Month: September 2018

5:30 pm, High Barnet Station.

The border path through Mimmshall Woods is a delight, ended too soon.  At this point I had almost to double-back on myself to follow the border as it describes a deep hook into the body of neighbouring Middlesex.

South-west, across the M25, then south to the little village of Ridge.  Out of Ridge, I could see the church in High Barnet across the valley, but it was still two hours’ trudging.  There is a danger after a while of concentrating on the path and not appreciating the wild beauty about it.  How much I must have missed.

Two seriously invisible, ploughed-up paths here:  a compass bearing was needed each time.  Soon, it crossed back across the A1. Oh.  (Memo to the Department of Transport – when you provided a helpful footbridge to carry a path over a trunk road, put it where the path is, not quarter of a mile up the road.)

Suddenly the farms turned to stables, and at once to the outermost suburb, Arkley.  Thereafter roads led into Chipping Barnet, or High Barnet (which are alternative names for the same place, if marked separately on the OS map).  The station is High Barnet:  the outermost of the Tube network.

See: Hertfordshire Border Walk

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1:30 pm: Border at North Mymms, having lunch.

Just before 9 o’clock starting – too late at the end of September. I knew I had to just go quickly and try to avoid diversions. South through the Lee Valley park for a mile, waved at Essex; waved at Middlesex across the M25, cut west straight through the bottom of Cheshunt and out into what had been the Theobalds Estate.

The great house is gone, alas, the King’s favourite house was demolished by the rebel parliament after the regicide.  Its remains are in what is now a public park, but much of the wider estate is still there, its name appearing in every farm and cottage for miles. Here the route is mainly on old estate roads and bridleways.

Much of this part of Hertfordshire was in, or still is in, the great landed estates, and I will look them up when I get home.

An advantage of heading west after so long is that I can take photographs without the sun glaring in  the lens, at least until the later afternoon.  I find I am following too a part of the Hertfordshire Way for some of this route, and earlier I was on a “Chain Walk”; these are a series of linked circular walks forming a chain across the east of Hertfordshire from south to north.  I met one near Royston too, I think.

Out to Cuffley, Northaw and through little paths, and fetching a compass around the north of Potters Bar – that town must not be entered: it is Middlesex.  I succeeded, and have been rewarded by a delightful path along the actual county border:  just over the A1(M), that is the path across which I am sprawling now, feet in Middlesex, head and heart in Hertfordshire.

See: Hertfordshire Border Walk

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Cheshunt, 5:30 pm.

My first destination of the afternoon after crossing the meadow was the Rye Meads Sewage Works, which announced their presence from afar off and did not fill me with hope. The works fill the corner between the River Stort and the River Lea (or Lee, there is no fixed spelling) which is why I headed further in, to the New River.  Incongruously though, after what felt like a mile of sewage-estate, I came across the remains of a gorgeous late-mediæval house – Rye House – famous for the Rye House Plot of 1683, and now just a gatehouse, in stark contrast to the modernity about it.

The New River is a remarkable achievement, running from the springs at Amwell it is a real river, in that it flows, but wholly man-made, created to take water to London, and now a good, green route south for me.  I was not looking forward to the afternoon’s walk as the map shows a belt of continuous urban development all the way south to join that of Middlesex, but in the event the New River Path leads straight through to provide a good path and a pleasant one. My goodness, some of the houses leading down to the riverbank!

I eventually turned off the path at Wormely and cut through to the River Lee (or Lea) and a path running south down its valley. Oh Lea (or Lee), what have they done to you? Where once there was a river, centuries of excavation and industry have left lakes and a canal and odd channels, and somewhere in among it must be the old course of the old River Lee (or Lea).  I followed it down and after a few false turns eventually found Cheshunt station, but took the opportunity to dash into the woods on occasion to see the lakes and channels.

I looked down the canalised River Lea (etc) and remembered that just a little to the south is the spot at the corner of Middlesex where I finished the Middlesex Greenway last year.  Well, it was time to go to the station to come home (by way of The Maltsters), but next time I will step another mile south and then say farewell to the border with Essex and turn west at long last.

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What a contrast from other days.  I started in Bishop’s Stortford just before 8:30 am and set off at once down the River Stort, a canalised version of it at least.  It seemed a bit of a roundabout way that I got to Sawbridgeworth at last, by riverside, meadow, road an river again, and a ploughed path was annoying. Pretty place.

Then south of Sawbridgeworth I followed the Harcamlow Way – as weird a waymarked route as you can imagine, if not as weird as mine, but here perfectly practical and logical; down to the river and along the towpath, which I followed (on the Hertfordshire side almost all the way) for several miles, variously a silent river and a busy one, never an ugly one, until Roydon. I have just had my lunch in a field north of that village and am about to set forth for the afternoon’s endeavours.

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7:30; Bishop’s Stortford

I had the satisfaction of knowing that Brent Pelham was the last village on the route before Bishop’s Stortford.  That does not avoid the fact that it is a cussed long way.  It was also the last place marked with a pub on the route.

Past the church in the village (I am photographing the churches as I go, by the way I headed east to find a path running along the county border itself.  I am not sure that all the paths I used are legitimate:  they are shown as public paths on some maps but not others, and the broken Herts CC signpost was, well, broken.  Emerging then at the border, I found the path, and for the next ill-signposted mile and a half, I walked along the border.  Eventually, it emerges at a concrete drive leading to a massive electric sub-station, and on the gate of that most artificial, monument to the triumph of utilitarian modernity there was a white post and signs: ‘Essex’ to the left and ‘Hertfordshire’ to the right.

Unable to walk through the middle of a massive pile of electricity, humming continually, I followed the paths around it.

There were more diverted paths, but nothing calamitous, until at Patmore Heath I met the Hertfordshire Way again.  It did not quite ask me where I had been all day, but I joined it for the rest of the journey.  It was most well signposted and almost all the paths were clear.

I think it was about 7 pm that my vision started to go blurry.  By that time I was in Bishop’s Stortford, if still on beaten-earth tracks overhung with trees.  Soon there….

(I can recommend Zizzis on a Sunday night, as the only place still serving food.)

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1:30 pm; Brent Pelham

I chose to take my edgy way – closer to the utter bounds of the county than the Hertfordshire Way, which took me from Royston out along the Icknield Way (a path is provided off the main road) until finally at an isolated far within shouting distance of the Essex frontier I finally turned south away from the Icknield Way for the last time and away from the Cambridgeshire border, to run instead beside that of Essex, which I have followed for the rest of the day.

It was a climb into the hills, but a gentle one – I hardly noticed the climb, though to my east was Langley, where I once sought out the highest point in Essex.  Then to Barley and on to Nuthamstead, where I joined the Hertfordshire Way for a mile or two.  (Complex paths on the very fold in the map, but a pause and a good compass found the way.

Few people along the way – a solitary dog-walker, three retired folk walking the Way, and the Cambridge Hash House Harriers out for a run.

Eventually, through fields and silent woods to Brent Pelham.  It was a weird, unearthly but back-of-the-memory sound that greeted me, first a series of yelps, then many, and then a baying repeated and repeated – the foxhounds were giving tongue.

To the Black Horse (where there was no mobile reception so I did not ask about Wifi for posting this), and lunch.

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