Weather forecasts suggested that last weekend might herald the end of summer and we headed off to spend two days hiking in South Shropshire.

While not a mountainous environment South Shropshire’s undulating hills can make for wonderful long day hikes which can clock up quite impressive amounts of total ascent. There are heather bound uplands to cross, bracken-strewn climbs to hack through and wonderful vistas of surrounding hills and patchwork quilts of lower lying fields. Dropping down from the hills you walk through lush green woodland and across fields where farming seems to be more of a local tradition and less of an agri-business.

Our two day hike started and ended at Church Stretton with our target being the border town of Bishops Castle, the one town in this area that Kate hadn’t visited. The first part of our route took us up and over the Long Mynd and down to Rattlinghope (pronounced Rachup) and the Darney Dale. For my money this Welsh  border country offers some of the finest landscape in England. Look one way and you might be presented with an almost idealised view of the English Countryside. Look another and the mystical sight of the Welsh Marches comes into full focus. You are never far from Wales here. Local accents are often tinged with the singing sounds of the black country, but others have a definite Welsh ring to them. The Long Mynd itself gets its name from the welsh for hill — Mynd. On the other side of Church Stretton is Caer Caradoc, which certainly sounds anything but English.

At Bridges we stopped at the Horseshoe in. This was once a fine pub in a fine location, perched above the confluence of five small streams. Sadly it is not what is was. The current owner is not into being walker friendly. By all means buy a pint of his (to be fair well kept) ale but don’t expect to be able to eat you own sandwiches; you will be chased away with a flea in your ear. To deal with the smoking ban the landlord has erected a horrible wooden shelter at the front which completely wrecks the front view of the pub. A small garden has been added at the side of the pub but this hardly makes up for the loss of the frontage. I guess business is business though and I presume the pub knows who its clientele is. But if you’re planning a day’s walking around a fine country pub you’d be better advised to aim for Wentnor a little further to the South.

From Bridges we headed out in a westerly direction, crossing hills that may have been small on size but big on views. Route finding should have been simple but — as so often happens — we suddenly came on an area where footpath signs mysteriously vanished, where stiles were absent and where gates were locked. And this was when we were walking a right of way! I’m always mystified by farmers and landowners that deal with walkers and public rights of way in this manner. Do this and the one thing I can guarantee is that hundred of lost walkers a year will trample over your obviously precious land. Surely it would be better for all concerned to spend a little time on signage!

Things really became confusing at Birchope (SO 372 957). The path should have gone West but there were few way markings. Opposite a cottage a stile lead to a clear path through a bracken strewn hillside. This looked like a path. Except it wasn’t one. we ended up on high ground surrounded by barbed wire with no way out. Whoever owned this piece of land had not realised that a stile in should equate to a stile out. So, we worked our way through a barbed wire fence as best we could.

Free of our barbed enclose we made our way back towards the Shropshire Way as it crossed the Linley Hills. The Shropshire Way is notable not only because it meanders its way through wonderful landscape  but because it is now a very mature trail. One minute you are striding along wide, well tended grass routes and the next you are walking along avenues of mature and generous trees, their canopy providing welcome shelter in the warmth of summer.

As our route descended we made our way towards Bishops Castle along quiet country lanes and through quiet woodland paths. Our campsite was smack bang on the Shropshire Way and was something of a find.

Foxholes Camp site is not signposted on OS maps but you will find it at SO 324 897. It is a fabulous place. The spacious camping field sits on top of a small hill with wonderful views on each side and there are other fields for touring caravans The site has great facilities, is well designed and well maintained and relying a lot of solar power for heating. The farmhouse features wet rooms for cyclists and walkers and pretty much has everything you are looking for from a campsite. Bishops Castle village is just 5 minutes walk away on the Shropshire Way.

We awoke on the second day to rain. By the time we’d taken breakfast in Bishops Castle it was about 11.00 am and after half an hour or so the sun began to reassert itself. We took paths leading East out of the town, crossing across hills and through woodland until we reached the little lanes that ran to Plowden. The sun flickered through whispy, high, cloud cover but the air was fresher and the humidity of Saturday had been brushed aside. The weather was defiantly on the change. As we climbed from Plowden up onto the Mynd ridge we were battered by the wind, but it was one of those winds that was exhilarating rather than worrying.

In many ways the weekend had presented us with the very best of walking weathers. Yet we walked alone for the most part. We descended from the ridge by way of Minton Hill, one of the quieter routes off the Mynd. From Minton we strolled lazily along lonely lanes the climate warmer and wind free down low.

We finished with a drink at the Ragleth Arms in Little Stretton, a place that is far more at home with its place and history than its cousin at Bridges. Our train home arrived at five and we were home a little after seven.

It was only a weekend, and it was an easy journey to get there. But it was still a fine two days of fun and adventure.

The Black Country of the West Midlands was not only the cradle of the industrial revolution. It was the manufacturing powerhouse of Great Britain and its Empire. The early canals of James Brindley served the early mass manufacturing of Hockley Port and the subsequent ‘mainline’ canal linked up the Potteries of Staffordshire, the furnaces of Wolverhampton and Bilston, the small workshops of Dudley and the industrial commerce of Birmingham.

It was not a pretty place but a place of practicality, hard work and hard lives. Echoes of this not too distance past can be found in the traits of local West Midlanders to this day. Black was the colour of the sky as the furnaces belched out their emissions into the sky. Locals will quickly tell you the story of Queen Victoria insisting that the blinds of carriages be drawn while the Royal Train passed through. The area featured in Charles Dickens’ 1841 novel The Old Curiosity Shop in which he described how factories “… poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air”. An American Consul described the area’s furnaces making the sky “black by day and red by night”.

For local a walkers of all types the walk along the mainline canal is a popular one, not least because of a tradition of raising money for charity by stopping at every pub along the way!  When I first walked this stretch the mainline was still an industrial powerhouse. It all changed very quickly with the collapse of manufacturing in the early 80s. The steel works were raised to the ground and many of the manufacturing plants closed. The chemical works south of Wolverhampton have now long since gone.

Today many of these sites remain empty and desolate. Some industry clings on but those sites that have been developed are likely to feature housing, distribution of light industrial units. But the main changes are environmental.

The worst of the Thatcher years saw the establishment of a number of temporary employment programmes that were well used by local authorities and local environmental groups. Sites were grassed over. Bends in canals were planted with reeds to provide a welcome habitat for water life. Canal towpaths became green walking corridors and cycle tracks. Thirty years later this new environment has become thoroughly established and a walk along the ‘mainline’ is now a very different experience.

Weekend fisherman still escape here from the responsibilities of the family home and older lads are still taken out and inducted in a world where you can sit all day and never catch a bite. But these days they are whiling away the hours in an almost rural habitat and their watery companions are more likely to be geese, ducklings, moorhens and Coots than shopping trollies and discarded tyres.

Reminders of the past are ever-present though. Great expanses of cleared land remain presumably too contaminated to be used quickly. Here only the buddleja  thrives. You will come across horsers — or ‘hoses’ grazing on patches of land cheek-by-jowel with built-up estates.

But you can also walk for miles withouth seeing any modern development at all. True, the sound of roads is never far away but then again this is also a feature of the North Downs Way!

For great stretches the canal reminds me of a waterside walk in Warwickshire or Staffordshire. And in what seems like a time traveller’s trick small settlements around bridges now reveal themselves in a form that must be very close to what they would have ben when first constructed.

A walker is never bored on this walk. There are fellow walkers and cyclists to chat to and fisherman to compare notes with. There are canal travellers — leisure and business — to greet, and that bird life to admire.

This canal route has been here throughout all modern times. But it is scarcely recognisable from the route I took as a young lad.

Ouch !!!

Most days when I go walking I have a plan. And usually the plan works out OK. But not always.

Yesterday saw me getting up at 6.00 am to have a good crack at a long walk. Things began to become unravelled when I got to Shrewsbury Bus Station. A little notice said that buses might be running late because of road works. But they could have told me that this might mean 50 minutes late!

Still, I was walking on Wenlock Edge by just after 10.00. The edge is a long ridge that runs from Ironbridge to Craven Arms in South South Shropshire. It is a historical place. Man has inhabited this ridge for thousands of years, and I like the notion that I’m walking through time. Wenlock is also an important place in geological terms and if you’re ever in Craven arms then it is well worth visiting the Secret Hills Centre.

Once the climb has been made up to the ridge this is a straightforward walk. The first section is through a delightful mixed woodland of oak, beech and some native pines. This is no forestry reserve in the Welsh manner but a wood that reminds me of Scottish Caledonian forest. I’ve walked this path many times before but I don’t think I’ve ever met another walker. I was on my own again yesterday until I came to the very last section of the walk.

Most of the walk was spent in rain, not particularly heavy but persistent. But the weather was warm enough to allow me to ignore my waterproof jacket, for the most part anyway.

The plan was to nip off the Edge and walk towards the hills of Church Stretton. I realised that I seldom walk these hills in high summer. As a result there seemed to be much more foliage everywhere than I remember, so much so that I overshot my exit by some way.

Sitting down and eating my pie (Turner style) I pondered whether to turn back or not. I’m not good at turning back and so decided just to continue to walk along the rest of the ridge. This is a long walk of about 19 miles but it is reasonably flat most of the way (once you are on the ridge).

I made good time. I entered the last section. Here the path is a narrow one cutting its way through dense woodland. A waymarked track heads off downhill but the intrepid walker can continue in a very quiet section of walk before dropping down on a muddy estate track to join the waymarked route at the road. Off I headed. Not thinking about summer. Soon I was trapped in a mass of overgrown brambles and nettles with no easy way out. Nothing for it to plough on. Perhaps it was not such a good idea to wear shorts!

I cut a slightly weird (or weirder than usual) figure as I made my way to Craven Arms train station.  My Tilly hat was all over the place and my legs smeared with rather impressive amounts of blood! At the train station the local young women kept their distance!

The train was late. Eventually it came and dropped me in Shrewsbury. The connecting train to Birmingham was late. I was home late, too late to take in the planned 3D version of Toy Story3 at the local IMAX.

On the train from Craven Arms a bunch of walkers got on at Church Stretton. Through the corner of my eye I thought I recognised on. It was Challenger Sam Hackett. He moved through the carriage to quickly to be caught. Perhaps, If I’d been on the Mynd we’d have bumped into each other. It’s a small world!

I got home to shower and dace around in agony from the cuts on my legs. They were as sensitive again this morning!

So, in summer, think of the brambles!

Nothing went to plan. It was very painful in places. But it was still a great day out!

 

This very moving grave sits at the base of Ragleth Hill, not in a grave yard but alone under woodland trees. I’ve always found this to be quite moving. Craig bullock was a carpenter, “tragically killed” on 4th October 2002 at the age of 30.

The memorial stone features this poem which may have been written specially — I can’t find any reference to it on the net. If you know it, then let me know.

 

Country Blood

I am of the countryside

Carved out of the oaktree bark

And I am of the wild free wind

That bears the soaring lark.

Part of the upturned earth am I,

One with the cornfield sea,

And I exist in the quet green hill

And it exists in me.

 

Here all the dainty weeds are mine

That blows along the way,

And all the little resting things

Whose heart beat for a day.

My peace is where the velvet dew

Sleeps under hanging mists;

Where the cavernous forest deeps and dims

My secret soul exists.

 

A moving spot. Look carefully and you can see a can of Strongbow as part of the memorial!

Sometimes an urban walk is not that dissimilar from a rural walk. The map may have said Kew Bridge to Chelsea Wharf  but this 16 kilometres of so was far from urban.

I walked past riverside villages, through tree-lined paths which offered only a view of water, down single-lane tracks lined with summer heavy hedgerow and no pavements. Walkers were out, some ramblers and a groups of wonderful, older, ladies out to stretch their legs and have a good laugh. They posed happily for a photo.

Strand on the Green

Cracking day out

Along another stretch of hedgerow line path a met an American guy foraging for blackberries. He was on the water side of the bushes. His blackberries were monsters, wonderfully ripe and quite mouth watering to look at. He loaded the berries into the bag on the front of his bike. He was off to make a crumble or a blackberry tart.

Urban forager

Crossing Barnes Bridge I was stunned to here a cry from beneath me of ‘where the fuck does he think he’s going’. I looked around to se a pleasure cruiser in the middle of the river. Suddenly — and at great speed — three single skulls raced from under the bridge, taking evasive action to avoid the cruiser. The cruiser approached. The man on the PA system was describing Barnes and the celebrities that lived there. “You might remember Annika Rice” he said. His passengers all seemed to be Chinese or Japanese. I doubt they understood a word he said, let alone could remember the girl from the helicopter.

Evasive action

Crossing Barnes footbridge Barnes revealed itself as the kind of village that one might stroll into after a day on the North Downs Way. Or maybe the wrought iron work in the street’s balconies reminded me of a small seaside town, perhaps on the Thames estuary. Before the street’s rock world opulence was able to wash the dreams away I was back on a treelined path, this time a broad path that could have been in the middle on any forestry commission walk. There were no views of urban development, just the gentle flowing river and its banks revealed by the low tide. Groups of walkers were out for the day. Mountain bikers genteelly sauntered by. Joggers bounced past, some simply stretching the muscles and others working up a sweat as if their lives depended on it. A gorgeous looking young French woman was seemingly being put through her paces by a personal trainer. Several families out for a stroll checked directions to the nature reserves.

At several points I was able to climb down to the shore and quietly watch a wonderful display from herons and other water birds while cox-paced rowers glided by.

Every now and then a break in the trees and hedgerows revealed a gentle urban scene or rather was it one of a by-goine village? the most dominating buildings remained the churches and spires that must have guarded these banks for centuries. The sun was now out and shone through the shady green canopy, creating magical patterns that would have graced my precious South Shropshire hills.

Putney gradually revealed itself as yet another seaside town. I walked in past a cluster of boat houses and marine stores. The first buildings had that seaside feel about them. Pubs were opened up to the river frontage — settings that would have graced many a river or coastal setting.

But now it was time to indulge myself in urban life. I turned inland to the Lower Richmond Road and made my way to the best music pub in the UK, the Half Moon. With a pint of fine ale and a distinctively retro cheese ploughmans I settled down to read the newspapers. There is no doubt that the Half Moon is a music pub. every inch of wall space is taken up with signed photos of some musician hero of other. I sat in what used to be my favourite corner when I lived here many years ago. I munched my lunch in the company of Richard Thompson, T Bone Burnett, Mary Black, John Prine, Dennis Locorriere (from Dr. Hook), Georgie Fame, John Mayall and Maddy Prior Prior. I felt quite at home.

Inside the hallowed walls of the Half Moon

Crossing back over Putney Bridge the pace of life picked up a little and the air was slightly more edgy. Now I was walking alongside social housing rather than pads of millionaires. The new Imperial wharf developed moved things up market again. This is an extraordinary development which will probably suck up much local demand for a while yet. I’m not sure what to make of the design but the landscape. gardens and wild habitat along the path were welcome. There is still a lot of empty space here, fenced off spaces animated only by dramatic growth of buddleia. A mini Battersea power station. stood as ignored as its big brother across the water. the developers still have much to play with along this stretch of river.

There was no rural indulgence to be had now. On the other side of the river the old churches were still prominent but now they were cosseted with all manner of glass and steel constructions, the kind that would not find favour with a certain Prince.

Community picnic

Chelsea Harbour and Wharf are not what they once were and there was little to capture my photographic imagination. I turned North towards Gloucester Road tube. On Fulham Road I was almost kmocked over by a racing supercar with the number L 2. On the Old Brompton Road I was almost bagged by a Maseratti with no number plate at all, just a K — diplomatic corps I guess. It was time to get out quickly.

A great day of may unexpected experiences and encounters. The city retains its ability not only to surprise but to thrill in ways that are almost unimaginable.

A great day today, walking along the Thames from Kew Bridge to Chelsea Warf. For much of the journey it was like a country walk. It was part of my back rehabilitation – lots of road walking but of course no hills. I think a full trail report will follow.

Back to the hills soon!

What a lovely morning’s walk I had yesterday.

Over the last three weekends winter has tried hard to reclaim momentum but somehow the spring is too strong, even when fresh snow has fallen.

I headed out to the Long Mynd. I was at Church Stretton early. Few people were about. It was a glorious morning, one of those which sees everyone smiling and saying hello to each other. The Post Man in All Stretton stopped his van to say hello. My plan was to climb Caradoc and do a full circuit ending on Ragleth Hill. Ragleth and Caradoc may be minor hills but they have very steep bits. One look at Caradoc told me this might be a little beyond the worn tread of my Terrocs. Instead, I headed out for All Stretton and a climb up to the ridge that I knew would be bot wonderful and quiet. So it proved and I didn’t meet another soul until I got to the top of the ridge.

Climbing up from All Stretton

The climb was a little slower than planned. There was more slow lying on some of the precariously angled sheep tracks, but progress was gentle rather than risky.

On the ridge I met many walkers up from the Cardingmill Valley, all having a great time trudging along in their boots. All looking are me a little weirdly as they noticed the Terrocs. The sun shone even more strongly and the patchwork of fields and hills looked at its winter best.

Happy Ramblers

Both of my routes down would have been difficult with very sharp inclines. I took a quiet and more gentle slope, fine in its upper reaches but a little trickier lower down. I had forgotten that much of this walk was in the shade. Rocks slick with frozen ice had to be navigated with care. Walking back into Church Stretton it was almost impossible to envisage the scene up there.

A wonderful morning’s walk and another contribution towards Spring fitness. The calf muscles don’t ache this morning — progress is being made. Mind you, the work with the walking poles has left its mark on my shoulders and upper arms!

From now until May I plan to be out cycling or walking each weekend. Next weekend is a weekend off though. I shall be in Wembley watching the Villa boys destroy United.

“We’re the famous Aston Villa and we’re going to Wem-ber-ley …”

(I might get a chance to do some urban walking and photography though).

From the Ridge