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.