and well signed, with the local parish council of Chartridge using their own bridleway signing.

After a short sharp climb the route joins a fine track between old hedges, hugging a contour with open views of fields, almost as though you're flying across the ridges. Reaching Chartridge I pass a cricket ground with a match in progress, and note with some surprise that this is the first example of such a stereotypically rural English scene that I've encountered on the whole walk, and so late in the season. Here once again the route dallies with the Chiltern Heritage Trail.

Chartridge -- "Caerda's Ridge" from an Anglo-Saxon personal name -- is a linear ridgetop village on what became the metalled road from Chesham to Wendover (these days it's faster by car to head for Great Missenden and take the A413). On the corner where we join the village street is Chartridge Village Hall and Reading Room, converted from an old blacksmith's shop in 1919 by Caroline Franklin, wealthy founder of the local Women's Institute.

Wheeler and her husband lived at Chartridge Lodge a little further towards Wendover, which they expanded and converted from a modest farm into a luxury home. It's now a posh residential conference centre and the base of a company that owns a whole network of such venues.

The path from Chartridge leaves by Chartridge Mission Church, a simple, small and neat chapel originally built for the Baptist congregation in 1844. I've noticed a number of these little chapels along the way and wonder if historically nonconformism had a particular appeal in the Chilterns. The path passes some pretty white cottages, one of which, in an unexpected echo of inner London, appears to have borrowed an Underground station sign from the Angel Islington, on display below a hanging basket. Angel is also on the route of the Jubilee Greenway. I'm becoming aware that the architectural character is changing, with flints giving way to stone and whitewash.

Then it's down and up again, with fine views behind, to the next ridgetop hamlet, Asheridge, little more than a row of houses along a lane.

Here, turn left for a few paces rather than right to find a decent small pub, the Blue Ball, with an unusual sign: rather than the traditonal painted board, there's a three dimensional blue ball surrounded by a horseshoe at the top of a post. Patches of corrosion on the ball look strikingly like the continents of a fictitious planet, set against azure oceans.

From Widmore Farm, Asheridge, a concrete track passes a curious black wooden building on stilts and runs through fields where, here at the end of summer, rolled bales of hay form random patterns.

Then once more down and up, through a small wood, Widmore Wood, and up the next valley edge. Keith Chesterton, devisor and original describer of the Countryway, compares these waves of dry valleys to the Welsh Borders and you can see what he means, yet you could walk briskly to the tube station at Chesham from here in less than an hour. I wonder if the prevalence of chapels subconsciously reinforced the comparison.

On the next ridge is the more sprawling linear hamlet of Bellingdon, with another chapel. Here the route wiggles to pick up an old byway towards Ramscoat Wood. There is no right of way on the desire line straight down the ridge, but, writing in 1981, Chesterton tips his readers that local people simply go straight ahead down the edge of the wood anyway. In the intervening years someone has decided to put a stop to this, installing a sturdy fence, restoring the hedgerow and putting up "No public right of way" signs. I fail to understand this mindset -- I can't see any good land management reasons why the public shouldn't walk down the edges of these particular arable fields as it does along so many others that have an official right of way. Landowners may be concerned about the legal principle of presumed dedication, where if people use a path for 20 years without any evidence of a landowner trying to prevent them, it's presumed the landowner intended to dedicate the path as a right of way. But there are ways round this by opening up a path permissively with notices denying there's any intention to dedicate.

I duly walk around three sides of a square, cutting through the centre of the wood on the byway and then tracking back along the other side of it, briefly entangling with the Chiltern Heritage Trail again, before resuming my course uphill. Just below the summit, a more public-spirited person has placed a picnic bench in a well-chosen spot.

This is Hawridge, but there's no village astride it at this point, just a broad field bisected by a ridgetop path. Crossing this I descend to Nut Hazel Cross, no more than a farm on a junction of minor roads, but enough to qualify for its own named traditional fingerpost. The junction sits on a parish boundary and may have had a special significance in "beating the bounds" ceremonies.

The thin band of woods at the top of the next rise is managed under the Chiltern Woodlands project, started as the Small Woodlands Project by the Chiltern Society in 1989 and now an independent charity that conserves local woodlands, supporting land managers to implement sustainable forestry and public enjoyment.

On the other side you're out into the fields of Woodlands Farm, where you can't fail to notice the sturdy branded waymarker posts signing not only rights of way but a network of permissive paths, yet this is private commercial farmland, not part of a public or charity estate. Since 1999 the farm has been part of the landholdings of Copas Farms, based in Cookham, which we passed a few sections ago, and the company has a policy of welcoming public access, including providing open spaces and conservation areas and organising led farm walks, "in an effort to encourage people to understand farming, the countryside and wildlife." This progressive attitude is perhaps informed by the importance of the Pick Your Own market to Copas' business -- they are clearly used to welcoming the public to their land. But even so their attitude is praiseworthy and all too rare, such a contrast to the shortcut-blockers a little way behind us.

On the other side of Copas' fields I pick up a path which first runs alongside small paddocks, passing the second tree house I've spotted today, and then diagonally through them, via a series of well-maintained gates, passing two baths recycled as cattle troughs that present an incongruous site.

The local Parish Paths Partnership, a scheme where local people and the parish council can obtain small amounts of funding from the county or unitary council to improve their footpath network, has been active here. And here and elsewhere you'll also spot the Chiltern Society's white arrow waymarks, adopted before the now-standard yellow, blue, red and plum right of way arrows were introduced nationally.

The path emerges on Hog Lane on the outskirts of the village of Ashley Green, and yet again the Heritage Trail signs are on display. Ashley Green is a classically quaint village centred on a thin triangular green. Its position on the road between Chesham and Berkhamsted, only a short drive from the tube station at the former, makes it attractive to better off commuters. The flint and Bath stone church is a Victorian addition as the village only became the centre of a parish in 1876. On the green we're reminded again of the importance of wells -- the wooden well house, recently restored, is one of the more prominent features.

Once again the Countryway has deposited us some distance from the nearest major transport interchange. There are hourly buses from here to Chesham and Berkhamsted, but not on Sundays. Chesterton's suggestion for those who want to continue on foot is to head for Berkhamsted, which is nearer than High Wycombe is to West Wycombe, and also gives us the chance to add another county to today's walk.

This means continuing along the Countryway for a short distance, along a gravel track across the top of the green, past the well house and cottages and out into fields. You come past a fenced wooded area with "Danger - Deep Water" signs, perhaps an old reservoir, to an open field gate where there is a junction of well-defined tracks. The Chiltern Heritage Trail and the London Countryway (and my notional north-south route) fork right here while I keep ahead. There are numerous footpath options for reaching Berkhamsted, including leaving the Countryway before Ashley Green and passing through Hockeridge Wood, a "best practice" woodland management site owned by the Royal Forestry Society. But my route continues down a field edge to the bottom of a dry valley, and into the Hertfordshire borough of Dacorum.

To the right the boundary follows a fence but there are no boundary markers to the left, just an imaginary line along the lowest contour and a noticeable strip of something different on the path surface where it crosses. On the other side you're welcomed to the new highway authority with a Hertfordshire-branded byway fingerpost: though it's clearly a continuation of the same path, which is only a footpath on the Buckinghamshire side, the different authorities must have made different interpretations of historical facts when defining their footpath networks.

I'll say more about Hertfordshire when the main route of the Countryway reaches it in the next section, but for now I'll declare an interest, as it's the county where I grew up, although some way east of here. We lived near a village called Little Berkhamstead and always wondered why it was so far from big Berkhamsted. In fact both gained the same name independently in Saxon times, "homestead among the birches", though with slightly different spellings, and the village has borne various additional epithets over the centures to distinguish it from its bigger namesake.

The byway curves up beside a wood, becomes a farm track past Harriotts End Farm, well sited on the corner of the ridge, and emerges on a quiet, tree-lined lane. I opt to follow this quiet lane northwards to its end. In the 18th century a number of parkland estates were developed round here and I could cut off to explore the remains of one of them, Ashlyns, where the Regency villa still stands, now used as offices, a residential care home and boarding school. Adjoining this was another villa in a park, Haresfoot, but only its pretty home farm remains, just off the lane to the right. But my eye is drawn on the map to a little pocket of wooded access land, presumably the remnants of a common, from where a long straight path runs mainly through open space straight towards the town centre.

The natural course of the lane is blocked by the A41 dual carriageway, where it's been diverted to run down to a split level junction. The road is a landmark of our clockwise progress: it's the first of the major roads north from London we've encountered on our journey so far, linking London, Birmingham and Birkenhead. This section is, of course, a modern bypass: the historic route ran through Berkhamstead as its high street, making use of a length of Roman road, Akeman Street, originally a link between St Albans and Cirencester. In 1762 it became a key link in the developing modern road system as part of the Sparrows Hernel Turnpike between Bushey and Aylesbury, linking to the Edgware Road to London's West End in the south (itself largely a Roman road) and turnpikes to Birmingham in the north. The whole route became a trunk road in the last century, threading an alternative course from Oxford Street near Marble Arch via Baker Street and Swiss Cottage, still the main route north from the West End. With the opening of the M40 and M42, its importance has declined and some sections have been detrunked and even renumbered, but here, just south of Berkhamsted, it's still a very busy highway of near-motorway proportions, embedded, like the M40, in a ditch.

On the other side of the motorway bridge, a stile built onto the crash barrier takes me into the woods and along a path that's clearly not especially well used, but still possible to follow as it winds between trees and holly bushes. It emerges on a street, Kingshill Way, that bounds Berkhamsted's built-up area. A short way along to the left is the J Paul Getty Jr Conservation Centre, the headquarters of the British Film Institute National Archive, one of the biggest film archives in the world, endowed by the American-born philanthropist John Paul Getty Jr (1932-2003). The walk, however, continues straight ahead through playing fields belonging to Berkhamsted School. This minor public school dates back to 1541, when it was founded by John Incent (1480-1545), then Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London, which we'll pass when London Underfoot reaches the Jubilee Walkway.

The long, straight line of the footpath, bisecting the playing fields along a row of mature trees, suggests this is an old route into the town that once passed through farmland or open land at this point -- thankfully it's not (so far) been fenced off or shut by a child protection panic. After the playing fields it becomes a surfaced, enclosed path, crosses residential streets and continues through a public open space, Butts Meadow. The name immediately signals a connection to archery, and indeed this was an archery practice ground from at least the time of Edward the "Black Prince" (1330-76), whom we've encountered before as he held the estate of Byfleet. The last record of active archers is in the 18th century, and now it's a relatively plain but pleasant open space, surrounded by rich hedgerows and popular with dog walkers, with a verdant slope that gives a good prospect of the town down in the Bulbourne valley.

There are three keystones to Berkhamsted's history: the highway, the castle and the market. Roman Akeman Street found a convenient route through the Chilterns here, along the valley of the river Bulbourne, a tributary of another Chiltern stream, the Gade, with its confluence at Hemel Hempstead, eventually draining into the Thames via the Colne. Even before the Romans, there is archaeological evidence of Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age occupation in the vicinity. The site of Berkhamsted Castle, on the opposite side of the Bulbourne from my viewpoint, was originally fortified in Saxon times, and Grim's Ditch, a Saxon earthwork of uncertain purpose that we'll later encounter on the London Loop, crosses Berkhamsted Common. Little is known of the early days, then the town bursts spectacularly into the historical record in one of those years every British school child once had embedded in their memory -- 1066.

Berkhamsted was the point at which the Norman invasion of England became the Norman Conquest; Guillaume le Bâtard (1027-87), the Duke of Normandy, secured his claim to becoming William I of England; and the Celtic and Germanic cultures of the British Isles started their metamorphosis into the weird Anglo-French hybrid we know today. In early December 1066, with the Norman forces encircling London, Edgar Ætheling (1051-1126), uncrowned heir to the English throne and descendant of the house of Wessex, surrendered to the Conqueror here. Guillaume could have been crowned there and then, but clearly thought this Hertfordshire backwater an insufficiently glamourous and symbolic backdrop. Instead, he demanded the keys to London, where his coronation went ahead in Westminster Abbey (also on the Jubilee Walkway) on Christmas Day.

Following the Conquest, the castle was rebuilt in stone and became a favourite haunt of the Plantagenet royals. Doomed Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was once the constable -- his overspending on the castle is thought to be one of the things that enraged his patron Henry II, contributing indirectly to his assassination. An equally ill-fated historical figure connected with the town is Edward II: he gave the castle to his lover Piers Gaveston, who got married there. The Black Prince had a particular affection for the town, choosing it as his honeymoon location and giving it an historic connection to the Duchy of Cornwall. With its military function long since superceded, the castle was finally abandoned in 1495, in the early days of Tudor England.

Meanwhile, in 1217 Berkhamsted had become a market town, making it a thriving local centre as well as a stop on a major highway. The road was turnpiked in 1762, and in 1798 a new line of communication opened alongside it, when the Bulbourne was largely dug up to become part of the Grand Union Canal. 1838 saw the opening of the London and Birmingham Railway, a third trunk transport route squeezing along the valley. Berkhamsted Common, northwest of the town, was the site in 1866 of a celebrated campaign to save common land for the enjoyment of all against enclosure.

Our path, once the route linking the Butts to the Castle, emerges by a school and the obvious route ahead becomes Prince Edward Road, recalling the historic connection to the Black Prince. This emerges on the High Street right by the market. Old Akeman Street is now bypassed and traffic calmed, displaying a mix of building styles that still preserves some houses and pubs that would have been familiar to coach passengers passing on the turnpike. The historic market place has succumbed to car parks and shopping centres, but open air traders still set out their stalls on the High Street on this mild September Saturday. A town sign displays the arms, featuring a stylised castle with gold dots -- "besants" -- on a black border, the heraldic code for the Duchy of Cornwall.

I keep as straight ahead as I can, across the High Street, through the car park which now occupies the market square site, and along Mill Lane, passing another campus of Berkhamsted School. A short stretch of residential street takes me past Canal Fields, a pleasant public space that received a Millennium makeover, with the twin ribbons of the canal and the railway ahead. A short stretch of recently reengineered footpath takes me up to a bridge and over the canal where the station is immediately visible on the left.

The 220km Grand Union Canal links London and Birmingham, from the river Thames at Brentford, with an arm to Paddington and on via the Regents Canal to the Thames at Limehouse, to Warwick Bar by the Banana Warehouse on the edge of Birmingham city centre. Stretches of the canal towpath further towards London form key sections of the London Loop, Capital Ring and Jubilee Greenway, so we'll say more about it when we walk these routes. The London and Birmingham railway, later part of the London and North Western and the London Midland and Scottish Railways, is our first encounter with a major intercity railway line north from the capital. It now forms part of Network Rail's West Coast Main Line, one of Britain's most important trunk routes, carrying Virgin Pendolino tilting trains from Euston not only to Birmingham, Britain's second biggest city, but on to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, the country's ninth, fourth and third biggest cities respectively.

Don't jump on a train, however, without detouring under the railway and visiting the site of the Castle, just behind the station and also on the Berkhamsted Heritage Walk. Since its desertion at the end of the 15th century, much of its masonry has been cannibalised -- some is even incorporated into the viaduct and embankment of the railway -- but you can still climb the motte and survey the line of the moat, with just enough remnants of walls to pick up the floor plan.

The site is now in the care of English Heritage, the government agency that presides over most of the "heritage" the National Trust hasn't snaffled up, and it's free to visit, with a good job made of interpretation boards. With all the grass it's a pleasant open space, though perhaps undervalued for a site that witnessed such a vital turning point in English history. Imagine the Black Prince and his retinue celebrating his wedding party if you can, or Edgar kowtowing to his new Norman masters (how did it feel as the agent of such a seismic shift in history?) or maybe the doomed Edward and Piers in a passionate embrace among the overgrowth sprouting from the decaying brickwork as the Pendolini whistle past nearby. On the way back, a cluster of curious bollards topped with luminous green will guide you to an alternative station entrance.

Download a route description PDF http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/884833/londonunderfoot/8-greatmissenden-berkhamsted.pdf

View Google map
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&start=323&num=200&msa=0&msid=117966169375523396049.00046414d40d8252e7b70&ll=51.707134,-0.706859&spn=0.001599,0.00478&t=h&z=18

More information

Buckinghamshire County Council http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/

Visit Buckinghamshire http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org/

Walking in Buckinghamshire (Visit Buckinghamshire) http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org/site/walking-in-buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire Walks and Rides (Bucks CC) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/row/getting_out_on_the_network.page?

Buckinghamshire Leisure & Culture (including parks) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/leisure/Leisure__culture.page?

Chiltern District Council http://www.chiltern.gov.uk/

Chiltern tourism and walks http://www.chiltern.gov.uk/tourism

Chilterns Area of Oustanding Natural Beauty http://www.chilternsaonb.org/

Chiltern Society http://www.chilternsociety.org.uk/

Great Missenden Parish Council http://www.greatmissendenpc.co.uk/

Great Missenden and Prestwood visitor guide http://www.chiltern.gov.uk/downloads/GM.pdf

South Buckinghamshire Way http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/assets/content/bcc/docs/row/promoted_routes/South_Bucks_Way_Leaflet.pdf

Chiltern Heritage Trail http://www.chilternsaonb.org/site_details.asp?siteID=222

Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre http://www.roalddahlmuseum.org/

London to Aylesbury Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_to_Aylesbury_Line

River Misbourne (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Misbourne

The Lee http://www.thelee.org.uk/

The Lee and Lee Common Stile Free Walk http://www.chilternsaonb.org/site_details.asp?siteID=473

Chiltern Link http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/assets/content/bcc/docs/row/promoted_routes/ChilternLink.pdf

Chartridge Parish Council http://www.chartridgeparishcouncil.org.uk/

Copas Farms http://www.copasfarms.co.uk/

Ashley Green Community Association http://www.ashleygreen.org.uk/

Ashley Green Stile Free Walk http://www.chilternsaonb.org/site_details.asp?siteID=474

Ashley Green Chesham Walk http://www.chilternsaonb.org/downloads/publications/CheshamWalks6AshleyGreen.pdf

Hertfordshire County Council http://www.hertsdirect.org/

Hertfordshire Tourist Information http://www.hertsdirect.org/comdirectory/comvol/infoad2y/intour3y/

Hertfordshire countryside and rights of way http://www.hertsdirect.org/envroads/environment/countryside/

Dacorum Borough Council http://www.dacorum.gov.uk/

Dacorum Tourism and Travel http://www.dacorum.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=1542

Dacorum parks, countryside and open spaces http://www.dacorum.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=77

Berkhamsted Town Council http://www.berkhamsted.gov.uk/

A41 (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A41_road

BFI National Archive http://www.bfi.org.uk/nftva/

Berkhamsted School http://www.berkhamstedcollegiateschool.org.uk/

River Bulbourne (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbourne

Grand Union Canal http://www.waterscape.com/canals-and-rivers/grand-union-canal

Grand Union Canal walking http://www.waterscape.com/canals-and-rivers/grand-union-canal/walking

West Coast Main Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Main_Line

Berkhamsted Castle (Local History & Museum Society) http://www.berkhamsted-castle.org.uk/

Berkhamsted Castle (English Heritage) http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/berkhamstedcastle

Berkhamsted Heritage Walk http://www.angelfire.com/journal/ggbtps/bherit01.htm

London Countryway 7: West Wycombe - Great Missenden

2009-09-23T21:18:00.021+01:00

On this section and the next, the London Countryway continues through the Chilterns in almost entirely rural and remarkably quiet surroundings. This is where the roller coaster really gets into its stride with ups and downs over minor chalk ridges, your leg musles testifying to the route's alignment against the geological grain as it wanders through a succession of field edges, beech woods and ridgetop hamlets. It's amazing that such a contrasting environment exists within such easy reach of the big city, and that fewer people don't explore it -- I passed a few dog walkers and occasional strollers, but hardly anyone clutching an OS map, certainly in comparison to the Downs or the Surrey Heaths.

I opt to catch the bus from High Wycombe to the start of the section rather than retrace my steps, finding some pleasant streets and the Eden Centre, built over the river Wye and partly hidden under the A40. It's a brand new shopping mall and leisure complex, partly outdoor, partly indoor, that shows how much the design of these places has progressed, built on a big scale but still navigable, the routes through it self explanatory. The bus drops near the Pedestal Roundabout, so named because a classical-style white pedestal stands at the junction, presumably another Dashwood folly.

The path from the A4010 soon crosses under the railway through a well-weathered brick arch, then climbs slowly through fields, with fine views back towards Wycombe Hill. Eventually the church's distinctive palla d'oro disappears behind a ridge and the path approaches lonely wooden farm buildings grouped around a cinder courtyard. From here it picks up the drive to Cookshall Farm, but pretty soon the drive swerves left and the right of way leaves it to continue more-or-less ahead through trees. From the aerial photo it looks likely the straight alignment of the right of way is the original one, while the metalled farm track is a later diversion. The Countryway's creator and 1981-vintage guidebook writer Keith Chesterton suggests no-one will hassle you for using the farm track, and indeed a runner is using it as I approach, but the wood looks more inviting. At first the path is a broad green strip, with park-like woodland with silver birches and ferns on one side and a wilder beeches and oaks on the other, but it narrows to a woodland track before emerging into a field.

More woods ahead mark the first proper commons we've encountered since leaving Surrey, still part of the massive West Wycombe Estate but long managed as accessible public green space. There are in fact two adjacent commons, divided by a parish boundary. To the south is Downley Common, and the Countryway first reaches the northern extremity of this. The route then turns north through the short strip that links to Naphill Common, although the boundary is relatively recent, as Downley was once a "detached part" of Wycombe parish. Downley was once used for chalk and clay extraction, and during World War II was used as a testing ground for tanks made in High Wycombe. Naphill Common is bigger, the biggest in Buckinghamshire, but was once twice its present size, and less wooded, but the woodland flourished following the cessation of grazing after World War I and since 1951 it's been a Site of Special Scientific Interest precisely because of its longstanding lack of traditional grazing management.

Both commons have active user groups -- the Downley Common Preservation Society and the Friends of Naphill Common. Both have been keen to facilitate walking on the commons -- Downley has a Millennium Trail, and the paths in both commons are very well waymarked, a blessing as it's easy to get lost given the dense woodland and the complex lattice of paths. The waymarking even includes the path numbers -- these are the numbers used on the "definitive map" of rights of way kept by the council, usually allocated on a parish-by-parish basis, and rarely appear on signs, but they're extremely useful here. For the most part our route is both a footpath, H12, and a bridleway, BW24, which through some quirk are recorded as separate rights of way although there's no obvious distinction on the ground.

The woodland spreads out westwards and I'm soon deep among the oak and beech. The fine old trees are often wreathed by holly, there's an occasional flourish of juniper, and big black beetles -- now known in educational parlance as "minibeasts" -- scurry through the twigs and mulch on the path surface.

Eventually I arrive at the northwest corner of the common where a pleasing little collection of cottages looks out onto a green on the edge of the village of Naphill.

This is a sizeable village of the linear variety so common in these parts, strung out for some 1.5km along a road that is said to trace the boundary between the territories of two Celtic tribes. To the east were the Catuvellauni, who had their capital at St Albans, our destination in a few stages' time. To the west were the Atrebates, centred on Silchester -- both sites of course became important Roman settlements. The Atrebates' name could be cognate with Irish aitreibh, "building". The buildings here today are mainly of flint and brick -- the Black Lion pub, just set back from the main road, is a good example.

The village owes much of its business, and its good bus connection, to the proximity of RAF High Wycombe just up the road at Walters Ash. This isn't an airfield but a command centre, the headquarters of Air Command, the pinnacle of the Air Force's command pyramid. Aerial photos reveal a rectangular structure with three circles in a field on the east of the complex -- this is the nuclear bunker where, during the Cold War, a team of bureaucrats sat ready to sound the four minute warning.

My mind turning to more cheerful matters, I head off northwest on a path well-used by locals that winds across meadows and fields towards a woodland, where I have my second wildlife moment of the day. I'm no birder, but even I notice the large birds dramatically swooping and calling with piping voices around the edge of the woods as I approach. These are red kites, and they represent one of the great conservation success stories of recent years. Once common birds of prey in Britain, they were added to the list of vermin in the 19th century and persecuted to near extinction, surviving only in small numbers in isolated Welsh valleys. From 1989 birds from Spain were reintroduced in the Chilterns, and they have flourished, with over 200 breeding pairs. They've since been reintroduced to several other sites in England and Scotland, sometimes using Chiltern-born chicks, including around Callander in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, another of my favourite places for walking. Yes, I'll stoop to a cliché -- 'magnificent birds'. They put a smile on my face, and I wonder if the birds I spot now have descendants north of the border. I certainly rather see red kites in the sky than Bomber Command.

The broad ridge that supports Naphill descends through North Dean Woods to the hamlet of Upper North Dean, where there are bus stops, but only for services that seem to run once on Tuesdays. This is one part of the country where the council have revived the use of traditional fingerpost road signs as more fitting to the local environment, as the result of a welcoming loosening of regulations at the Department for Transport.

The route then climbs again, up a hill and towards a wood, and along a surfaced track past the settlement known as Piggotts. This is the venue for the Music Camp founded by scientist Bernard Wheeler Robinson (1904-97) in 1927 near Hitchin, which moved here when it became Robinson's home in 1963. Twice a year, amateur musicians gather here for nine days of communal music making, including tackling ambitious works by the likes of Olivier Messiaen, as well popular composers like Sondheim. Piggots has even hosted its own Ring Cycle.

At the end of the track is Piggotts Hill House, set back at the end of a long drive, but I'm deterred from taking a photo by an angry dog that comes bounding down the drive towards me. There's no gate, and I'm dubious as to whether the invisible forcefield at the limits of its territory will hold the beast, so I hastily continue around the house wall and back into woods.

The path descends to another small hamlet, Bryants Bottom, and then steeply back onto a ridge surmounted by Denner Hill Farm, where some old barns have been converted into impressive homes. Then it's down again through a rough field with fantastic views to Hampden Road, which marks the district council boundary between Wycombe and Chiltern districts.

From here another path runs uphill through a field towards a wood, the delightfully named Nanfan Wood, then across to the equally oddly named Hangings Lane on the edge of the sizeable village of Prestwood. This, the sister village of Great Missenden, is an example of the more common fate of areas of common land following enclosure -- originally a common that formed part of the Mandeville estate, as in Stoke Mandeville, it was developed in Victorian times, taking advantage of its position on what was then a main road between London and Birmingham. In the local 1960s the former cherry orchards were developed as overspill housing in a government initiative.

Rather uncharacteristically, the Countryway does some suburban wiggling through the village's residential streets, mainly I think as Chesterton is anxious to show us the Glebe, a pretty row of whitewashed cottages just off Kiln Lane. The gravel path that runs under a wooden archway just by these looks like a garden path, but is actually a right of way that leads into a road on the other side -- the residents entertain walkers further by keeping pretty patches of garden across the path from their homes.

From Prestwood Farm the route heads out across fields, downhill again and through Rignall Wood. Behind me I hear the thrum of a vehicle which turns out to be a golf buggy affair, moving at a walking pace -- and towing a horse! An example of the world turned upside down, or yet another example of the curious modern phobia of physical activity?

At Coney Cottage, just along from Rignall Farm, I spot a proud array of rosettes pineed on the wall of a stable. A sign warns the horses are microchipped -- presumably, like Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they can only act aggressively towards demons and vampires. I wish the same could be said of the local dogs.

Beyond this the fields flatten towards the railway to Aylesbury. Just before the tunnel under the railway, it's joined from the left by the South Buckinghamshire Way, one of a number of routes in the county originally proposed by Ramblers members but adopted by the county council. Northwest, the South Bucks Way fairly soon meets the Ridgeway National Trail near Coombe Hill, and ambitious walkers can link from there via the Ridgeway to the North Bucks Way, the first in a chain of paths that together make up the Midshires Way through middle England to Stockport, Greater Manchester, where there's a connection to the Pennine Bridleway. You could follow signed paths from here through the Pennines to Byrness and on along the Pennine Way across the Scottish border to Kirk Yetholm.

On the other side of the railway is Mobwell, where the path passes a dry hollow. During wet weather a spring bubbles up here to become the river Misbourne, the suffix "bourne" indicating a watercourse that only appears intermittently.

In fact the upper part of the river has in recent times been more dry than wet, thanks partly to dry weather, partly to water abstraction, with its course sometimes becoming obstructed, causing flooding when it does flow. It was dry between 2003 and 2007, causing much local excitement when it reappeared, but then disappeared again until early this year. The Chiltern Society are now campaigning to address the problems and properly restore the river's course. Downstream of Chalfont St Giles it's more consistently wet, and flows to join the river Colne at Denham, which in turn joins the Thames at Staines, so the waters that emerge here eventually graze the western edge of Greater London through the Colne Valley Regional Park.

Opposite the source is a substantial pub, the Black Horse, and the trail runs through its car park and on along strips of meadow beside the dry trench of the infant river. The Thames, too, looks like this on its very upper reaches near Kemble in Gloucestershire. Then you're walking between two rows of trees, with the roar of a busy road on your immediate left. This is the A413, an important link route between Gerrards Cross, Aylesbury and Banbury, the modern incarnation of that very old road that once linked London and Birmingham, and the subject of a song by cult singer-songwriter John Otway.

This section of the Countryway ends at a stile that takes you out onto the road, leaving the South Bucks Way, the next section continuing through fields opposite. But for the short link to Great Missenden station I keep ahead for a short distance on the South Bucks Way before cutting off on a convenient footpath towards the village centre. For the first time in a while there's the option of a convenient link to London -- the South Bucks Way continues down the Misbourne Valley to meet the Grand Union Canal towpath at Denham Lock, from where you can closely parallel and then join the London Loop.

Great Missenden is a large village still very much linear in focus, once a coaching stop on the old road, though thankfully now bypassed. It's worth taking a wander down the High Street to look at the church and the former Missenden Abbey -- the street itself is lined with historic cottages. The Red Pump Garage caught my eye -- it's actually now an estate agent, but the old petrol pumps, the sort that required an attendant to operate, are still in place. A notice on the door says the garage has been out of fuel since eight gallons cost more than £1. That's about 3p a litre.

The village's biggest visitor attraction today is the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, located here since author Dahl (1916-90) lived locally in later life, although he was born in Llandaff of Norwegian parents -- Plas Roald Dahl at Cardiff Bay commemorates his attendance at the Norwegian Church located there. He's internationally known for his dark children's morality tales, notably Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which has been filmed succesfully twice, but I'll forever associate him with the ITV anthology series Tales of the Unexpected. The early episodes of this were introduced by Dahl himself, his thin and gangling frame in classic storyteller pose in a leather armchair next to an open fire, sardonically name dropping titbits of his international jet set gambling lifestyle. Looking at this neat little Chiltern village high street in comparison to the New York literary salons and Monte Carlo casinos of these anecdotes, I'm even more convinced of their phoniness.

By the station, the route connects to the Chiltern Heritage Trail, further details of which have proved difficult to track down. It was a millennium project of Chiltern District Council consisting of a walker's route and three interlinked, mainly road-based, cycling routes. Guides to the cycling routes are downloadable online, but the walking route was promoted in a booklet with a cover price, stocks of which have now run out, even though the route is thoroughly signed. The council tell me they don't even have any reference copies left, and a promise to send me a photocopy of the route map was unfulfilled at the time of writing. Since the route was created they've abolished their tourism service and transferred the person responsbile to other duties. It's too frequently the case with walking projects that a certain capital sum is spent on putting something in place but without any provision for its sustainability, so something that should be delivering a legacy for decades is left to founder, in this case over only a handful of years.

As to the railway, it's what binds Great Missenden to Metroland, and its story is also part of the story of the modern transport network in London. The world's first "metro" or high density urban underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863 as a cut-and-cover line along the northern edge of central London, from the Great Western main line terminus at Paddington to a station on the edge of the City at Farringdon, almost all of which is still used by London Underground's Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City and Circle lines. The Met developed into one of the most important transport undertakings in London, eventually linking with the Metropolitan and District Railway to create the Circle Line. In 1933 it became a key component of the new state-owned London Passenger Transport Board, the ancestor of today's Transport for London.

The Met long harboured ambitions beyond moving bodies between the main line termini, workplaces and leisure venues of the urban area. As mentioned in the last section, at the beginning of the 20th century it was working to create its own main line in partnership with the Great Central Railway, incorporating part of the Wycome Railway at High Wycombe. Already, from the 1870s it had been busy extending its own lines northwest from Baker Street towards Harrow and deeper into the Home Counties. Great Missenden was joined to Baker Street and Aldgate when the extension from Chalfont to Amersham and Aylesbury opened in 1892. From Aylesbury it took over an existing railway to Verney Junction, 80km from Baker Street, where there was an interchange with the London and North Western Railway's branch line from Bletchley to Oxford; for a while it also took over the Brill Tramway, originally a railway privately owned by the Duke of Buckingham, which connected Quainton Road on the Verney Junction line to Brill. But plans for further expansion foundered and Verney Junction and Brill remain historically the furthest outposts of the Metropolitan Railway and later the London Underground.

Brill's status as a London tube station was cut short when the line was closed in 1935; passenger services north of Aylesbury ceased two years later though were revived to Quainton Road for a few years in the 1940s and sections of the line continued to be used for freight. In 2008 a short length north of Aylesbury came back into use with the opening of Aylesbury Vale Parkway, but by this time the aberration of this long reach of the Underground had long since been addressed. In 1960, when the Metropolitan Line was fully electrified to Amersham, Underground services were cut back to there. British Rail took over the rest of the line to Aylesbury, its services leaving from Marylebone with limited stops to Amersham. This arrangement persists though private operator Chiltern Railways has since taken over from BR -- it's an odd joint service, involving the only stretch of line where National Rail trains run on London Underground metals.

In the early 20th century the Met came up with a novel business model for boosting traffic on its suburban lines: building its own suburbia. In 1903 it built a housing estate at Pinner and several others followed, some with stations opened specifically to serve developments. So a tentacle of classic suburbia began to fatten along the railway, promoted through posters and booklets under the name Metro-Land, most famously championed, and without the hyphen, some decades later by John Betjeman. The image was a bucolic one, of Englishmen's modest mock-Tudor castles set among greenery a convenient commute away from respectable City jobs. The message both drew upon and helped develop an ideology of Englishness as essentially rooted in an omnipresent rural past, at the very time the large-scale urbanisation and mechanisation were overturning the real life of the countryside. The truth of Metroland was dense new estates of near identical houses, imposed at a swoop on greenfield sites with little organic development around natural centres. It offered a regimented freedom that was neither rural nor urban. As Leslie Thomas puts it in one of the classic Metroland-set novels, Tropic of Ruislip, it was "in the country but not of it. The fields seemed touchable and yet remote".

The wisdom of allowing London to develop uncontrolled at the whim of private interests was always suspect and following World War II the government introduced planning controls and instituted the Green Belt, effectively putting a stop to the spread of Metroland. So it never did quite reach Great Missenden, and although there are patches of residential sprawl here and there on our journey, most date from 1960s overspill planning. Still, it's tempting to imagine this little station tucked away behind the village street, its platforms lined with London Transport roundels, in an English autumn dusk where bowler-hatted commuters from Aldgate and Moorgate turn homeward to evenings round open fires and the wireless, broadcasting John Betjeman, perhaps.

Download a route description PDF http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/884833/londonunderfoot/7-westwycombe-greatmissenden.pdf

View Google map http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&start=323&num=200&msa=0&msid=117966169375523396049.00046414d40d8252e7b70&ll=51.707134,-0.706859&spn=0.001599,0.00478&t=h&z=18

More information

Buckinghamshire County Council http://www.buckscc.gov.uk

Visit Buckinghamshire http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org

Walking in Buckinghamshire (Visit Buckinghamshire) http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org/site/walking-in-buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire Walks and Rides (Bucks CC) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/row/getting_out_on_the_network.page?

Buckinghamshire Leisure & Culture (including parks) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/leisure/Leisure__culture.page?

Wycombe District Council http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/

Wycombe Tourism http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/sitePages.asp?step=4&contentID=245&categoryID=1248

Wycombe Parks and Recreation http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/sitePages.asp?step=4&contentID=239&categoryID=1132

Chilterns Area of Oustanding Natural Beauty http://www.chilternsaonb.org/

Chiltern Society http://www.chilternsociety.org.uk

West Wycombe Parish Council http://www.westwycombe.org.uk/

West Wycombe Estate http://www.west-wycombe-estate.co.uk/

West Wycombe Village and Hill (National Trust) http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-westwycombevillageandhill

West Wycombe Park (National Trust) http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-westwycombepark

A40 (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A40_road

West Wycombe & Bradenham Walks http://www.chilternsaonb.org/site_details.asp?siteID=391

Hell-Fire Caves http://www.hellfirecaves.co.uk/

Chiltern Main Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiltern_Main_Line

Downley Parish Council http://www.downleypc.org/

Wycombe Museum http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/museum/

All Saints High Wycombe http://www.allsaintshighwycombe.org/

Eden Shopping Centre http://www.edenshopping.co.uk/

Hughenden Parish Council http://www.hughendenparishcouncil.org.uk

Downley Common http://www.chilternsaonb.org/site_details.asp?siteID=702

Downley Common Preservation Society http://www.downleycommon.org.uk/

Special trees and woods: Naphill Common http://www.chilternsaonb.org/caring/stwp_site_details.asp?siteID=595

Friends of Naphill Common http://www.naphillcommon.org.uk/

RAF Command http://www.raf.mod.uk/organisation/rafcommand.cfm

Red kite (RSPB) http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/species/casestudies/redkite.asp

Great Missenden walks: search for Great Missenden at http://www.chilternsaonb.org/

Chiltern District Council http://www.chiltern.gov.uk

Chiltern tourism and walks http://www.chiltern.gov.uk/tourism

Great Missenden Parish Council http://www.greatmissendenpc.co.uk/

Great Missenden and Prestwood visitor guide http://www.chiltern.gov.uk/downloads/GM.pdf

South Buckinghamshire Way http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/assets/content/bcc/docs/row/promoted_routes/South_Bucks_Way_Leaflet.pdf

River Misbourne (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Misbourne

Chiltern Heritage Trail http://www.chilternsaonb.org/site_details.asp?siteID=222

Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre http://www.roalddahlmuseum.org/

London to Aylesbury Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_to_Aylesbury_Line

London Countryway 6: Marlow - High Wycombe

2009-08-26T17:31:00.045+01:00

Today the London Countryway launches into its second and final semi-circle and once again switches scenery as it enters the Chilterns, the last of its three Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Like the previous AONBs, the Kent Downs and adjoining Surrey Hills, this one is centred on a chalk ridge, another ragged edge of the same chalk shelf, the debris of unimaginably old algae fossils, now emerging on the other side of the London basin.

Though there's a satisfying circularity to linking the two main chalk zones cradling the capital, the landscapes straddling the Countryway's course through them are markedly different. To the south we paralleled or walked astride the main chalk ridge itself for some time, enjoying wide views with their geology drawn in broad strokes, and the sense that we were tracing a wall. The Chilterns, by contrast, are more sprawling and less linear.

There is indeed a main ridge with a scarp slope and open downland looking over the Vale of Aylesbury, also traced by a National Trail, the Ridgeway, based on a prehistoric ridgetop trackway. One of Countryway inventor Keith Chesterton's first ideas was to link this with the North Downs Way along the southern ridge, but it runs further from London and he decided reaching it would take his route too far out. Instead, over the next four sections the Countryway traces a route some way southeast of the main ridge, cutting against the grain of several gentler and more rounded subsidiary ridges that run roughly perpendicular to the main one. So there's a series of ups and downs through a rolling agricultural landscape that's more intimate and enclosed than the drama of the North Downs, with more restricted views.

The AONB was designated in 1965 and covers 833 km2, running from the Goring Gap, where the Thames cuts through the chalk on the ancient boundary of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, in a 75km diagonal northeast to Hitchin, interrupted near the end by a gap to accommodate the urban area of Luton. Since 2005 it's been managed by a conservation board bringing all the councils together, but there's also a very active user group, the Chiltern Society, who help protect the AONB but also promote its enjoyment. They've been very active in maintaining the footpaths, producing maps and creating a number of longer walking routes, some of which we'll encounter. Buckinghamshire county council, in whose territory most of our route falls, also have a well-established network of routes, and between the council, the society and the AONB you won't be short of alternative suggestions for walks. There's even a cool interactive map of local routes on the AONB website.

Though the Chilterns claims to be the closest AONB to central London, rather than tracing the outer limits of the city, you now feel you're venturing far beyond it, with few obvious visual connections to the capital. I thought at first this might just be my lack of familiarity with the area -- though I already knew the North Downs relatively well, researching this walk is the first time I've explored the Chilterns. But outside the bigger towns on the main radial roads and railways, this really is very deep countryside.

Mostly it's attractive but unspectacular, low on major heritage sites, visitor attractions and features of interest, rich in wildlife. There are plenty of woods -- mainly beech and oak -- but they're patchy and dappled rather than the thick gnarled forests that cling to the scarp of the Downs. Elsewhere the land is arable farmed or used for horses, with the occasional common. Lots of footpaths start by climbing uphill through fields to woodlands at the top, emerging into one-street hamlets with cottages -- flint lined with brick, or sometimes whitewashed with red-tiled roofs -- strung along the roads that trace the ridgetops, before another footpath rollercoasters down and up to the next ridge. Good drainage through the chalk ensures the valleys are usually dry, so streams and rivers are few.

If you're after a classic country walk, these are excellent surroundings, mainly quiet and peaceful, with long stretches away from busy roads, the climbs exercising but not challengingly steep or long, the footpaths well-maintained and well-signed and surprisingly underused by visitors. But in some respects these are the least interesting sections of the Countryway so far, and certainly stretch the city walking remit of this blog.

The walk starts in surroundings that are urban enough, just outside the AONB boundary and just inside Buckinghamshire, in pretty Marlow by the Thames, the town where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The Countryway follows Pound Lane past Green Flag-accredited Higginson Park, an excellent and popular example of a traditional urban park created from an 18th century private garden in the 1920s, which sweeps down to the riverside.

You'll spot the sign that indicates one of the county council's circular walks passes this way. More sporadically signed is the Shakespeare's Way, which has joined us here from the Thames Path. Created by the people behind the Macmillan Way network of cross-country footpaths, this 235km path links William Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon with London and the Globe Theatre, a journey the writer himself must have undertaken on foot, although not necessarily on the same route. East of Marlow it follows pre-existing routes: the Thames Path to Cookham, then the Beeches Way (mentioned in the last section), the Grand Union Canal Walk and finally the Thames Path from Brentford to the Globe. This is just a brief encounter with Will's wandering ghost as we'll be seeing more of him in future walks.

The Countryway soon leaves these routes just past a red brick maltings now converted into flats, heading up a good urban footpath to busy West Street with its pubs and restaurants. Continuing northwest up Oxford Road, though, you soon start to get the feel of a village street, leafy, quiet and lined with 18th century houses, though the United Reform Church looks more like an office building. Dodging down Queens Road we pick up a footpath beside the Duke of Cambridge pub that climbs uphill past allotments. Where the allotments end we're into the AONB and rising up above the Thames Valley with its wooded ridge beyond -- it's our last sight of the valley until near the end of the Countryway. Already there are chalk and flints underfoot, and a rich hedgerow to the side.

This fine path leads to a track just by the satellite hamlet of Bovingdon Green where for a short while we pick up the Chiltern Society's flagship walking route, the Chiltern Way. Originally created as the Society's millennium project, it's an expansive 200km circular walk exploring the length and breadth of the AONB, with two additional smaller loops linking to the Thames Path in the south and the Icknield Way in the north, another 94km in total.

Heading east from here will take you to Goring, cutting off a big southward meander of the Thames and linking to the Ridgeway, which you could if you wished follow southwest along the chalk towards Avebury and along the Wessex Ridgeway to Lyme Regis where fossil-rich cliffs mark the interface between chalk and sea. But our track runs east past a pretty farm and into our first Chiltern woodland, Blounts Wood, then the first hint of a rollercoaster down and up along field edges to End Farm.

Here the Chiltern Way forks off, heading for Wendover and the northeast trajectory of the Ridgeway -- the National Trail ends at Ivinghoe where the trackway route continues via the Icknield Way and Pedders Way via Thetford to Hunstanton. Meanwhile the Countryway keeps roughly north on a bridleway uphill again and along the edge of another woodland, Highruse Wood. This picks up a lane to Copy Green, where an isolated flint cottage stands exposed by a small triangle of grass on a ridgetop plateau of farmland, possibly the loneliest place we've yet encountered on the Countryway. With old fashioned leaded windows, English roses growing by the window and cart tracks leading to the front door, it looks from the outside as if little has changed here for a century or so, except for the TV antennae on the chimney.

More good bridleways now lead across fields west and then north alongside Shillingridge Wood, another rich beech woodland. The path emerges into a secluded valley, following a line a few metres up from the valley floor, and below us is the curiosity of Bluey's Farm. This is a neat and pretty group of buildings -- whitewashed and thatched cottages, a matching terrace of stables, and a wooden-framed brick house -- which back in the late 1970s intrigued Keith Chesterton with its "unreal and dreamlike" atmosphere.

He discovered that all the buildings apart from the old brick house were built around 1960 as the private retreat of a Greek ship owner, a Mr Mavroleon, originally as a stud farm. I guess this was Basil Mavroleon, who married an Englishwoman and lived in Britain; or his son and heir Manuel Basil, who was nicknamed Bluey. The latter died in 2009, and the Daily Telegraph obituary recounts that "his son Carlos, a journalist working for CBS who had converted to Islam, died in mysterious circumstances in a hotel room in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1998." The buildings have since been converted into a number of impressive private homes, the old half-doors of the stable stalls now replaced with picture windows, and it no longer seems such a lonely place as it must have done when Chesterton wrote about it, but there's still a trace of the "unreal and dreamlike".

The valley is still lovely, half coated with long stripes of trees -- a few leaves already turning bronze in late August -- and beyond the farm the path winds down to the bottom and enters another wood, Moor Wood, on a fine broad bridleway. The trees hear grow tall and straight, with little foliage on their lower branches -- the word 'cathedral' comes to mind.

The track eventually emerges on the Marlow Road, a well-used B-road, about a kilometre short of the village of Lane End. There's a short stretch along the road, with no footway but at least a little verge, and before the village the route heads off uphill across a field and towards a wood.

A search for peace and quiet round here is compromised by the constant buzz of light aircraft from Wycombe Air Park which is a short way to the east. Originally named Booker Airfield, it was built in 1939 as a civilian air training facility, but was not immediately used as such due to the outbreak of World War II. It finally began providing basic training to volunteer flyers and military glider pilots in 1941, still under civilian auspices. In the 1960s it became the base for the flying clubs of then national carriers BEA and BOAC, the ancestors of British Airways. The connection remains as the now-privatised BA operates it through a subsidiary as a base for training, gliders and light aircraft, so you might spot little Piper Dakotas with tails displaying BA's distinctive wavy red white and blue device, a livery more familiarly applied to Boeing 747s and Airbuses. The noise of aircraft is soon joined by the noise of shooting: adjacent to the air park is a shooting ground operated by EJ Churchill, the London-based gunmakers, claiming to be "the most prestigious shooting ground in the country".

Widdenton Park Wood is part of a former mediaeval estate and a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) thanks to its unusual combination of a typical Chilterns beech-oak woodland and wetter boggy areas fed by springs, with willow, birch and marshy grassland and a number of rare plants. On the top of the hill is an enclosed reservoir fed by springs, another dream-like place surrounded by neat green railings. The Countryway follows the fence and passes the main gate where no less than seven padlocks indicate the water company takes its security seriously.

Our route out of the wood emerges on the drive to Churchill's shooting ground just short of a lane that crosses the M40 motorway. The motorway is the latest incarnation of the key highway link between London and Oxford, and continues beyond as a more pleasant and less congested alternative western route to the M1 and M6 between London and Birmingham. When it was completed in 1990 it was supposed to be the last major motorway scheme in the UK but successive governments have failed to withdraw successfully from their road building addiction and there have been several schemes since. It is, however, the newest of the major radial motorways encountered on this walk. For many years it was the only major motorway without any service areas, allegedly apart from some portaloos at Cherwell Valley in Oxfordshire, though this has now changed. This section, the High Wycombe bypass, was in fact the earliest to open, in 1967. Like much of the route through the Chilterns it's in a wooded cutting in an effort to minimise its impact on the environment, and is known as one of the more accident-prone stretches of the M40, as high speed commuter traffic shuffles with long distance goods vehicles.

On the other side of the motorway a farm track runs parallel to it for a while, and what might have been a footbridge ahead turns out to be a service conduit carrying several serious looking pipes across the roaring traffic.

Then the track bends away past a farm and through another woodland and, earlier than expected, our destination is in sight -- the tower of St Lawrence's Church, West Wycombe, topped by a golden ball copied from the Palla d'Oro on the Punta della Dogana in Venice, rises from the trees over to the left. Soon we're descending on a lane alongside the wall that encloses the extensive parkland of the West Wycombe estate, into the valley of one of Britain's several rivers named Wye. This rises from the Chiltern chalk a little to the north, at Bradenham, and flows for 14km to the Thames at Bourne End between Cookham and Marlow: we passed close to this spot on the last walk. Wycombe is named for its once well-wooded valley -- Wye-Coombe -- and this geography will dominate our view for the rest of the walk. Near the valley's head, at this western end of the village, is the promontory of Wycombe Hill, with that distinctive church tower commanding the surroundings.

Along the valley floor between High Wycombe and West Wycombe runs the A40 road, which crosses the Wye nearby the point where our lane joins it at a T-junction. Although superceded by the M40, for centuries the road was one of London's vital radial routes, connecting the capital with the university city of Oxford. At the London end it forms one of the major east-west road alignments, from St Paul's via Holborn and Oxford Street. In parts, including at Wycombe, it follows much older routes that date back at least to Romano-British times. The dead straight alignment between West Wycombe and High Wycombe, however, isn't evidence of Roman engineering -- originally the road ran to the south of the river, until the current route was laid out as a grand avenue by local landowners the Dashwood family in the late 18th century using spoil excavated from the famous Hell-Fire Caves under Wycombe Hill.

The best known of the Dashwoods is the second baronet, Francis (1708-81), sometime MP, Postmaster General and Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose father, also Francis, had first bought the extensive estate -- some 20km2 -- in 1698. When mentioning Francis Dashwood it's customary to reach for the adjective 'notorious' for his association with the Hell-Fire Club, which met in the Caves and, allegedly, in the church's golden ball, as well as at Medmenham Abbey, not far away on the Thames. The built and landscaped heritage we see today is largely Francis' vision, inspired by a taste for Renaissance Italy then considered essential among English aristocrats raised on the Grand Tour, and indeed Francis' other social achievement was to found the Dilettanti Society, a dining club for those of his contemporaries who were equally admiring of Italian style.

There's a dramatic pedimented and double-collonaded mansion set within a Palladian park scattered with temples and follies; a preserved rustic village street; and over it all the hill, topped with its distinctive church and an octagonal mausoleum. There's an extravagance about it which belies English reserve, but tempered with good taste. In the 20th century the village and hill, and then the house through the donation of a particularly generous Dashwood, came into the hands of the National Trust. Family members still live in the house, however, and although it's partially open to the public as a stately home, it's also used as an events venue and for functions and corporate entertainment.

The Countryway doesn't run through the village itself but it's a very short and worthwhile diversion -- a collection of old inns, shops and cottages strung out along the A40, including a timbered-framed group at the east end that dates from the late 15th and early 16th centuries with delightfully sagging and overhanging upper stories. One of these is a traditional sweet shop and apparently none of them have foundations.

There's a kind of group harmony about the village that's difficult to convey in a single photo. The buildings set back from the road around the village hall also make an attractive little enclave.

The route sends me straight up the hillside towards the mausoleum, the last few metres a bit of a scramble up eroded chalk. Perhaps unfairly, the deliberate domineering use of scale, place, severe Portland stone and classical pastiche reminds me of some of the pretentious Nazi architecture I've recently seen at Luitpoldshain in Nürnberg. Among the urns is one containing Francis' ashes.

The church, behind it, is a much more pleasing building. Both occupy the former site of an iron age hillfort that would have overlooked the ancient highway.

I leave the hillside on a path that turns out to precede the one intended by Chesterton, and end up walking past the entrance to the Hell-Fire Caves, one of the supposed venues for Francis and friends' "notorious" behaviour, including alleged sacrifices and black masses. In fact there had been an earlier Hell-Fire club before the one Dashwood co-founded, and the name isn't of the members' choosing: they preferred to be known as the Knights of St Francis. Sex quite likely did play a role in some of club's activities; however its undocumented but enduring reputation for Satanism is most likely the result of a smear campaign conducted by the political enemies of Dashwood and his friends. Though a Tory, Francis was a reformer -- the caves were excavated partly to create work for unemployed labourers during a time of economic difficulty. His fellow members included the radical John Wilkes, satirical artist William Hogarth, and American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.

I'm not sure quite how interested the current management are in setting the record straight on Dashwood. They run the Caves as a visitor attraction with much use of the word "notorious" in the publicity and flaming lighting effects playing in the lobby. Still, it looks like the outdoor café does a notoriously wicked cream tea.

The Countryway offers a choice at West Wycombe. This section officially ends a stretch of field path east of hill, which emerges by Flinthill Farm on the A4010 Bradenham Road, a little north of the Pedestal Roundabout that marks the eastern end of the village. The nearest major transport interchange is High Wycombe, 5km eastwards down the A40, rather too busy with traffic for most walkers. There's a decent bus service, so you could either finish your tour in the village or complete the whole section and catch the bus from the Pedestal Roundabout. The other walking option is along what Chesterton describes as "difficult paths on the left hand hill" -- that is, the north side of the Wye valley, on the left as you look east from Wycombe Hill. The difficulties, he explains, result from building work on a housing estate, with parks being blocked by rubble.

Keen to walk as much of the route as possible, I pick out the likely paths on the map and take a guess that in the near three decades since the guide was compiled, the difficulties have been resolved. I cut across a recreation ground, turn down a lane that takes me under the Chiltern Main Line railway (more of which later) and pick up the first of the paths, which starts out in a fashion that's fast becoming familiar -- up a hill towards a wood. The well used paths testify that we're getting close to a residential area, and I soon emerge on an open grassy slope where people are walking dogs and canoodling in the sunshine, with a good view over the valley below. Then we're out of the AONB and onto a residential street on the edge of Downley, once a separate village but now essentially a suburb of High Wycombe.

My guess turns out to be correct -- the path that now snake between fences through this massive area of what looks like 197os social housing development is clear and well-signed. It's clearly an old path, leafy and away from roads, now providing welcome permeability to some rather ordinary streets. One of the houses backing on to it has dispensed with its wooden back fence and replaced it with piles of old tyres.

Later, the path runs along the top of a remaining patch of open hillside that's now managed as a public park, Plomer Hill Open Space. The view here sweeps down to road and river, revealing the impressive size of the built-up area and the outlines of its geography.

The town has its own importance, independent of its role as a waypoint on the transport links between London and Oxford. Once a Roman settlement, it first appears on record under something like its current name in the 10th century, and was a market town from the 12th century. Industry has also played a major role, first mills, then furniture making. The latter is the traditional industry of the Cotswolds, where the artisans who turned the straight trunks and branches of the local beeches into chairs were known as "bodgers", a term that has taken on an unflattering meaning in everyday English, though there's nothing to suggest the original Chiltern variety were anything less than skilled and conscientious craftspeople. Today, the town has a population of just under 100,000, making it the biggest in the county, and an urban industrial character that's unexpected for a commuter town in the otherwise prosperous Home Counties, with some seriously deprived areas. Some local paper headlines -- such as the shooting of a woman at point blank range on a nightclub dancefloor -- could be straight out of Peckham or Haringey.

At the other end of the open space the route has been buried under housing. Cascading down the hill is a warren-like 1960s estate, crossed by a web of little paths that are intended more as short links between homes than sensible through routes, so I stick to the roads. I'm actually quite enjoying this walk as a contrast to the rural character of much of the route. It's fresh up here, with occasional glimpses down the hill -- the relief is steep enough to remain visible through the street pattern, demanding the little council houses respect its contours, and you can imagine what an airy ridge this must have been before the town claimed the hillside. Eventually I start to wind downhill, passing some flats in Garratts Way that for some reason resemble modern church buildings, and find an unmapped path that descends by the side of the railway line, emerging just shy of the town centre on Parker Knoll Way with its furniture-themed name, opposite a big Morrisons supermarket.

The route into town takes me under a magnificent viaduct carrying the Chiltern main line. Just on the other side of this, on the west side of Archway, is a skateboard park with a large piece of railway-themed grafitti art.

Unfortunately having admired this I'm forced to backtrack as the crossing arrangements at this busy road junction are frustratingly limited and the pedestrian routes not obvious. The crossings look relatively new but the area still needs a rethink from the point of view of the walker.

I suspect that once it was even worse, as in the 1960s High Wycombe's was one of those historic town centres comprehensively vandalised in the name of modernism and the motor car. The Wye was covered over, and swathes of 18th and 19th century buildings were bulldozed in favour of concrete shopping precincts and car parks knotted within impenetrable highways, on the model then being imposed on a larger scale in Birmingham. Recently there have been some efforts to put things right, under the banner of the "Eden Project" -- the deliberate namedropping of Tim Smits' eco theme park near St Austell is stretching things a bit. Sadly an early proposal to open up the river again was dropped, but the new shopping centre is fine as these places go and pedestrianisation and "public realm" improvements have made what remains of the mediaeval street pattern more walkable.

My approach to the centre is pleasant enough. Frogmoor extends out right to create a pleasant open space with a curious sculpture depicting a stylised family.

Historically this was the location for landmark fountains -- the current incumbent is a "holes in the ground" job that barely functions, though there are plans to build a new one based on the Arch of Chairs that was created to welcome Queen Victoria in 1877. A fingerpost points to the twin town of Kelkheim, in the Taurus mountains near Frankfurt am Main.

My route bends down to the impressive All Saints Church, dating back to the late 12th century and rebuilt several times since, still with Roman stones in the masonry. From here you can catch sight of one of the most interesting historic buildings, the 18th century Market Hall, which owes its present colonnaded form to a rebuild by Robert Adam.

I follow Castle Street past a pleasant memorial gardens: just uphill from this is the Wycombe Museum, which predictably has a fine collection of furniture as well as social history and art exhibits. The street ends right opposite the station, by a pub called, for obvious reasons when you see it, the Flint House.

The railway takes us back to London both literally and metaphorically, as it played a role in the history of one of the organisations that most shaped the modern capital, the Metropolitan Railway, one of the most important direct commercial ancestors of today's Transport for London.

The station was originally built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1854 as the terminus of a branch of the Great Western Railway from Maidenhead -- the northern part of this was closed in 1970 while the southern section from Bourne End to Maidenhead, with its later spur to Marlow, remains as the "Marlow Donkey" line that we encountered on the last walk. In the 1870s the line was extended from High Wycombe to meet the Great Western's main line between Oxford and Didcot, with a branch from Princes Risborough to Aylesbury, though the northern section of this, too, was lost in the 1960s. At the turn of the last century, sections of the line featured in the Met's ambitions to reach beyond its urban origins and create a genuine main line. The Met paired up with the Midlands-based Great Central Railway, which had its own ambitions for a London extension. The GCR and GWR teamed up to create a line from the GCR near Bicester, joining the Wycombe line at Princes Risborough and then continuing direct to London via Denham and Ruislip, with the original intention of linking with the Met. But the GCR and the Met fell out, and the GCR built its own terminus at Marylebone in 1899, though substantial sections of the southern part of the GCR line ran on parallel tracks.

There will be more to discuss on the hinterland of the Met on later walks, but for the moment it's pleasing to note that the route, though still not one of the great radial main lines, is currently enjoying much more of a main line type service than it's had in years. Chiltern Railways, who currently hold the franchise on this group of National Rail lines, run services from Marylebone to Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare again) and Birmingham, a much more pleasant way to reach the latter from London than Virgin's only slightly faster service from Euston, and since 2008 the trains of "open access" operator Wrexham & Shropshire have run through, though without stopping, on their way to and from North Wales.

As well as retaining the curious ceremony of annually weighing the Mayor to see if s/he has got fat at taxpayers' expense, Wycombe has numerous celebrity connections -- Benjamin Disraeli was a local MP; Dusty Springfield, Ian Dury and philosopher Karl Popper lived here; former Doctor Who star Colin Baker is a prominent local resident and a columnist on the local paper. But perhaps the most intriguing recent celebrity connection is that surrealist comedy team The Mighty Boosh first teamed up here when two of them were attending Bucks New University. Those council pebbledash units tumbling down the chalk hillsides towards the Wye might conceivably provide a backdrop to the antics of Bubblegum Charlie, or the Crack Fox.

Download a route description PDF http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/884833/londonunderfoot/6-marlow-highwycombe.pdf

View a Google map http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&num=200&start=219&msa=0&msid=117966169375523396049.00046414d40d8252e7b70&ll=51.550605,-0.714111&spn=0.191284,0.441513&t=h&z=11

More information

Visit Buckinghamshire http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org/

Walking in Buckinghamshire (Visit Buckinghamshire) http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org/site/walking-in-buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire Walks and Rides (Bucks CC) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/row/getting_out_on_the_network.page?

Buckinghamshire Leisure & Culture (including parks) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/leisure/Leisure__culture.page?

Wycombe District Council http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/

Wycombe Tourism http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/sitePages.asp?step=4&contentID=245&categoryID=1248

Wycombe Parks and Recreation http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/sitePages.asp?step=4&contentID=239&categoryID=1132

Marlow Town Council http://www.marlowtowncouncil.org.uk/

Marlow Branch Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlow_Branch_Line

Prince of Wales, Marlow http://www.the-prince-of-wales.co.uk/

All Saints Marlow http://www.allsaintsmarlow.org/

Higginson Park http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/sitePages.asp?step=4&contentID=220&categoryID=3617

River Thames (Environment Agency) http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/recreation/boating/31543.aspx

National Trails http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/

Thames Path National Trail http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/Thamespath/

River Thames (River Thames Alliance) http://www.visitthames.co.uk/

Salters Steamers http://www.salterssteamers.co.uk/

Shakespeare's Way http://www.shakespearesway.org/

Marlow Circular Walk http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/assets/content/bcc/docs/row/promoted_routes/marlow.pdf

Chilterns Area of Oustanding Natural Beauty http://www.chilternsaonb.org/

Chiltern Society http://www.chilternsociety.org.uk/

Chiltern Way http://www.chilternsociety.org.uk/content/about-ChltnWay.php

Great Marlow Parish Council http://www.bucksinfo.net/greatmarlow/

Lane End Parish Council http://www.laneendparishcouncil.org.uk/

Wycombe Air Park http://www.wycombeairpark.co.uk/

M40 Motorway (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M40_motorway

E J Churchill Shooting Ground http://www.ejchurchill.com/

West Wycombe Parish Council http://www.westwycombe.org.uk/

West Wycombe Estate http://www.west-wycombe-estate.co.uk/

West Wycombe Village and Hill (National Trust) http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-westwycombevillageandhill

West Wycombe Park (National Trust) http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-westwycombepark

River Wye (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Wye,_Buckinghamshire

A40 (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A40_road

West Wycombe & Bradenham Walks http://www.chilternsaonb.org/site_details.asp?siteID=391

St Lawrence Church Trust http://www.stlawrence-westwycombe.co.uk/

Hell-Fire Caves http://www.hellfirecaves.co.uk/

Chiltern Main Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiltern_Main_Line

Downley Parish Council http://www.downleypc.org/

Wycombe Museum http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/museum/

All Saints High Wycombe http://www.allsaintshighwycombe.org/

Eden Shopping Centre http://www.edenshopping.co.uk/

London Countryway 5: Windsor - Marlow

2009-06-30T22:21:00.049+01:00

The end of this long section marks roughly the halfway point of the London Countryway. Having set off from the side of the river Thames at Gravesend ferry pier, the route has followed a broad arc through the hills south of London and back across the heaths of Surrey and Berkshire to regain the river at Windsor. But rather than simply crossing to the opposite bank and heading out of the valley again as it does in the east, the Countryway tracks the river northwest for a while, following one of the Thames' long, lazy meanders, as if searching for the optium point to head off into the Chilterns on its second and final arc. Finding that point takes a while: it's another 23km, the single longest section of the route, before the Countryway's creator, Keith Chesterton, finally settles on quitting the Thames at Marlow.

Since the last edition of Chesterton's guide to the route was published in 1981, a whole new National Trail has been created along the riverside -- the Thames Path, opened in 1996, runs for around 300km from the source of the Thames near Kemble in Gloucestershire, on the edge of the Cotswolds, to the estuarine marshes between Crayford and Dartford on London's eastern edge. The National Trail passes right through the heart of the capital and in future this blog plans to follow it from Marlow downstream, so there will be a lot more to say about it and its rather long and tortuous history then. But for the time being it's a welcome and easy to follow stretch of well-signed footpath, one of a number of established trails that the Countryway samples on its journey.

If you were planning a walk from Windsor to Marlow today, following the Thames Path throughout would be the obvious option. In fact that option was in all essentials already available to Chesterton three decades ago, as at the core of the National Trail is the old Thames Towpath, developed back in the late 18th century as the river was systematically upgraded for navigation purposes. One of the challenges in creating the modern walking route was the large number of missing ferry links where, for historical reasons, the towpath swapped banks, but the stretch between Marlow and Windsor is relatively free of these except at Cookham where there is an obvious road diversion. Chesterton, however, adhered to his strategy of pursuing variety of surroundings. He gives us a good taste of the towpath from Eton to Maidenhead -- a classic stretch which, with its locks, "aits", public school bathing places, water meadows and picturesque riverside houses hiding behind gracefully draped osier willows, is about as close as you can get to the romantic straw hat and striped blazer image of the non-tidal Thames. But on reaching Boulters Lock at Maidenhead by Ray Mill Island, once one of the most fashionable Thames resorts, he opts instead for an alternative through flat marshes, fields and commons that grazes Cookham and reaches Marlow via an unexpectedly dramatic wooded chalk ridge as a foretaste of the Chilterns.

My last walk ended at Windsor & Eton Riverside station but as I'll be returning to Paddington, I head this time for Windsor's other station, Windsor & Eton Central. Both stations have their interest but Central certainly has the edge in terms of spectacle. Closest to the castle, it was opened in 1849 as the Royal station, designed to enable Victoria to commute from castle to palace in style, with a vast train shed entered through a grand ceremonial arch. Its extravagant architectural flatteries were, however, completely out of scale for the everyday transport needs of a town this size and with the decline in passenger numbers in the 20th century, maintaining the place became a serious challenge. By the 1970s only a single platform was still in use, as today providing a modest shuttle service to Slough, with the rest of the structure threatened with dereliction. We'll come across a similar story of a railway operator's royal forelock-tugging pretensions meeting everyday reality when we reach Crystal Palace station on the inner orbital Capital Ring route.

As a large scale visitor attraction Windsor did have the advantage over Crystal Palace and in the 1980s British Rail rebuilt the station in partnership with Madame Tussauds of waxworks fame to house an exhibition on Royalty and Railways, for which a full-sized replica steam locomotive called The Queen was built at Swindon. This closed in the 1990s but the building then found a new role as a spectacular shopping mall known as Royal Windsor Shopping. Nearly all the spaces between platforms have been filled in, along with the old goods yard, and are now lined with shops, while many of the station structures house restaurants. A wooden building -- presumably also an original feature -- is now an information centre. The loco is still there, though apparently robbed of its original firebox, and some of the old railway signs are still in situ. But the only section now in railway use is one short platform and a booking office at the far west end of the complex, a pitifully thin strand of permanent way almost lost in a thick sleeve of retailing. In some ways it's sad to see the immense Victorian Jubilee arch with its grand clock and arms of London and Windsor now welcoming you to a globalised lineup of middle market brands and chain restaurants, but at least there's still life in the proud old edifice, unlike Crystal Palace.

This time, rather than wiggling through alleyways and across car parks, I simply follow High Street and Thames Street down the valley, past one of the castle gateways and a striking war memorial to the historic bridge over the Thames. There's been a fixed crossing at this strategic point since at least the 1100s, but after centuries of wooden bridges requiring constant rebuilding, the current bridge, designed by architect Charles Hollis using the then-new wonder material of cast iron, was opened in 1824, originally as a toll bridge. As far back as the 1830s there were concerns that the cast iron would crack, but in fact the bridge survived many years of traffic levels far in excess of those Hollis could have envisaged before emergency action had to be taken in 1969, resulting in the bridge being closed to traffic in 1970, and a subsequent and not uncontroversial decision to pedestrianise it permanently. It was last refurbished in 2002, reopened by the Queen as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations, after a period when even pedestrian movements had to be restricted. Today it's difficult to imagine this elegant bridge in its peaceful setting carrying heavy through traffic from the south coast bound for the Midlands.

On the Windsor side, a house that once belonged to architect Christopher Wren (whose work will feature in a good few future walks) is now a hotel, while off to the right is the landing stage for Salters Steamers, who once offered regular steam packet services along the Thames from Oxford to Richmond and Putney. Their business is now the leisure market and their routes much shorter and less regular but it's still possible to combine a boat trip with a riverside walk. Once on the bridge we've already joined the Thames Path, which crosses the river here, and which you could if you wish follow downstream towards Kingston (for the London Loop), Richmond (for the Capital Ring) and central London, although it's a meandering, roundabout journey this way. In joining the national trail here we're also rejoining European long distance path E2, which we've dallied with before along the North Downs Way and the River Wey Navigation -- it's also a roundabout route from here back to Wisley via the E2, involving a dogleg through Weybridge.

Windsor and Eton face each other across the river like Strasbourg and Kehl, Newcastle and Gateshead or Buda and Pest (more of them later), and on the other side we're welcomed to Eton and to the North Bank of the Thames by Wendy Ramshaw's curious sculpture installation from 2000: six distinctive stainless steel bollards, the one nearest the bridge surmounted by a viewing lens.

If your view of Eton is distorted it's likely not by Ramshaw's optics but by its association with Eton College, the educational establishment responsible for turning out generations of Britain's ruling class. Its list of old boys -- and yes, it's still only boys -- includes 19 prime ministers (perhaps soon to be 20 if David Cameron is successful at the next election), many royals and senior military officers, countless captains of industry and influential media and intellectual figures and a choice handful of KGB agents. It was founded by Henry VI in 1440, like many similar institutions as a philanthropic foundation for the education of the poor, and endowed with a good income through extensive land holdings. Today only about 10% of the students -- the King's Scholars -- attend through competitive scholarships, while the rest, known as Oppidans, enjoy the privilege mainly because their folks can find £28,000 a year in fees. And yet it's still a registered charity, and even has an appeal on its website for additional financial support, with donations qualifying for Gift Aid.

The school is up the High Street but I'm not planning to detour so I'll content myself with walking through some of its land, the first tranche of which is reached down Brocas Street, just after the bridge, where a path by the side of the Eton boathouse leads to the water meadow of the Brocas, now open as a public space. This is already a classic Thames-side setting, with locals enjoying the sunshine, sitting on the grass and looking at the boats. Across the river is Alexandra Gardens and the Royal Windsor Wheel, a semi-permanent 50m observation wheel seating visitors in enclosed capsules -- and surely sited here as a conscious echo of the much bigger (134m) London Eye at County Hall on the South Bank, a good way downstream.

Seeing the wheel draws attentiono to the contrasting aspects of the river at both points, and underlines the fascination of a long river like the Thames, which grows from an erratic trickle to a vast and airy estuary. Walking the Thames Path, you'd witness the change gradually, but with a circular route such as the present one we're sampling the river at points significant distances apart, and it's hard to imagine we're encountering the same watercourse. At Gravesend the Thames was broad and tidal, a landscape of lighthouses and big boats from faraway places and mudflats that reeked of the sea. Here it's tamer, narrower and more intimate, and you can wave to the people on the boats and see their smiles as they wave back. The weather accentuates the contrast -- in Gravesend at the beginning of March it was grey and overcast, the river bleached pebble grey. It's now late June and the rich greens of vegetation, the green-brown Thames water, spectacular splashes of pink flowers and the red primary colours of the boats shine in bright sunlight.

This is the Edwardian Sylvan Thames of gentlemanly leisure and wicker hampers from Fortnum and Mason or Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, the most English face of the river, imagined as a cosy stream locked off at Teddington from that other more dangerous Thames that flows through the cosmopolitan metropolis and out towards the North Sea, where, deep beneath the waves, it meets the waters of its estranged parent the Rhine. And yet, it is the same Thames, its ancient geological traces still reaching to the mainland under the water somewhere off Flanders. And its intimacy and gentleness are deceptive. It's the Thames of Mole, Ratty, Toad and Badger in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, who though born in Edinburgh grew up in Cookham. And for all the childhood innocence mention of that book evokes, the river still has a mysteical side. You can well imagine a mythical faun sirening Krishna-like on its flute from a half-forgotten osier-draped eyot, as happens in the novel's curious episode 'The piper at the gates of dawn'. The faun then wipes Ratty and Mole's recollection of the encounter, "lest the awful rememberance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before."

The designation "towpath" also highlights a contrast, for this isn't an artificially created canal like those we've previously encountered, but a natural river, improved for navigation but still wide and uneven, its meanders unpredictable. A margin of overgrowth and secondary woodland now hugs the riverside itself, providing an insurmountable obstacle to anyone who tried to use the towpath for its original purpose today. In places the river splits into several channels which then recombine, the areas of land thus isolated known in the Thames' own specific vocabulary not as "islands" but as "eyots" or "aits", derived from Old Norse "ey", the same root that gives the Isle of Skye its name. Locks are not neat black-and-white structures operated by passing boaters, but semi-industrial hydraulic installations with dedicated staff, baby brothers of the sort that admit sea-going container vessels into commercial docks. At each lock the river splits, so while the boats descend in controlled stages, the main flow plunges down a noisy weir that might imperil the heroine of the rapidly-edited climax of a silent epic by DW Griffith. Turbulence is never far beneath tranquility.

At the end of the Brocas the path passes under two bridges. First, Windsor Railway Bridge which carries the Great Western's Windsor branch, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1849, the world's oldest wrought iron bridge still in regular use and a forerunner of Brunel's spectacular Royal Albert Bridge linking Devon and Cornwall across the river Tamar. The great engineer cut his professional teeth on crossing the Thames, as project manager on his father Marc's Thames Tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe which we'll encounter on a later journey. Compared to that near-disastrous undertaking, this elegant bridge must have been a minor challenge, once the objections to the railway were overcome -- the College authorities thought it would facilitate truancy. Just upstream is the concrete Queen Elizabeth Bridge which carries the A322 Windsor bypass, opened in 1966 as the first bridge on the stretch of river between Windsor and Maidenhead, and since the pedestrianisation of Windsor Bridge the only direct link for motor traffic between Windsor and Eton. The route is shared for a while with National Cycle Route 4 (NCN4), the Thames Valley cycle route, which ultimately connects London and Fishguard, though the distinction seems academic as cyclists use this whole stretch of the riverside path even where they're not supposed to. There's quite a network of off-road cycle paths around Windsor and Eton which are not too busy and also make attraactive and very accessible routes for walkers, so you could easily combine a Thamesside walk with a circular route of your own devising.

After the bridge a meander in the river creates a little headland and Chesterton chooses a path that cuts the corner, though the Thames Path sticks to the riverside. The two routes rejoin to run along the southern edge of another open space owned by the College, South Field, stretching up to the satellite hamlet of Eton Wick. Here the path passes a rather lonely spot that is a student "bathing place" (why does that term sound vaguely sordid?) known with unashamed public school pretentiousness as Athens. A bench marks the spot, while an inscribed stone records that the place was donated to the College by a father to commemorate a son killed in a flying accident in 1917.

So far we've been walking in the borough of Windsor and Maidenhead which, as explained on a previous walk from West Byfleet to Sunningdale, was part of the county of Berkshire until that was abolished in 1998 in favour of unitary authorities. But unsurprisingly the Thames itself forms a much older territorial boundary dating back before London became an administrative entity, for centuries separating off (almost completely consistently) Kent, Surrey and Berkshire on the south bank from Essex, Middlesex, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire on the north. From the 19th century onwards there have been various adjustments with administrative areas advancing and retreating in salients across previously alien riverbanks. Eton was once in Buckinghamshire, but in 1974 the boundary was massaged up to the M4 and around Eton Wick to unite it with Windsor. At the end of South Field, the path crosses Boveney Ditch on a footbridge, and now the Thames is back to being a boundary again, with our route continuing on the Buckinghamshire side. This still retains its two-tier structure: right now we're in South Bucks District, although we've not yet left Windsor and Maidenhead for good.

Shortly I pass my first Thames lock on the walk, Boveney Lock, originally built as a wooden lock in 1838. A little further is the tiny, isolated church of St Mary Magdalene, Boveney, dating from the 12th century and originally built to serve boat workers operating from a now-vanished adjaent quay. It's a pretty little chalk and flint building with a wooden tower and, apparently, with many rare 18th and 19th century vernacular fittings in the interior. Part of the parish of Eton, it was declared redundant in 1975 and was taken on in 1983 by the Friends of Friendless Churches. It's undergoing a lengthy restoration that has struggled for funding and consequently isn't complete, so the building is currently closed. Just behind it is the hamlet of Boveney with several Tudor wooden-framed houses.

A little further on you pass a contemporary-styled boathouse of steel and perspex and beyond this, if you look through the trees to your right, you'll catch sight of a huge expanse of water. This is Dorney Lake, Eton College's still water rowing course, constructed to provide a more controllable venue for rowing than the Thames. It was constructed between 1996-2006, mainly by Maidenhead aggregates company Summerleaze, a name that will crop up a few more times on today's walk. The site, which includes an arboretum and nature area, is generally open to the public although only at limited access points: you can reach it by following the footpath to Boveney behind the church or the cycle route by Summerleaze Bridge upstream but it's firmly fenced off, in some places by traditional hedge-laying techniques, from the Thames Path. No doubt this protection will be reinforced over the next few years as the lake is set to host the rowing events in the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Soon on the opposite bank you'll see Windsor Marina, "in a tranquil garden setting" according to its owners, and then the distinctive elaborately castellated profile of Oakley Court, built for Sir Richard Hall-Say in 1859, allegedly in the style of a French château in order to comfort his young and homesick French wife. If its fairytale towers and crenellations seem familiar, it might be that you've watched too many 1960s British films. The big white house next door is Down Place, built in 1750, which in 1951 became the base of British production company Hammer Films, later named Bray Studios. Hammer also made much use of Oakley Court, and when the owner died in 1965 the neighbouring property became an effective extension of the studio for a while. It's most famous for appearing in Hammer's horror films, reviled by critics in their day but since justly lauded and celebrated, though many other movies were made there -- it's also recognisable as notorious girls' boarding school St Trinians. As in Los Angeles, London's film industry went west, and Bray is the westernmost of a number of familiar names we'll encounter on these walks, including Denham, Ealing, Elstree and Shepperton.

Hammer's most enduring icon is Christopher Lee in the role of Dracula, a character that regularly prowled Oakley Court. In Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1898), which first codified much of the contemporary vampire myth, the bloodsucking Transylvanian count establishes his London base at Carfax Abbey, Purfleet (actually still just outside London but that's a discussion for another time), another Thameside site, much further downstream into the estuary, which we'll visit on the London Loop. Since Purfleet is on the north bank, the count would have needed to take care to visit Bray as, according to Stoker, crossing running water unaided is one of the many things there's a law against for the Undead. Bray Studios is still used for TV production, while Oakley Court has been a luxury hotel since 1981. If visualising a cloaked Christopher Lee baring his fangs on the well-manicured lawns doesn't suit you, then bear in mind it was also the location for the enduringly popular musical horror spoof The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), so imagine Meat Loaf, Susan Sarandon and Christopher Biggins doing the Time Warp in fishnets and suspenders instead.

The path then runs alongside the narrow channel of the river separating thickly wooded Queens Eyot, also owned by Eton College, from the bank, and reaches another junction with NCN4, marked by what I believe is our first sighting on the Countryway of one of the National Cycle Network's eccentric Millennium Mileposts. This one is one of the "Fossil Trees" designed by John Mills, the first such posts to appear on the network in the 1990's. They were conceived by network champions Sustrans as a way of providing the routes with distinctive and memorable landmarks, but conveniently, they're also classed as public art rather than traffic signs, therefore avoiding the strict regulations imposed on traffic signing by the Department of Transport, which would prohibit, for example, the Millennium Commission and Royal Bank of Scotland sponsor logos clearly displayed here. Oddly, the Mileposts aren't actually very good at indicating the route accurately, as can be seen here, so they're inevitably supplemented with various cycle route waymarks.

NCN4 is only with us for a few metres before crossing the Thames on the simple but elegant wooden Summerleaze Footbridge, which links to paths to Bray. The bridge is named after the aggregates company, and conceals a conveyor that was used to move spoil during the construction of Dorney Lake. Just past it the path runs along what are clearly the ends of posh house gardens: the first house in the row is a surprising modernist building faintly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, the sort of place they once thought we'd all be living in by now, probably watching jetpack squash on our holographic wallscreens while we enjoyed a meal of vitamin pills.

A little further on the path passes under a no-nonsense concrete bridge carrying the M4 motorway, the third of the radial motorways we've crossed so far. This section is one of Britain's earliest stretches of motorway, originally planned before World War II as the Maidenhead bypass, one of a series of bypasses envisaged along the A4 trunk route from London to Bristol and South Wales, and the first phase of construction had actually begun when war broke out in 1939. After the war, the decision was relieve the A4 completely by creating a new motorway route, so when the bypass was finally opened in 1963, it was as a motorway. Originally only two lanes, it was widened in 1971 to three, at which point the bridge would have been rebuilt. From the riverside you can barely glimpse passing lorries, and underneath the deck, despite the noise from above, the geometry of the bridge reflected in the water seems unexpectedly peaceful.

There are steps here to access pedestrian walkways which piggyback on the motorway to link with the Green Way walking route, more of which later. But instead I continue ahead along the river, past Bray Lock, dating from 1845, soon enjoying a view of Bray itself on the opposite bank, with pretty houses round a slipway looking a little like a film set.

After this it's not long before the house gardens start again and the towpath becomes a surfaced riverside street lined with colourful cottages, with two further historic bridges ahead. The first is one of Brunel's unchallenged masterpieces, the 1838 Maidenhead rail bridge, the setting for JMW Turner's painting Rain, steam and speed (1844).

The bridge marks our first encounter with one of the great long distance main lines that in the 19th century first reached out from London to the far corners of Britain. South of the capital the tangle of commuter lines in the relatively compressed and densely populated space between city and coast makes it difficult to identify real main lines, but follow the Great Western from Paddington and it could be 491km before you finally hit the buffer stops in Penzance. The section from Paddington to Maidenhead was the first to be completed, so the bridge is a magnificent final gesture of the opening performance.

Its two brick arches were the widest and flattest in the world, a design dictated by the river's width and Brunel's desire to avoid a hump that would disturb the railway's flat gradient. Originally the Great Western was built to broad gauge of 2140mm and the bridge carried two tracks, but by the end of the 19th century it had been brought into line with the narrower 1435mm gauge adopted as standard by most of the railways of Britain and mainland Europe, and has since been enlarged to carry four tracks. In the next few years the view of it is likely to change significantly when the line to Maidenhead is electrified with overhead catenary as part of the Crossrail project. One side effect of the bridge's design is the acoustic properties of the arches which give a marked and lengthy echo that can be enjoyed from the towpath, thus its nickname 'the sounding bridge.' Download audio clip (WMA, 75kB).

The second bridge is Maidenhead Bridge and carries a much older long distance transport link -- the "Bath Road" or "Great Western Road", the ancient highway from London to Bath. A wooden bridge stood here as early as 1280, but the current bridge with its thirteen elegant stone arches dates from 1777. Tolls were charged to cross the river here for centuries until a legal challenge in 1903. The road is now classified as the A4, the third single digit radial A-road we've crossed, although unlike the A2 and A3 it's no longer a trunk road, having been superceded by the M4. The bridge remains something of a local bottleneck. The Thames Path and London Countryway use it to cross the river to Maidenhead, leaving Buckinghamshire temporarily for Windsor and Maidenhead borough's second major town.

The route passes the small park of Bridge Gardens, occupying a corner between river and roads, and by a fine late Victorian fountain turns north to continue tracking the river along Ray Mill Road. This area by river and bridge is in fact the town's historic core, though in coaching days the centre of gravity shifted further west along the High Street to the Bath Road's crossing of the inland route to Windsor and Marlow, an area which grew further when the railway station opened nearby. I pass up the temptations of the current town centre and keep close to the Thames, past signs welcoming me to Maidenhead Riverside.

Despite the council's best efforts in installing hanging baskets along this stretch, it's hard to imagine what is now a rather dusty road, quite busy with traffic, as one of the most fashionable stretches of the Thames. The former pleasure gardens, just across the road, is now simply called Riverside Gardens and is an uninviting expanse of car park, lacklustre play area and areas of bare grass with few seats and little shade, though the chalet-style park café still does a good trade. Yet this was the place that Jerome K Jerome cuttingly described in Three Men in a Boat as "too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of showy hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls. It is the witch’s kitchen from which go forth those demons of the river – steam- launches. The London Journal duke always has his 'little place' at Maidenhead; and the heroine of the three-volume novel always dines there when she goes out on the spree with somebody else’s husband."

The former epicentre of the snobby, showy, overdressed Maidenhead of adulterously spreeing dudes and ballet girls is reached at Boulters Lock -- a "boulter" being a miller, referring to a nearby mill. There have been a succession of locks at this point since the late 16th century but the current layout dates from 1912, by which time it was well-established as a popular calling point for boating parties of the chattering classes, especially during the Ascot races -- a scene memorably portrayed by painter Edward John Gregory in Boulter's Lock, Sunday Afternoon.

It may no longer be the pinnacle of high Victorian leisure but it still maintains some appeal as a destination, with a hotel, bar, restaurant, refreshment kiosk and plenty of boats to watch on the lock. The adjoining Ray Mill Island is now an attractive park with an aviary, guinea pig zoo and some interesting public art.

The London Countryway parts company with the Thames Path and the E2 at Boulters Lock along what turns out to be a very interesting route through the varied landscape in the crook of the river between here and Marlow. At first it runs through the residential streets of the Maidenhead suburb of Summerleaze, from which the privately owned aggregates company that built Dorney Lake took its name. Their connection to the area is clear on the map: the two ragged edged lakes concealed behind the houses on both sides of Summerleaze Road are the obvious legacy of gravel extraction, while the landfill site at the end of the road is another of their enterprises.

A track runs from the entrance to the landfill site past the larger of the lakes -- Maidenhead Lake, base of the local sailing club -- and out into an unexpectedly intriguing patchwork of open space, with restored workings, arable fields, waterways and marshes flanked by ancient commons owned by the National Trust and council recreation grounds. Even the farmed bits have good access, with a network of broad, well-signed paths, creating a coherent space that has the feel of a single country park. The Environment Agency has a hand in this as the area plays a key role in the Thames flood relief scheme, with a concrete "bund" cutting across the middle of it from west to east. A few metres off route, just on the other side of a ditch and on the approach to the cricket and football ground, is a rather joky sculpture depicting a yawning mother hippopotamus and her calf -- I couldn't find an explanation for its origin or significance, unless it's a reference to the marshiness of the environment.

Just along the hippos' ditch, the Countryway joins one of southeast England's lesser-known signed walking routes, the Green Way, originally created by the old Berkshire County Council with input from the Ramblers in the late 1980s. This runs from Bray, with a link to the Thames Path over the M4 bridge, alongside several small waterways and through green spaces, passing through the centre of Maidenhead and on to Cookham, with another link back to the Thames. With various alternative routes and links, it's a total length of 19km. In the keywords I've called it the Green Way Maidenhead to distinguish it from other routes with similar names. Another potential confusion is that the term "greenway", without the space, has become a generic term for an off-road "multi-user" route accommodating walkers and cyclists, while the Green Way, though parts of it coincide with designated cycle routes, is promoted exclusively as a walking route.

The Green Way wiggles to include the National Trust commons and the London Countryway, which in any case predated the signed route, doesn't adhere strictly to it, preferring a straight course through flat fields and up the gently inclined concrete of the Environment Agency's flood relief bund. The two routes rejoin to run beside Strand Water, part of a minor Thames tributary that widens into a long, thin pond. The surroundings remind me of the marshy landscapes that flank the river further down into the estuary, on the other side of London; it's as if a chunk of the maritime Thames has migrated upriver.

The path emerges by Moor Hall, a rambling complex centred on a mid-19th century mansion that's now the headquarters and conference venue for hire of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The Hall sits on the southern edge of Cookham Moor, a rather bleak, heathy common that divides the village of Cookham in two. To the east, the historic village centre clusters on the riverside at Cookham Bridge -- it's best known as the home of early 20th century English quasi-primitivist painter Stanley Spencer, who set many of his works round here, and there will be more to say about it when I walk the Thames Path. To the west, linked across the moor by a raised causeway and parallel road, The Pound, is Cookham Rise, which grew up from the 1850s around Cookham station on the Marlow branch line. At Cookham there's also the opportunity of picking up another signed path back towards the edge of London -- the Beeches Way, a Buckinghamshire County Council route, starts just on the other side of Cookham Bridge and runs for 25km via the City of London-owned public woodland of Burnham Beeches to West Drayton on the Grand Union Canal and London Loop. This is also the route of the Shakespeare's Way linking Stratford-upon-Avon with the Globe Theatre at Bankside, London, following the Thames Path from Marlow to Cookham then the Beeches Way on its eastbound journey.

Across the Pound and through the National Trust car park we reach the end of the Green Way, passing an information board about it. and pick up a path signed as an easy access route -- although an unaided person in a conventional wheelchair might struggle a bit on the unsurfaced paths. It's soon obvious our course is parallel to the river, with boats and Thames Path walkers visible on the right, across the Strand stream and a water meadow known as Merlins Mead -- I'm unsure of the connection with the Arthurian figure of myth, if any. The path runs on a very slightly higher contour, and on the left there's a wooded bank, the beginnings of what becomes quite a dramatic change in the landscape.

There's one more link path to the Thames and then the route starts to bear away from the river, burrowing under the railway through a near cylindrical arch in a damp old brick bridge. And then, to the left, a more obvious grassy ridge begins to rise, such a contrast to the flat surroundings that you can almost identify the exact spot at which it first breaks ground. The springy turf and streaks of erosion reveal it's composed of chalk, our first sight of the Thames basin chalk erupting to the surface since the Countryway's descent from the Sheepleas at West Horsley. It's actually an outlying ridge of the North Wessex Downs, the name given to the chalk ridges southwest of London, but it acts as a foretaste of much more to come when we enter the Chilterns.

Here the Thames starts to bend west towards Marlow, and the river deposits caught between this bend and the chalk ridge have built up into what's now the National Trust's Cock Marsh, with bronze age long barrows and a popularity with wading birds that qualifies it as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The path now becomes a broad chalky track that starts to mount the flank of the ridge, climbing above the marsh through dappled broadleaf woodlands to emerge on a road opposite a house called Chimneys -- its top-heavy Tudor-style stacks immediately giving a visual explanation for its name. The road brings us alongside Winter Hill, a stretch of open downland atop the ridge, with a small car park where locals park up, walk their dogs and sit in their cars gazing across the valley. There's a fine view across the riverside lakes at Westhorpe to Marlow and the hilly territories we'll soon be exploring around the Wycombes.

Behind the houses on Winter Hill the route enters a dense, rather gloomy woodland of mixed conifers and beeches known as Quarry Wood, first following a ridge path that curves up to a road and almost immediately plunging back into the wood on a steep, stepped descent back into the valley. The wood is part of Bisham Woods, an extensive strip along the top of the ridge, much of which is managed by the Woodland Trust and is a Special Area of Conservation. Kenneth Grahame is said to have been inspired to write The Wind in the Willows while walking in these woods -- they certainly could have been the inspiration for the Wild Wood in the novel, where small animals shouldn't dare to tread except in special circumstances.

Finally I reach the bottom of the hill and the road to Marlow, which passes the entrance of Longridge, an adventure and water sports centre for young people, much used by schools and youth organisations. Looking back, you can see the distinctive shape of the wooded ridge stretching away westwards, clearly delineated from the flat Thames flood plain at its foot.

Our road passes under the A404 Marlow bypass, a relief for the old route from London to Maidenhead through the Chilterns and one of the few non-trunk roads we've encountered that actually carries the same number all the way to London, in this case starting at Paddington and initially running along Harrow Road. Soon the outlying houses of Bisham, Marlow's opposite number on the Berkshire bank, start to appear and I'm approaching the Thames once more.

Marlow Bridge is a graceful suspension bridge, the only suspension bridge over the non-tidal Thames, designed by William Tierney Clark and opened in 1828, replacing a succession of wooden bridges dating back to the 16th century. It's one of only two of Clark's suspension bridges to survive in use, the other one being the Széchenyi lánchíd over the river Danube, or as it's known locally, the Duna, linking Buda and Pest in Hungary, built to a similar design but on a grander scale as the the first permanent bridge in the city and in its day the longest in the world. The connection between Marlow and Budapest is commemorated on a marble plaque on Marlow Bridge in both English and Hungarian, the latter one of the more unexpected languages I would have anticipated appearing on a inscription along the London Countryway.

I linger on the bridge for a few moments, my eyes following a boat heading up in the direction of Henley, Reading and Oxford. This is the last junction with the Thames Path, and the point where the Thames itself fades from the view of this blog, the furthest point upstream of our London walks, and our last view of the river on the London Countryway until just before the end of the route, where we emerge on the north bank of the estuary just below Tilbury. It'll be a very different Thames that greets us then. It's also a farewell to the E2 which, if you were so inclined, would take you on from here to Oxford, Cannock Chase, along the eastern edge of Greater Manchester and along the Pennines before crossing the border and turning west along the Southern Upland Way to the port of Stranraer and its ferries to Belfast. The Thames Path junction is also where we pick up the only minimally signed Shakespeare's Way which shares the route of the Countryway very briefly on its way to Stratford-upon-Avon (in the other direction, as mentioned above, it follows the Thames Path to Cookham then the Beeches Way).

Aside from being a settlement on an important European river, Marlow has little in common with the bustling Hungarian capital -- it's a small but attractive market town, with roots as an Anglo-Saxon borough, and its celebrated previous residents include 18th century psychiatrist Dr William Battie, from whose name derives the expression "batty" to describe mental instability. There's no crumbling Hapsburg grandeur on show, though there is a fine church, dating from 1835, which makes a good match with the bridge, and Marlow Place, an impressive early 18th century house. The latter is just off the main route of the Countryway, on the way to the station; just a little further on is the Prince of Wales, a rambling mid-19th century pub that raises a final smile with its sign, a rather unflattering caricature of the current holder of that title.

Marlow station is tucked away to say the least. The line was opened in 1873 as a short spur to Bourne End, a little downstream, where it connected with the line from the Great Western Railway at Maidenhead to High Wycombe, dating from 1854. The steam locomotive that worked the line came to be known as the Marlow Donkey, and that nickname has since extended to the service itself, also being borrowed by a nearby pub. The connection between Bourne End and High Wycombe fell victim to the savage postwar trimming of Britain's branch line network, finally closing in 1970, leaving Marlow as the terminus of the branch, with Maidenhead trains rather awkwardly reversing out of Bourne End. Today it's just a well hidden single platform with little more amenity than the average bus stop despite its urban setting. Perhaps the country halt feeling is a sign we're about to stray as remote from London as the Countryway will allow.

Download a route description PDF http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/884833/londonunderfoot/5-windsor-marlow.pdf

View a Google map http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&num=200&start=219&msa=0&msid=117966169375523396049.00046414d40d8252e7b70&ll=51.550605,-0.714111&spn=0.191284,0.441513&t=h&z=11

More information

Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/

Windsor Tourism http://www.windsor.gov.uk

Windsor Parks and Open Spaces http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/parks_openspaces.htm

Windsor Public Rights of Way http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/prow_index.htm

Windsor & Maidenhead walking leaflets http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/landenv_leaflets.htm

David Nash Ford's Royal Berkshire History http://www.berkshirehistory.com/

Slough to Windsor and Eton Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slough_to_Windsor_%26_Eton_Line

Staines to Windsor Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staines_to_Windsor_Line

Windsor Royal Shopping Centre http://www.windsorroyalshopping.co.uk/

Windsor Castle (Royal Collection) http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/default.asp?action=article&ID=34

River Thames (Environment Agency) http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/recreation/boating/31543.aspx

National Trails http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk

Thames Path National Trail http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/Thamespath/

River Thames (River Thames Alliance) http://www.visitthames.co.uk

Salters Steamers http://www.salterssteamers.co.uk

Windsor Bridge (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Bridge

Windsor's Bridges (Royal Windsor website) http://www.thamesweb.co.uk/windsor/windsorbridges/winbridge.html

Eton Town Council http://www.etontowncouncil.org.uk/

Eton (Eton Traders Association) http://www.eton.co.uk/

Eton College http://www.etoncollege.com/

Royal Windsor Wheel http://www.royalwindsorwheel.com/

Windsor Railway Bridge (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Railway_Bridge

Queen Elizabeth Bridge (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth_Bridge,_Windsor

National Cycle Network Route 4 http://www.sustrans.org.uk/what-we-do/national-cycle-network/route-numbering-system/43

Eton Wick History Group http://www.etonwickhistory.co.uk/

Buckinghamshire County Council http://www.buckscc.gov.uk

Visit Buckinghamshire http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org

Walking in Buckinghamshire (Visit Buckinghamshire) http://www.visitbuckinghamshire.org/site/walking-in-buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire Walks and Rides (Bucks CC) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/row/getting_out_on_the_network.page?

Buckinghamshire Leisure & Culture (including parks) http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/leisure/Leisure__culture.page?

South Bucks District Council http://www.southbucks.gov.uk

South Bucks Parks and Recreation http://www.southbucks.gov.uk/leisure__culture/parks_and_recreation/default.asp

South Bucks Tourism http://www.southbucks.gov.uk/leisure__culture/tourism_and_travel/default.asp

Dorney Parish Council http://www.bucksinfo.net/dorneypc/

Boveney Lock (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boveney_Lock

St Mary Magdalene Boveney http://www.stjohnstjamesed.org.uk/page16.html

Dorney Lake http://www.dorneylake.com/

Bray Parish Villages http://www.brayparishvillages.com/

Windsor Marina http://www.mdlmarinas.co.uk/mdl-windsor-marina/

Oakley Court Hotel http://www.principal-hayley.com/venues-and-hotels/the-oakley-court

Bray Film Studios (unofficial site) http://www.thestudiotour.com/bray

Summerleaze Footbridge (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerleaze_Footbridge

M4 Thames Bridge (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_Thames_Bridge,_Maidenhead

M4 Motorway (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_motorway

Bray Lock (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bray_Lock

Taplow Village http://www.taplow.org.uk/

Maidenhead Railway Bridge (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Railway_Bridge

Great Western Main Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Western_Main_Line

Maidenhead Bridge (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Bridge

JMW Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-mallord-william-turner-rain-steam-and-speed-the-great-western-railway

Bridge Gardens (RBWM) http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/parks_bridge_gardens.htm

Riverside Gardens (RBWM) http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/parks_riverside_gardens.htm

Boulters Lock (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulter%27s_Lock

Ray Mill Island (RBWM) http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/parks_ray_mill_island.htm

Edward John Gregory: Boulter's Lock, Sunday Afternoon http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/collections/boulterslock.asp

Maidenhead Sailing Club http://www.maidenheadsc.org.uk

The Green Way (RBWM) http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/prow_publications-green-way-leaflet-download.htm

Cookham Parish http://www.cookham.com/

Moor Hall (Chartered Institute of Marketing) http://www.moorhallconferences.com/

Beeches Way http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/assets/content/bcc/docs/row/promoted_routes/beechesway.pdf

Easy Going Route: Cookham http://www.visitthames.co.uk/uploads/cookhamwalks08.pdf

Maidenhead and Cookham Commons (National Trust) http://www.cookham.com/cookhamnow/clubssocieties/nationaltrust/NT%20guide%20web.pdf

Maidenhead Commons and Cock Marsh (National Trust) http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-global/w-localtoyou/w-thames_solent/w-thames_solent-countryside/w-thames_solent-places-countryside-list.htm#maidenhead_commons

Marlow Branch Line (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlow_Branch_Line

Bisham Parish Council http://www.bishamparishcouncil.org.uk/

Bisham Woods (Woodland Trust) http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/our-woods/Pages/wood-details.aspx?wood=4424

Longridge http://www.longridge-uk.org

Marlow Bridge (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlow_Bridge

Wycombe District Council http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/

Wycombe Tourism http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/sitePages.asp?step=4&contentID=245&categoryID=1248

Wycombe Parks and Recreation http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/sitePages.asp?step=4&contentID=239&categoryID=1132

Marlow Town Council http://www.marlowtowncouncil.org.uk/

All Saints Marlow http://www.allsaintsmarlow.org/

Higginson Park http://www.wycombe.gov.uk/sitePages.asp?step=4&contentID=220&categoryID=3617

Prince of Wales, Marlow http://www.the-prince-of-wales.co.uk