May 31, 2008: Stokenchurch to Lacey Green
The windmill at Lacey Green
As a final warm-up for a major expedition in Wales Tosh and I determined that we would return to the Chiltern Way, with its many ups and downs, in order to complete a nine and half mile stretch, one that might give our legs the necessary exercise. Curiously neither Linda nor Hanna had a free day today but Georgie volunteered to look after Fritz and I turned him over to her in the doggy pen across the street, at exactly 9:00, before heading for the Bakerloo Line. It was warm enough for me to wear only a t-shirt today.
I was soon in Marylebone Station, where I found Tosh having a second breakfast at a little table outside a coffee stall. I made my way into the Marks & Spencer food hall nearby and purchased a banana, a sandwich, some crisps and some flavored water and we then joined the ticket queue, buying day returns for Princes Risborough –utilizing our Freedom Passes and our Senior Rail Passes. Soon we were able to board our 9:45 train, gossiping about the recent ASL reunion that we had both attended for the half an hour or so it took us to get to High Wycombe – where we left the train.
There is a taxi rank outside this station and we had no sort of wait at all before speeding off to Stokenchurch, which is where we had abandoned this route last fall. This was the second time we had taken a cab to this quite undistinguished village (“the ugly duckling” of the Chilterns according to Nick Moon), having started here with Harold, Dorothy, the Haradas and Toby on a stretch of the old Chilterns Hundred route twelve years earlier. I expected to encounter our footsteps on a number of occasions today, though in fact only a few places brought forth the requisite memory. We were able to start walking at 10:40.
When we were here in 1996 there had been great difficulties in leaving town, where new building had done a pretty effective job of effacing all evidence of the desired route. Today life was far more straightforward. We crossed the A40, located Church Street and the funny little Lloyds Bank, then turned into Park Lane and soon thereafter we were in real countryside, our route accompanied by hedges and fences as we worked our way along in a roughly north-easterly direction. It was quite warm in the sun but, if fact, there was very little direct sunlight today, though it remained cloudy bright most of the time and I used my sunglasses for the first few hours. It was also quite humid.
We followed one hedgerow for a long time, emerging at last via some steps onto a track. Crossing this, and using a few more tricky steps to drop down some more, we now faced a daunting sight. Our route required us to proceed through a field of oil seed rape, lush in foliage, with just a trace of yellow flowers etching the proper way forward. There was a real path beneath our boots but, of course, it was impossible to see our feet. I plunged into this morass, the plants often as high as my chin, Tosh just behind me, and fought my way forward toward a line of four trees (the promised thorn bush at the end was not in evidence any longer). This crossing was a great struggle, particularly on my tiring legs – which were grabbed at every step by the plants. When I emerged I noticed that my hiking trousers had been stained green in a number of places. In retrospect I think it would have been far easier to use farm roads to get around this obstacle. I wish I had – for this is not what I meant when I expressed a wish to exercise my legs.
We had emerged on a track known as Colliers Lane, once used, so Moon tells us, by Welsh colliers to transport coal to London. A half left across a small field should have been our next move but the field was also choked with crops and so, having learned my lesson, I found a way around this. Crossing two farm tracks we were now at the foot of a very steep hill but here there was a clear path in the green and so we began an upward struggle. The guidebook suggested that we were to aim for an electricity pole in the top hedge and, indeed, we passed such a pole, but the latter was not embedded in any hedge and I soon began to suspect that there had been some physical changes in this part of the world: nothing seemed to correspond to the text hereabouts.
Fortunately the route today was well waymarked and there were Chiltern Way badges nailed to appropriate stiles and so we made our way forward, soon walking next to a right-hand hedge that I did find referenced in the text. This led to a drive and the entrance to Andridge Farm. I paused to make a study of the guidebook here just as a lone chap, also carrying Moon’s book, preceded us through a small set of dwellings and down a hill. There were lots of loose dogs about and we were urged on our way by their insistent barking. A bungalow at the bottom of our hill was painted pink (an even more intense shade than usual if viewed through my sun glasses). Several stiles allowed us to descend to Horseshoe Road, where we turned left, soon reaching a junction with Town End Road in the village of Radnage. We then began a stretch in an enclosed field, first down then up, and I did recall this spot; in 1996 we had endured a brief downpour here and I recalled that Dorothy had been consumed with jealousy when Catherine Harada had pulled out a Mary Quant poncho.
At the top end of the field we penetrated the grounds of St. Mary the Virgin church and here we sat down on a bench and Tosh ate a sandwich and I ate a banana while a chap, about to mow the lawn, fretted over all the grass clippings that would be left behind.
Our route now lead us through the tombstones and out the back wall, where we began a decent into a valley bottom, and, once achieved, an ascent up to woods on the other side. We followed a right hand fence for a while, eventually abandoning its company for an entry into Yoesden Wood. A fork on the opposite side sent us uphill again, with signs of settlement gradually introducing us to civilization again. In 1996 there had been a pub in the village of Bledlow Ridge; now I saw only an Italian restaurant.
As we crossed the Chinnor Road and walked behind the houses on our left, we now switched directions from northeast to northwest but, again, I had difficulties matching Moon’s descriptions with details on the ground (I note that I experienced similar difficulties with Jimmy Parson’s description of the stretch in 1996). There were occasional waymarks so I kept us moving forward; we climbed up into a grassy amphitheater and searched around for an exit before finding it in the far right corner. Eventually we emerged onto a road in the village of Rout’s Green and I could be confident that I knew where we were in the text. We had covered three and a half miles to this point.
We turned left and then right on paved roads and when the macadam petered out we penetrated Neighbour’s Wood, following just inside its left edge downhill. I must say the country here was very lovely, with Lodge Hill dominating the scene on our right, and wild flowers blooming in every hedgerow. We emerged into the open after a section on a green lane, arriving at the entrance to Callow Down Farm. Moon mentions that the landowner was seeking a diversion at the time the guidebook went to press and, sure enough, we were unable to penetrate the grounds of this beautifully restored piggery – though there was a parallel track in more open country that we could use to make fast progress.
Signs soon put us back on the original route and near Old Callow Down Farm, also quite handsome, we met a couple who were out walking Henry the Boxer. They admitted themselves to an adjacent field and I asked Tosh is they were exercising the right to roam or if perhaps they owned the place – but neither suggestion was true: they were merely avoiding a cattle grid that the dog could not cross unaided. Curiously, I remembered this stretch from 1996 as well and here too we were accompanied by a dog, not just my Toby, but a dog we called Skip II. The latter followed our party all the way out to Wigan’s Lane, in spite of our efforts to turn him around, but a gate and stile prevented him from going any further. Henry had to go on lead here and we said goodbye to his owners as they turned right and we crossed the road and climbed through a hedge.
We crossed a field and climbed up to a junction with the Ridgeway (which means that this must have been the third time I had used this trail), turning left and following the Ridgeway for a short distance before abandoning it to pass through a hedge and descend to a thicket on a path which had turned yellow at the edges after the application of some chemical. Once through the thicket we could make fast progress along a second yellow weed road toward the village of Bledlow, now visible in the distance. A loudspeaker was interrupting the silence and we soon saw hundreds of parked cars over on our right –so we knew something was attracting large numbers of visitors.
Tosh was surprised that there were no other sounds, no hurdy-gurdy, no cheers, no applause. “Well it’s not a public execution,” I concluded. I was worried that the pub, The Lions of Bledlow, would be overrun by all these visitors, thus spoiling our chances for refreshment, but when we at least reached the village and turned left on Church End we found only the usual clientele at a pub we had also visited a dozen years earlier. A chap here told us that the local attraction was the Bledlow Fair, an annual event. We would have ordered some food but the South African chap behind the bar promised long delays so, as it was already 2:00, we ordered drinks only. We sat down at a table in the back garden and Tosh parceled out some nuts that she had just bought while I ate the avocado and prawn sandwich I had bought in Marylebone Station. The pub had a nice atmosphere – with signs warning against the presence of muddy boots but suggesting that dirty paws were alright. There were a number of dogs about.
After only half an hour we returned to the spot where we had left the Chiltern Way and continued on past the church and the manor house – the latter must surely have been the spot whose gardens we had been advised to visit by a barfly at the Lions in 1996, only to discover that Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, actually frowned on such activity on his private property.
We reached a t-junction and turned right, the loudspeaker of the local fete inviting competitors in the limbo competition to report for duty. There was, naturally, a lot of traffic about and trying to keep out of harm’s way while having a peek at the same time meant we utterly missed our next turnoff. We had passed the lads who were directing traffic in and out of the show and reached a lay-by in which a flatbed truck was parked before I called a halt and suggested a retreat. A local chap confirmed this notion and we retreated, finding our path through a hedge and beginning a descent to the wide valley bottom below.
I have to say that scenery here was far less interesting than it had been only a mile behind us, just lots of field paths, green lanes, hedgerows and stiles well-guarded by burgeoning nettle bushes that left their imprint on hands and elbows. We reached Frogmore Farm with a handsome brick and timber farmhouse, fifteenth century in origin, and reached Oddley Lane, where we continued forward to reach the village of Saunderton.
Here we found a T-junction, turned left into the Bledlow Road and right into Church Lane, passing between two ornamental lakes. Our route took us through another churchyard, where I could tell Tosh that we had only 2.1 miles to go. I soon regretted this because that lady was already dreaming of an early return and a portion of Nando’s chicken on her way home – and she was into her late afternoon crescendo now.
We passed through some marshy woodland and turned south along a hedgerow, eventually reaching a crossing of the north-bound track of the London-Birmingham rail link – an unprotected stretch that we stepped over gingerly, our ears pricked for the sound of any oncoming train. More field walking carried us further south (we did pass a large party of walkers heading our way here) and into the gates of the handsome Old Rectory, whose drive we used to reach a stile into another field. Around the corner on our left we joined the Ridgeway for a second time, rising with this path (as I must have done in 1981) to a gate and a crossing above the tunnel of the southbound rail track. Tosh expressed alarm at the steep sides of this cutting, expecting that the whole thing would come tumbling down on the tracks with the slightest moisture but I cheered her up by telling her that we would soon be able to test this theory on our own train journey south.
We soon left the Ridgeway, turning right and using a twin-trunked oak tree as our next waymark. A few more fields to cross and we reached the busy A4010, which we dashed across when there was a break in the traffic. We had reached a section of the route that was quite overgrown and you could tell that some walkers had taken to nearby roads as a way of avoiding these struggles. We persisted until the route put us out on a farm track, one that gradually began to climb up from the valley bottom in which we had been making fairly fast progress for the last hour and a half.
I now made the mistake of telling Tosh that we had only eight tenths of a mile to go (though a very steep section indeed) and she wanted me to phone immediately for a taxi so that there would be no waiting at the end of our walk. I declined. A father in an open convertible was giving his tow-headed kids a drive up and down our lane, one toddler seated in his lap as he drove. We left this group behind at Collins Farm and took a steep path up to a street in suburban Loosley Row, where we turned right. An American woman stopped to chat with us and other residents, working on their gardens, wanted to know if we had far to go. We did not, for at a crossroads we turned left on Loosley Hill and, using pavement now, inched up our last gradient. At the top, with a windmill just behind, we found The Whip Inn, and here, at 4:30, our walk came to an end.
I was happy to see that the pub was open and we sat down for a celebratory half lager apiece. While she was ordering Tosh wanted to know if I had called for a cab yet. “This nagging almost makes me feel as though I were still married, Tosh,” I replied. In the event I succeeded in getting a good response from the second number I used and we had only a short time to wait. The pub featured two Jack Russells who were very interested in our boots and another one of those lovely nubile barmaids that country pubs specialize in. Each of us paid a visit to the loos and soon thereafter a chap poked his nose into the pub to fetch us for the short ride into Princes Risborough.
This town, also much visited on my rambling adventures, was shortly to hold a Walking Festival. I told Tosh that, fortuitously, we would have a train at 5:06 and I even had time to visit the office of Village Cars in order to pick up a card against our eventual return to this spot. The train was on time, the cutting did not collapse on our head, and, after passing very close to the new Wembley Stadium on a ride of some 45 minutes, we reached Marylebone. I had also called Georgie to advise her on my arrival and thus I rode only as far as Warwick Avenue and fetched Fritz soon thereafter. I was home by 6:30, my sore legs certainly having received their pre-Wales workout – and then some.
To continue with our next stage you need: