June 15, 2003: Wotton-under-Edge to Old Sodbury
The church at Alderley
The smoke alarm was still bleating when I got up on a sunny Sunday for day three of our walk. I shaved and read some of my New Yorker and New York Review of Books articles and then I went down to join the others for breakfast at 8:30 – the time we had dutifully checked on our registration form. The galumphing waitress brought us a pot of coffee but half an hour passed and there seemed to be no interest in taking our breakfast orders. Harold then undertook an expedition into the kitchen itself, where three members of staff were just sitting around, and thereafter a little more progress was made. Our waitress arrived at one point to announce, “We don’t got no ham,” a reference to our sandwich orders. Harold and I switched to beef and we ate our eggs contentedly.
I was first down with my pack at about 9:30, just as an elderly gentleman in a blue scenicruiser, accompanied by a little girl, arrived from Compass Holidays to ferry our bags forward – there would be no worries on this point today – though I did have to penetrate the upper levels of our hotel in order to hurry the Lees along with their bags. They had tipped the waitress and she had rushed out to get us a fourth cup of yoghurt to go with our lunches. Of course our hotel had no plastic spoons with which to eat these comestibles, so, underway at last at 9:50, we stopped at a newsagent on the high street and purchased some spoons and some cold drinks. I bought a plastic bottle of Evian that served thereafter as a second canteen.
Our route led us through parts of the town we had not seen yet, past a charming almshouse, down back alleys and into the churchyard. Bells were doing their Sunday best and some little girls were using this background noise to shout out some schoolyard chant that had nothing of the sacred about it. We used a tarmaced path to head east, passing the hamlet of Holywell and continuing beside a lovely stream all the way to the hamlet of Combe. Here we turned right on a road, and I began to look for our first woodland ascent. A chap standing in his driveway asked us if we were looking for the Cotswold Way but Tosh, noting I had already spotted our route, said, “We don’t need any help; this is our navigator.”
So began the first of the day’s climbs, up Blackquarries Hill. Burton says that near the top zigzags ease the angle of ascent, but there was only one zag, as far as I could tell, a left turn that brought us up to a quiet road, where we continued moving in an easterly direction. Here there was easier walking, though we paused once in some roadside shade – with Margie way out in front of the rest of us here. There was very little traffic. Our next turn-off came in sharply behind us (we should have taken an unofficial short cut to reach it) and we were soon on a hilltop trackway, another long barrow on our left – and great views to the west on our right.
We left the trackway to continue around the end of a promontory – where we had our final views of Wotton, far below us now, and then used some steps to rejoin the trackway as it entered woodland once again. Soon we were at the head of a sunken lane that descended steeply in a narrow rocky and sandy chasm that would have been a real ordeal in wet weather – hart’s tongue fern flourished here. At the bottom we came back into the sunlight near Elmtree farmstead and followed field paths – helped along by arrows on telegraph polls. Near a mill stream a man was training his dog in voice commands delivered at ever greater distance and volume.
We reached an ascending track and climbed up to the delightful village of Alderley (I was singing “On the Road to Alderley,” much to Marge’s discomfort) and while we were using a back road to reach the church and an Elizabethan-era school building it was decided to look for a shady place for a rest.
A group of American walkers (the Yanks seemed to predominate among genuine CW walkers encountered on this trip) were just vacating a grassy spot outside the churchyard and they were happy to yield this place to us. They hailed from Fresno, a middle-aged couple and their 26 year-old daughter – who was a police dispatcher. The latter had a hiking staff and the mother two, though why it was necessary to use such sticks on a route with footing as comfortable as the CW (and with no packs on their backs either) I do not know.
It was noon. I used the opportunity of this little rest to put on some Factor 25. This was just as well because the trackway that next took us on our southeasterly journey was often open to the bright sun. We paralleled a waterway that had once provided power for a number of mills, some of which we encountered as we turned right and reached a roadway that also continued in the same direction along the valley floor. Fishing parties were lined up around some of the ponds created by the damming of this stream.
Not surprisingly Tosh was agitating for lunch but I wanted to get off the road and into some woods, ones that we could already see rising above us on our right. After some delightful cottages we found a trackway that climbed up steeply on the right and I sent Tosh ahead to scout out a good lunch spot. We had come exactly five and three quarter miles when we pulled up in a comfortable grassy patch beside our track and tucked into our sarnies. The raspberry yoghurt, though no longer cold, was quite refreshing.
Approaching the Somerset Monument
After lunch we continued uphill, with the gradients gradually easing off, leaving the comforts of woodland for a march across fields and around a barn to reach the road up to the Somerset Monument – another one of those hilltop beacons, here celebrating one of Wellington’s generals at Waterloo. We didn’t linger for long but continued along the busy roadway until we reached a track known as Bath Lane. Here I told my troops that, as it was just 2:30, we had a good chance of finding an open pub in the off-route village of Hawkesbury Upton. Everyone seemed amendable so we continued on our roadway for about ten minutes (passing signs advertising a charity polo match featuring HRH Prince Charles) and thus located the Beaufort Arms, which seemed to be open all day.
Our party at the Beaufort Arms, Hawkesbury Upton
The sleepy-eyed proprietor in shorts seemed quite interested in our walk and when he discovered that we were heading for the Dog Inn in Old Sodbury he said that he had once made himself unpopular there by referring to their “dog food.” He was chalking up his evening specials and claimed that his prices were much more reasonable than the Dog’s as well. He admitted to a cock-up on the catering front, having peeled far too many spuds at dawn, and the upshot was that he ordered one of his barmen to place on our table a wonderful mountain of warm roasted potatoes, which would otherwise have to be thrown away. We munched on a few of these and the barman came and got some for his family – including his dog.
Everyone had instructions on how we could use shortcuts to get back to Bath Lane – including a chap at the cricket pavilion, where a game was in progress. Soon we were back on route, the breezes at the higher elevation helping to take the sting out of the afternoon sun. After a mile or so we were offered a field path that paralleled Highfield Lane but it was increasingly overgrown and Tosh was soon complaining, “We don’t want to take this; can we use the road?” I saw no problem with this and soon located the spot where we would have to return to the trail to begin a descent on field and woodland paths down to Horton Court – whose church tower we could see for some distance. It was now a delightful late afternoon.
We headed south on a road and entered Horton village where a dogleg to the right allowed us to continue forward on field paths to the village of Little Sodbury. Another dogleg to the right allowed us to continue our southerly progress on a road past the church, over a stream and onto a steeply rising path – our last uphill for the day – as we climbed to the grassy ramparts of another hill fort. We had to battle through nettles on the last stretch of this ascent; nettles were everywhere on this trip and, in shorts, we often had to make a rather sinuous progress to avoid them.
We had a rest on the grass, no longer bothered by the heat of the sun, and then continued over the fort site to begin our descent. This was a rather overgrown path and one consequence was that we missed a turnoff. When we got to the bottom of our track I was surprised to find a road and my compass confirmed that it was heading west (we needed to be heading south). There was nothing to do but go back up our track and look again for our proper turnoff (the others had spotted this, it turned out, but none of them had shown the enterprise needed to battle through the foliage to see if there was a CW badge on the stile).
Once across this stile the way was clear and we continued south along a field edge (two old gents passed us going in the opposite direction) and, after walking through someone’s back yard, we emerged at the church of Old Sodbury itself. Our route put us through its churchyard and then down the hill on more field paths. We emerged at last on tarmac and there, across the A432, was the Dog Inn. We had walked thirteen miles and it was 6:15.
Our hosts, John and Joan Harris, were all dressed up and on their way to a party, she pretty in pink (the party’s theme). They had decided to put us in a cottage (among several they controlled) diagonally across from the pub, so we re-crossed the busy highway and were given a tour of a most unusual accommodation. It seemed to be partly occupied by the proprietors and had a number of bedrooms upstairs (none en suite), and a communal bathroom – with an additional bathroom, a shower room, a kitchen, a dining room and a sitting room downstairs. Laundry seemed to be everywhere. Our bags were on the landing so we chose rooms and began our turns in the showers, returning to the pub itself shortly before 8:00. The place seemed crowded and warm and we changed tables several times before finding one we liked This was next to some nice black people from nearby Bristol, who quizzed us about our walk. I went outside to use the mobile for my nightly call to Dorothy.
I had a double Jack Daniels and we studied the extensive menu. (It’s kiddy offerings, under the heading of “Puppy Food,” offered such treats as “Spaniel Spaghetti,” “Dachshund Sausage & Chips,” and “Lassie Lasagna.” When we actually went to place our own orders we were horrified to discover that we would have to wait an hour and a half for our meals!
Time passed rather slowly – with Tosh spending some of it talking to the Fresno trio – and we listened eagerly to all the numbers that were being called by the waitresses. At the table next to ours seven burly tattooed giants were hunkering down for their food and we soon got to know them as well for they formed a team for a Quiz Night competition – which we had stumbled into. I participated in this as well, with Tosh providing three answers in the forty-question test. I did quite poorly on British pop scene questions but much better in other categories. I won’t repeat any of the questions but some of my correct answers were Will Smith, Gerald Ford, Ghostbusters, Yellow Submarine, and Indian Ocean. After the barman had read all the questions we traded answer sheets with our neighbors. I got 47 points and they got 54 and they were quite amused when I pretended to deduct points for spelling. Neither of our teams triumphed and I never found out what the prize was. In the meantime our food had finally arrived (I had prawn curry, Marge chicken curry and the Lees ate steaks). I also drank another pint of lager.
It was about 10:30 (way past our bedtime) when we returned to our cottage – everything unlocked in this village still – and went to bed. Once again I had no trouble falling asleep.
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