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 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!
A bit more crop-trampling took me to the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard. An uninteresting walk near and then along a main road took me to the town centre, with its very fine Market Cross, whose origins “are not certain, however, it is believed to date from the 15th century and was possibly organised and financed by Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, who was Lord of the Manor” (Leighton-Linslade Past Times website). Another fine sight was the Costa Coffee sign – an americano and a piece of carrot cake later, I crossed the Grand Union Canal (whose towpath I was planning to walk on my next outing), and reached Leighton Buzzard Station, which is actually in Linslade (don't ask, I don't know).
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