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Monday 14 December
– Milton Keynes to Blisworth
For financial reasons (saving a third off the train fare) I didn’t start walking from Milton Keynes Station until twenty to eleven. With 14 (flat) miles to walk, I should have been fine for daylight, and I was, but there wasn’t a great deal of leeway for flooded towpaths or whatever. So I determined to walk it non-stop.
A few days before the forecast had been dry, but at the last minute the weathergirl had, with a twirl of her pink duffle-coat, snatched it away and substituted intermittent rain. This turned out to be nothing more than fine drizzle, a nuisance but no worse. My plan was to cross to the Western side of the railway and strike North along one of Milton Keynes’s green corridors. I have to admit that they do them pretty well.
This one followed a meandering stream, with good walking surfaces through established woodland. Look carefully and there’s a factory, there a housing estate. But the heron which watched me, safe on the other side of the stream, didn’t care about the hidden horrors – he had a good beat to patrol. The towns and villages which were swallowed by the new town live on in odd ways – the “footpath to the church” is now a cul-de-sac of semis. One ancient settlement is obvious. The mediaeval pilgrimage chapel of Bradwell Abbey still stands, with other bits of the abbey incorporated into modern buldings.
As soon as I departed from the planned walking route, I was on my own – footpaths were withdrawn, and I had to find my own way through a semi-derelict trading estate before once again conforming to an official route to Wolverton. Wolverton has been strongly associated with railways since 1838, when it was chosen by the London & Birmingham Railway Company as the site of their railway works, for the very good reason that it was halfway between the eponymous cities. The works spawned housing which grew into the “new towns” of Wolverton and New Bradwell. How ironic that they should have been swallowed in their turn by Milton Keynes. The works had various guises, sometimes manufacturing and sometimes repairing locomotives and carriages, and there is still residual activity today. I walked past what appeared to be old buildings with a spanking new roof on them (thanks to Wikipedia for the background, as usual).
Just after the railway works I turned West then North West on the towpath of the Grand Union Canal. After a couple of hundred yards of being rather rundown, the towpath became wide and surfaced, possibly to accommodate bikes. Today it also accommodated a very jolly jogger, who wished me a cheery “good morning”. The canal itself was the colour of soup, possibly lentil or thin pea. I soon reached the Iron Trunk Aqueduct, which carries the canal over the River Great Ouse. Apparently it replaced a series of locks, down to and up from the river level, and later a brick-built aqueduct which collapsed. Like its much bigger brother at Pontcysyllte, the aqueduct is constructed such that the canal is only separated from the vertical drop by a low metal sill – boaters with vertigo, look away now!. The towpath, mercifully, has a bit more protection.
Sunday 6 December –
Leighton Buzzard to Milton Keynes
Sometimes I'm a bit simple. I sat on the 8.23am from Euston, decked out in my waterproofs, wondering why the train was full of under-dressed yoof looking sleepy. Then I twigged – they weren't planning to join me for a day's walking, they were on the way home from all-night clubbing. Silly me.
From Leighton Buzzard Station it took just five minutes to reach the Grand Union Canal, whose towpath was to be my route for most of the day. I was heading generally North; I say generally because, being a canal it did what canals do, and wandered along the contours between locks. Having started damp, the day was rapidly improving, with several patches of blue sky.
A heron stood proprietorially at the bottom of a canalside garden, keeping an eye on the wheelie bin. A sign warned against fishing beneath some electric cables; two men sat underneath the cables fishing.
The towpath became part of the National Cycle Network (promising a decent walking surface). I left Beds and entered Bucks. As the housing of Leighton Buzzard and Linslade were left behind, the canal became more rural. But a fairly constant traffic of dog-walkers, joggers and canoeists, together with the fisherman lining the bank, undermined any feeling of isolation. After a relatively short time in Buckinghamshire I entered the Magic Kingdom of Milton Keynes, firstly in the form of Bletchley. Almost immediately, housing estates sprang up to the left of the canal, while the on the right the fields continued. The condition of the towpath, which had been so good up to now, went rapidly downhill. The puddles were easily avoidable, but that brought its own hazards – I was walking dog-shit alley, and every step needed to be planned.
The A5 swept overhead, the noise intense despite the fact that it was Sunday. For long stretches the muddy towpath was shadowed, a few yards away, by much better walkways, so I frequently switched between the two. There was the traditional new town mix of linear green spaces with housing and other buildings lurking behind bushes. Excitable signs announced that the Bedford and Milton Keynes Waterway would soon link the canal I walking beside with those of the fenlands. While “soon” needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, a quick check on the Internet convinced me that there is genuine progress being made to build “Britain's first new canal for over a hundred years”. Power to their elbows.
Friday 4 December –
Leagrave to Leighton Buzzard
I wasn't expecting this to be a classic walk – from one dormitory town to another – and it wasn't. But it was a perfectly decent walk on a marvellous day.
The kiosk at Leagrave Station provided that essential third coffee of the morning, and the bright sunshine brilliantly illuminated the pollarded plane trees of Leagrave as I headed through the streets Westwards. Leagrave offered, you will be relieved to read, no more poetry, but it was easy to escape from. 15 minutes' walking took me to a tunnel beneath the M1, after which I was in open fields. I could see houses in two directions, and hear the motorway traffic in a third direction, but ahead of me to the North was peaceful farmland. Frost still lay in the shadows. I was – not unpleasantly – constantly reminded that I was still in prime dog-walking territory.
Eventually I ran out of well-marked paths, and resorted to a farm track to take me nearly into Chalton. Turning West again, I picked up a byway, gated at the start and forbidden to motorised traffic (hurray!). It was a beautiful grassy track, up to about 15 feet across at its widest, and the only heavy traffic was birds flying across from bush to bush. A waymark erected by the Chiltern Society suggested that I was now in the Chilterns, but the few Chiltern-like hills rose from an almost flat plain. Later the landscape started to roll gently.
I reluctantly left the lovely byway, striking off Southwards and then Westwards again on a bridleway. I got a bit confused about the route as I passed a stud farm, a kind member of staff interrupting his coffee break to point me back in the right direction.
I joined the Icknield Way and the Chalgrave Heritage Trail, their waymarks jostling for attention on the signposts. Along the byway, the bridleway and a series of footpaths, crossing paths were impeccably signed. When I had to leave field edges and walk across a field, I found the downside – the route across the cropped field had been marked on the ground, but no attempt had been made to re-establish a decent walking surface after ploughing, harrowing or whatever had happened to break up the ground. So my pace slowed right down as mud built up on my boots. Very tiresome (and illegal).
I walked through Tillsworth, stopping on a bridleway just beyond the village to sit on a bank and eat my lunch. A rather languid thwacking noise alerted me to the fact that I was a hedge away from a golf course, but my munching was safely completed. Five minutes after lunch, the footpath I was following disappeared completely under the plough/harrow/etc. A finger post pointed across a crop of something or other, so across it I plodded. I can only think that farmers imagine they are protecting their crops by hiding the footpaths, but having me wander in roughly the right direction as I try to match up the field boundaries with the map doesn't seem to me to be good for crop welfare. Silly sillies. Eventually, with the help of the GPS on my phone, I got back on the right track, and made my way to Eggington.
Eggington House is “regarded as a very fine example of late 17th century domestic architecture, and is a Grade II* listed building. At the time of its construction in 1696 it was completely up to date and innovative in its design - which was unusual in the provinces, where architectural styles usually lagged behind that of the larger cities” (Wikipedia). It looked very handsome in the last of the afternoon sun (cloud was streaming in). The village has an attractive centre, but also has the usual Home Counties accretion of overstuffed commuters' houses on the outskirts. I was amused to see that one particularly bloated example was called “Tumbrels”, presumably because the owners had recognised that they will be first to the guillotine, come the revolution!
