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.)
