Category: Hertfordshire

Herts Embraced: a walk around Hertfordshire

The Herts Embraced walk begins in the morning.  The adventure is to walk the whole border of Hertfordshire clockwise, on the principles I have outlined before. It is daunting in the heat we have been having, but I am hopeful of cooler days.  I am counting on nothing though, and I am aware of being drained by the last week, when I was away in Germany, roasted under a hotter sun.  The last walk I did to re-open a multi-day route was in October, when the cooler weather was kinder, but the daylight was shorter.  This will be a new one, at a different scale and with longer days.

As before I am inviting donations to the Stroke Association (see below).

The walk starts early by Chorleywood Station, where Shire Lane marks the county border.  From there, I head north, up and across the Common, to the Chess and north through Bovingdon to Bourne End, following close to or on the county border.  From Bourne End the route (with the county border) heads west into the Chilterns and the Tring Salient, and I aim for Hastoe and the county top, which is at the county border a couple of hundred yards west of the village.

From there the mapped route runs north along the boundary, past Tring to Long Marston, but how far it will take me on the first day, I cannot tell – it depends on unexplored terrain and how much I still have left in me.  The next day, Friday, there will be more to be done (although I have been reminded of certain civic duties to be performed that might curtail my walk.)

This is not a route to be cleared in a few days but over a series of sequential expeditions which I want to complete this summer.  The idea is to test the route, verify that it can be done and record and circumvent problem stretches. Ultimately it will provide a challenge route for others – the Hertfordshire Border Walk – and a series of day-walks around our county.

Finally – the route is around the real county, the Hertfordshire, not the local government area which borrows its name.  I may be a councillor, trying to ensure sound local government, but I am not beholden to local government and I recognise that home is a place, not a bureaucracy.  I am doing this to embrace a county, not to find the edge of bureaucratic interference.

The Stroke Association

Please donate to the Stroke Association: click here.

The draft route

(See also the Hertfordshire Border Walk project page.)

Maps

The route spreads over a wide are and a series of maps is needed to complete it.  It might be done with standard Landranger maps, though the additional detail of an Explorer map can be very helpful.

In the Explorer, 1:50 000 series:

In the Landranger, 1:25 000 series:

 

 

See the country – while the country lasts

Is there anything more depressing than sitting in a planning meeting, as I am now, thinking about a planned country walk, then seeing the schematics displayed for concreting over it?  Well, yes – doing the walk and watching the diggers doing their work. Yet it is coming, inevitably, and here I sit, helpless.

There are wild places aplenty still – go and see them, and quickly.

In Lancashire, one brave and hardy soul is preparing to walk around the whole county, seeing both the heavily industrialised lands, swallowed forever by the works of man, but also the wild fells where a man may stand and look for mile upon mile on anywhen moorland forgetting which century he is in.

Old Shire Lane, south of Chorleywood
Old Shire Lane, south of Chorleywood

I am preparing a new walk, ambitious in its way, to see the edges of Hertfordshire, familiar and unfamiliar. I will get out there to convince myself that this is still a pretty county, with its woods, its meadows and rivers and its broad fields, peeping through in places behind cruel concrete, alas.  Still, I have walked the suburban wild before, and there must be more that remains green than the urbanised creep, still?

I have just looked up to see a familiar path on my route dotted along the southern boundary of a development site. I sigh inwardly, powerless.

I must hurry, and see the county, while the county lasts.

Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein

It is barely above zero in Crianlarich, with freezing fog descending and the hillsides will wake whitened.  So it is just as well that we are in Croxley Green.

Path up to the Green
Path up to the Green

A farewell to the old year, by walking the old paths:  the Croxley Green Boundary Walk, which is a lovely, unchallenging walk, just right for recovering from a flu-filled Christmas season.  The whole path is six and a half miles all around the parish boundaries.

There is a lot of variety around a village of no great size, but then it is not an average village.  It is a Metro-Land place but at the very edge, which bumps roughly into Hertfordshire’s big town at one end but ebbs away into the Chiltern farmland at the other, allowing a green ring to be drawn around the parish, on its hill between the Gade Valley to the Chess.  It has woods, muddy paths, the canal, fields and farms, and of course the Green.  The a nice, hot supper and a farewell to the year.

It has been a year of surprises, of things done and things left undone, but all that is done with now as we open new challenges.

I finished on an old, familiar path, but in the New Year there are new projects.  Watch this space.

The River Chess
The River Chess