Day Sixteen

Monday 11 January 2010 – Leicester to Loughborough.

I was about to spend most of my day back on a towpath, this time alongside the River Soar Navigation, about which more in a bit. From Leicester’s Clock Tower, I walked North along Churchgate, one of the ancient routes into and out of the City. Although Churchgate itself is mostly given over to pedestrians these days, its continuation beyond the inner ring road is a main commuter route. Rush hour traffic was stamping and cursing at the traffic lights as I scuttled off down to the towpath, which I almost immediately diverted from because I wanted to renew acquaintance with Abbey Park. This is a typical late-Victorian civic park, with a boating lake, picnic areas, a couple of caffs and, just over the bridge across the Soar, the remains of Leicester Abbey. A fairly short history lesson follows; to avoid it, skip to [*]

“Leicester Abbey was founded as a community of Augustinian Canons. The abbey was one of the largest and most influential land owners in Leicestershire, thanks to contributions by important patrons such as the Earl of Winchester, Simon de Montfort, Alan la Zouche, Ernard de Bosco and, finally, the Crown. The abbey certainly held more manors than any lay lord. The abbey is perhaps most famous for its connection to Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England, who was for a time the most powerful man in England, second only to the King. In spiritual terms, his power even surpassed that of the Archbishop of Canterbury (the Primate of England). Wolsey, at one part, was a candidate for the papacy. And yet, he fell out of the King’s favour in 1529 and was forced to return to his Archdiocese of York. A year later he was accused of high treason and ordered to return to London. On the way, he stopped at Leicester Abbey. As he arrived, he told the abbot, ‘I am come to leave my bones among you.’ The archbishop died that night. He was buried within the walls of the Abbey church, and today a monument stands on his supposed resting place. From the disgrace of Wolsey, the path to schism from Rome was short, and the inevitable fall of the Abbey of St Mary de Pratis of Leicester.”

[*] Now if you skipped the above history lesson, you missed the reference to Cardinal Wolsey. The next sentence of the lesson (courtesy, as usual, of Wikipedia) reads, “The clothes manufacturer Wolsey is based nearby in Leicester and the company is named in honour of Cardinal Wolsey.” Alas no more. As a cycle path took me back to the towpath, I could look across the canal at the bulldozed remains of the Wolsey factory. Thus are the mighty cardinal, and the mighty hosier, fallen.

The River Soar Navigation, the Northern extension through Leicester of the Grand Union Canal, is a bit of a mishmash. Sometimes canal and river are the same, sometines they run parallel a few yards apart, and sometimes the river wanders off out of sight, leaving the canal, and the towpath, to run a straightish course. Canalisation, I was surprised to read, started in the 17th Century, and was completed in the 18th. Spotting which was river and which was canal was easy – the river has a flow, so does not tend to freeze. This area North of Leicester is a giant flood plain, much of which has been leisurified as Watermead Country Park.

It was here that the two men had fallen through the ice three days ago, with fatal consequences. Another consequence was that the whole area was a forest of notices warning of the dangers of the ice. I cynically wondered whether they had been erected before or after the tragedy.

I walked past a fishing lake called King Lear’s Lake. I daydreamed about the King doing a bit of coarse fishing on alternate Saturdays when Leicester City Football Club were playing away (he wouldn’t have been able to travel to away games, of course, while the three girls were young, so fishing would provide an alternative break from the demands of kingship). My musings were all tosh, of course, but the reason for the name is scarcely more believable. Apparently legend has it that Lear (or Leir) was buried, alongside Cordelia, in an underground chamber under the river. I prefer my explanation, on balance.

I passed several villages, set back from the river. This was because I was on the flood plain, and the village-builders sensibly chose higher ground. Mountsorrel is an exception, lying immediately alongside the canal, probably because the produce from the nearby quarry was shipped out by water. A conveyor from the quarry is still marked on the map, crossing the river on a handsome redbrick bridge. The next village, Barrow-upon-Soar, looms over the river on top of what is almost a cliff.

Soon after Barrow, the river wanders off again, leaving the canal to slip unnoticed into Loughborough, under a cast iron bridge which used to carry the Great Central Railway. The last of the great North-South main lines, the Great Central ran from Manchester to Marylebone in London (I live about 200 yards away from Marylebone, which nowadays mostly serves only Metroland, with occasional forays into the Midlands). The Great Central was completed at the end of the 19th Century, and after a mere 60 years its destruction began, with final closure in 1969. Today the name lives on in the form of the steam railway from Loughborough to just North of Leicester. The surviving main line, the Midland, was to carry me back to Leicester and on to London.

Loughborough Station is dominated by the Brush works. They don’t make brooms, they make electrical equipment, and have done for over a century. They’ve had their ups and downs, but the factory appeared to be in full swing as I supped my coffee on the station platform. This posting seems to have contained an unconscionable amount of historical guff; the management trusts that it hasn’t unduly spoilt your enjoyment.

Here is a link to a map showing my progress to date.

Day Fifteen

Saturday 9 January 2010 – Foxton to Leicester

 

I cut across fields from Foxton to pick up the towpath alongside the canal leading to Leicester. I could have spent almost the whole day on this route, but the winding canal would have put four to five miles on my journey, so I had a cunning plan to desert the towpath later in the morning. The path had already been well trodden since the previous night’s snowfall; only for less than a mile did I make new marks in the snow. That’s a feature of walking in the snow: you get a very good idea of which paths are used and which aren’t. In four days’ snow walking, I was rarely a pioneer in the footprint-making department.

The previous day, I had walked through a couple of tunnels on the old railway, but there was no chance of walking through Saddington Tunnel. Like most canal tunnels, it had no towpath. While the horse was led peacefully over the top, the bargees would leg the boats through the tunnel, lying on their backs and “walking” along the tunnel walls.

The morning’s news included the deaths of two men, at a place I was due to visit the following day, when they fell through ice on a lake. The reporter speculated that perhaps the men had not realised that it was a lake they were walking on. I found this quite believable. Had I not known that the winding strip by my side was a canal, I could have taken it for a bumpy road. Snow had fallen on ice, incorporating branches and whatever had been floating in the water, and the wind had whisked up the snow, to create a strange and deceptive landscape.

Between Fleckney and Kibworth the engineers had had to admit defeat in their relentless pursuit of the contour and build a few locks. At Crane’s Lock I left the towpath and set off North on field paths. I needn’t have had any worries about finding my way: a well-trodden route led me into Great Glen. On what used to be the main A6 road from Leicester to Market Harborough, and now bypassed, Great Glen still has a few villagey characteristics left, but mostly it’s a rather depressing dormitory for people working in Leicester. I was too early for lunch in the pub, so I bought some stuff at the shop and escaped back to the fields.

I reached Gartree Road (as the map will attest, a Roman road), at Great Stretton, site of a deserted mediaeval village, now a few houses strung along the road and an old church. I had to walk West along the road for about a mile to pick up my next footpath. It was the usual irksome business; you have to keep sharp all the time, and assume that the next motorist will do something stupid. They often do. A welcome series of footpaths teetered around the very edge of Oadby (a suburb of Leicester which pretends that it isn’t), until I reached a pleasant arboretum on Leicester’s fringes, leading to Leicestershire Golf Club. This had been rededicated by the snow as a walker’s paradise – no troublesome golf balls to watch out for, so walk where you like (many had).

I lived in Leicester for many years, so visiting it with a full rucksack on my back was a strange experience. But at least I knew my way to the centre of the City.

Day Fourteen

Friday 8 January 2010 – Brixworth to Foxton

Britain was still in the grip of the Big Freeze. It was an awful lot below freezing somewhere in Scotland, and the BBC’s woman was there to gush about it. From Brixworth I headed back to the Brampton Valley Way, which would take me into Leicestershire and almost into Market Harborough. There were about ten more miles of the old trackbed to come, never exciting but always pleasant, with good walking on the carpet of snow, and frequent views across the country to either side. This made the Way a notch up from other railway walks, which spend hours in cuttings or between thick hedges with no views at all.
 

Most crossings were on a level with the Way, so occasionally I had to pay attention as I crossed a busy road. The walk had two novelty features – tunnels. Under hills near Kelmarsh and Great Oxendon, twin tunnels had been bored and, in either case, one of the tunnels had been retained for use by walkers and cyclists. Neither tunnel was a compulsory part of the trail – alternative routes were clearly marked. By I had heeded the advice to carry a light by renewing my torch batteries, so I plunged iinto the first tunnel. The surface was mostly pretty good, with just the occasional raggedy hole caught in the puny beam of the torch. But when I reached the middle of the tunnel, things were rather different. From the bottom of a ventilation shaft, curtains of ice hung down into the tunnel; on the floor, a great circle of uneven ice looked like some frozen cauldron. I picked my way gingerly past this scene of icy chaos and, passing beneath more slagmites of ice, reached the Northern portal without incident.
 

A couple of miles further on I reached the second tunnel. This was much less dramatic overhead, but the walking surface was more problematic: puddles and runs of water had frozen. The best walking was at the side, and I was in no serious danger. But these tunnels had been a most interesting experience. Apart from the occasional short coastal tunnel through a headland, the last time I could remember anything similar was in French gorges, notably the Gorge de Verdon in Haute Provence. Lacking a shelf to establish a trackway, the builders had had to bore into the side of the gorge in two places, to creepy effect.
 
Just North of the second tunnel, a truly bizarre sight greeted me. Towards me walked a man, accompanying four women, each of whom wheeled a baby buggy. So far, so intriguing. Then, fifty yards or so behind, a fifth woman also wheeled a buggy past me. By now I wanted to rush back to check whether the man had had a proud grin on his face, but wiser counsels prevailed.
 
Just South of Market Harborough, I left Northamptonshire and entered Leicestershire, just over a fortnight (in walking terms) after leaving Dungeness. This seemed to me like reasonable progress; so far I have averaged almost exactly fifteen miles a day, which is not bad for an occasional walker in the darker half of the year. In Market Harborough, it was back to lethally slippery pavements. I stopped for some soup in a town centre pub, where I was approached by a very nice woman, and later her lunch companion, who had spotted the backpack and stick, rightly surmising that I had not just come from the weekly shop at Sainsbury’s. The two women were keen walkers, and we exchanged routes taken. I mention this because it doesn’t often happen. Most people are either incurious about each other or too polite/inhibited to speak out (I’m the latter).
 
Market Harborough is a bustling place. Despite nowadays being within commuting distance of London by train, it still hads a country town air, and I passed the odd florid-faced man who looked as though he might have marched into town after a small-furry-animal-slaughtering session. In truth, he was probably a banker lying low until the heat abated.
 

A mile out of town, I turned West, across the Harborough Arm of the canal system, on to field paths leading to Foxton, by way of Gartree Maximum Security Prison. The paths were easy to follow, in spite of the snow cover, because Of Leicestshire’s admirable policy of maintaining waymark posts, brightly painted yellow at the top, at every twist and turn. Being in good time, I turned aside from Foxton Village for a quick look at Foxton Locks, often visited in the past but not when there was snow on the ground. Foxton Locks connect the Grand Union Canal summit with the line to Leicester and the Harborough Arm already mentioned. As I gusssed they would do, the locks and their surrounding paraphernalia looked stunning under snow, with strong sideways light from the afternoon sun to complete the magic. So I walked along the towpath back to the village in good heart.

Day Thirteen

Thursday 7 January 2010 – Blisworth to Brixworth

Britain was in crisis – it must be true, because the BBC kept saying so. “More bad weather is on the way... feet of snow and freezing temperatures... send us your pictures of traffic chaos... hang on, Jeremy's hit the jackpot, snow-related fatality in East Anglia... over to you, Jeremy... don't forget those crisis pictures!” So it went on. My train from London to Northampton the day before had been delayed for just an hour while the South Midlands had a bit of a blizzard, and then things got going again.

This morning, my bus from Northampton to Blisworth had been 10 minutes late, which was not surprising as traffic was running more slowly and gingerly than usual on frozen, compacted snow on all but major roads. Arriving in Blisworth, I was a bit slow in switching from town to country mode as a woman bid me a cheery “good morning”. She disappeared into the local day nursery; I couldn't see whether she had any young customers on this snowy day.

I soon reached the towpath of the Grand Union Canal. The path was under what had probably been about 4 inches of snow, trampled by local walkers into a lovely carpet for me to walk on. This part of the country had obviously escaped the worst of the recent weather, and the sun was out, brilliantly illuminating the pretty scene. At Gayton Junction, after a couple of miles' walking, I turned off the main canal on to the Northampton Arm, which connected the midlands canal network with the waterways of the fenlands. I soon reached the first of 17 locks taking the canal down to the level of the River Nene at Northampton. The canal went under three ugly bridges, carrying the M1 and two slip roads leading grateful motorists to Rothersthorpe Services. I was tempted by a coffee stop here, but not tempted enough to work out how to intrude a pedestrian amongst all the traffic.

Just as Northampton was beginning to loom large on the Eastern horizon, I left the towpath and turned North, crossing the flood plain of the River Nene. As I turned East again, parallel with the Nene, I passed huge car parks, iced up and empty, which serve Northampton’s soccer and rugby stadiums. To make further progress in my desired direction (Northish), I had to face up to the most dangerous section of the whole expedition: the slithery, slidy, ungritted back streets of West Northampton. For a mile or so I teetered along, planning every footfall and eyeing every slope with suspicion.

Eventually I left the suburbs along a bridleway which also served as a local rubbish dump. Household refuse peeped up through the snow – disgusting, but also somehow intriguing. There was a nice surprise: National Cycle Route 6 appeared from the left, drew me seductively off to the right, and fell in alongside the main Northampton to Birmingham railway. Soon the main line peeled off to the left, leaving me to carry on Northwards on what used to be the line to Market Harborough. I read that, had Saint John Betjeman not saved St Pancras from the ravening hoards of the British Railways Board in the 1960s, this might have become the principal route between the East Midlands and London, with Euston as the Southern terminal. I had been expecting to pick up this line, now the Brampton Valley Way, two miles further ahead, so the early start was a treat.

Just where the Way started on my map, there was a pub of the buffed-up, foody sort which provided me with a very good lunch, after I had stripped off three of my five layers of clothing. Back on the BV Way, it was soon obvious that a bit of the railway line lives on in the form of the Northampton and Lamport Railway, a mile or so of “heritage” line which is being lovingly restored by enthusiasts. And, goodness, you have to be an enthusiast to spend hundreds of hours rescuing clapped-out, vandalised carriages which have obviously been rotting away in some British Rail sidings for years. As well as carriages and locos, the restorers had done sterling work on signal boxes and other buildings purchased from BR, imported and re-erected. Their paintwork was immaculate.

When the railway line finished, the old trackbed was given over entirely to walkers and cyclists. Of the latter, there were a few, and of the former, the pattern was the usual one. As I got within a mile or so of the car parks dotted along the way, the dog walkers would appear; a mile past the car parks, I would be left mostly alone. It’s a brilliant resource; if you can’t walk very far, and you need level ground to take your exercise, and you can drive or be driven, an ex-railway with well placed car parks fills the bill.

At the Spratton Road car park I headed, not for Spratton, but East to Brixworth, a large village or small town (who can tell which?), busy with mid-afternoon shoppers in cars and on foot.