I have reached Uxbridge town centre in time for a lunch stop (12:20). (Thanks to Costa for having wifi. Good coffee and muffins too.)
It was a mixed morning all along the lonely western edge of the county: up across the scoured moor (pouring with rain) between the great reservoirs and through the undeveloped, threatened places around Heathrow; then along the boundary fence of the monstrous airport itself. It is funny to think this was once a hamlet of a few houses called “Heath Row”, and that the corridor in heart of the airport still follows the hamlet’s main lane.
Then the route led me through Harmondsworth, a village which the airport’s owners want to demolish to expand their shop. I expect it is revenge for being forced to sell Gatwick by the monopolies commission. I passed the mediæval church and just out of sight of the mediæval Great Barn (“the Cathedral of Middlesex”), along an ancient footpath, all under threat. Then north of the doomed community I reached the M4 – there is a footbridge across it – to West Drayton, and immediately entered the edge of an unbroken metropolitan sprawl which reaches from here to Essex.
It looks unpromising to the east, and the tearing motorway concrete bodes ill, but in fact there are big green spaces there; the Middlesex meadows fighting against blind, bland urbanity even on the track of the road; sports fields and the lands still free around Heston, and the magnificent Osterley Park, and if Heston is now known for a concrete service station selling plastic-wrapped food, it was once a village famed for cherry-topped buns celebrated even beyond the county. I shall indulge in more fruit buns as I go, in their honour.
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Staines: a clean start on the bridge over the Thames, the southern border of Middlesex. Dawn. Dark. Just stopped raining blue sky.
(Already tired too: I got only a few hours’ sleep last night as it was a the Chairman’s charity quiz night. Still, at least our team came respectably above the middle of the board.)
Late autumn may be the worst time of the year for a day-long walk as the daylight is short, but on the other hand autumn is the loveliest time of the year for the colour and smells of the dim lit dawn and dusk. As long as I do not slip on leaves and plunge into the chill canals which I will be passing soon, nor get stuck fast in deep sloughs of mud, I should be all right.
There should be a “Middlesex” sign on this bridge. Can the townsfolk push for that? This is not some anonymous suburb, but Staines, the ancient bridging point, ad Pontem, gateway to the Capital County.
The first step though is north, along Bridge Street, then to try to find the way along the Wraysbury River. It is a bit disconcerting that I might get lost after just 200 yards. The brook though should take me onto Staines Moor and northwards.
Let’s go.
Please donate to the Stroke Association: click here.
Endless rows of identical semi-detached houses on roads laid down by compass and set-square built for the station – get up, get the train out, work, get the train home, sleep. The Victorians hated the new suburbs their industry created: the “Dark Suburbs”, a metaphor for a land separated from culture doomed to ignorance; but then those left in the towns would say that. What were these new, amorphous neighbourhoods obliterating the green fields? No seats of learning, no theatres, no ancient churches – all the necessities of civilisation – and only the means to get out.
That is not true though, is it? The rivers are still there, and the little countryside brooks, and village greens, if hemmed in by habitation, and the churches and the theatres which have sprung up. The pretty, well-tended park is not a gift of municipal benevolence, but a reserve surviving from what was always there. The foxes that run though the end of the garden did not come in from the countryside: it was the town which came into their countryside.
Create your walk through the suburban countryside: this is what the Middlesex Greenway is about, the walk which I will be reopening at the weekend, and there is room for many more explorations to find the suburban wild places.
The suburbs everywhere took a pattern from the planned development of “Metro-Land“, where the ideal was rus in urbe: the countryside in the town, to each house a preserved plot of meadow as its garden; and between the houses the countryside remains. Of those footpaths that strung the old villages together, many remain, but you have to go to have a look. If you are missing all this, you are missing the very point of the suburbs.
Switch off Googlemaps and satnavs and whatever: they are only interested in drivers and roads. Step into the open and breathe, and find those little paths that were here long before the encroaching suburb. Locked in a charging steel box you go from town to town, but a good map, a paper, Ordnance Survey map, shows the actual landscape, deep in the conurbations.
Even in unrelenting streetscape, there is variety and detail to be found on foot that a driver misses, and yes you can take joy in the presence of your fellow man, in all his quirky variety. Those once identical houses are not identical any more, after generations of individualisation. The bland conformity is found in cheap, concrete council estates – a pile of bricks, a slab of concrete, a square of scrub grass behind a two-foot plastic-coated chain-link fence – but even they have not blunted the human spirit and those who have bought their houses have shown that they can be made beautiful.
This is what the Middlesex Greenway explores in the most suburbanised county of them all; Middlesex. It finds the green western edge of the county by rivers and farms, but then plunges into the suburbs, finding the parks, the paths by hidden country streams, even farms in the conurbation, and many forgotten places. It then steps into the relentless streets but not to rush by, so they too can be appreciated in their variety, from the ground. There too are parks and pocket-parks known locally and there for you to walk. Eventually the Middlesex Greenway emerges by the River Lee, canalised for industry but where its banks are bursting with fragrant nature which will not submit to the slide-rule. All this is there to be found.
On Saturday 21 October 2017 I will be starting to walk the Middlesex Greenway, from Staines in the south-west to Enfield Lock in the north-east. Using Ordnance Survey’s on-line tools, I have calculated the distance at 45 miles, and how long it will take I cannot say, but I have set two weekends aside.
The intention is to re-open the route – to see that it is still walkable and if not then to do something about that, and to encourage others to walk the route or sections of the route, for health and, frankly, for the pure pleasure of it.
I am also looking to encourage donations to the Stroke Association: there is a link below for donations, and I will include a link on each post I make as I go along.
The route has not been walked in full, as far as I am aware, since Stephen Collins devised it and walked it 1990: he took two days, but then he was a keen and frequent hillwalker. I am also a keen hillwalker, but less frequent. I also have to make notes as I go and check that the path is still walkable. I have also possibly chosen a poor time of the year in terms of visibility: the daylight hours are short, though in all other respects an autumn walk is a sensual delight.
The Middlesex Greenway is, if it is still walkable, an ideal long-distance route for those of us in the suburbs: good hard work and running close to stations for getting there and getting home, while exploring lesser known parts of what we think are familiar places.
Actually, don’t just let me tell you: pull your boots on and explore it yourself .
I will post here as I go when I can, and I am told that it can also be followed on Twitter: @wildthing_uk
Ben Macdhui, otherwise written ‘Ben Macdui’, is the second highest mountain in the British Isles, exceeded only by Ben Nevis, and the highest of the Cairngorm Mountains. In the first part I described the first part of the climb, to the summit of Cairn Gorm. The two peaks are joined by a high ridge, but a fair bit of climbing lied ahead and several miles to reach Ben Macdhui.
To the west of Cairngorm is a plunging cliff in the tight horseshoe of the Coire an t-Sneachda. To the south the land soon drops into the long, deep corrie around Loch Avon. The route toward Ben Macdhui heads west to the cliff-edge. The clifftop, incidentally, marks the border of Inverness-shire with Banffshire.
Path along the Stob Coire an t-Sneachda
The path looks precarious from a distance, as it follows the edge of the sheer cliff. In a strong wind or hail it could be very hazardous (and the first time I climbed Cairn Gorm I was battered by pea-sized hailstones in a fifty-knot wind), but this time it was a fine walk, climbing higher, and alternately dipping, in just light wind and rain, which frequently lifted, and the path is far enough from the cliff-edge to be comfortable.
However, when there is snow, it is another matter. Snow can build up on the cliff, and form cornices, which is to say snow ridges overhanging the void, and with the path invisible a walker can easily step trustingly on the snow cornice; effectively stepping out onto thin air.
Grazing reindeer
I went in August, so that danger was not there; there was still snow though, in a sheltered spot above Loch Avon. Within the snow patch, animals were gathered, of a type I had never expected to meeting in these slopes. Turning then from the corrie (Coire an t-Sneachda), the path leads south, along a broad ridge below which the land drops down increasingly steeply to Loch Avon.
Here was the enduring snow patch in the distance and within it many moving shapes. Binoculars showed me a distinctive shape I had not seen since a holiday in Norway many years ago – reindeer. The over a rise the rest of the herd appeared, unbothered by me nor by other walkers on the path. Reindeer have not been native to the Highlands since the Ice Age, but they were reintroduced in places in the 1950s, and now there is a thriving herd, unbothered by man, and not hunted.
Soon then as the other walkers gave up or disappeared, I came to my lunch spot: the azure water of Lochan Buidhe.
Lochan Buidhe
Lochan Buidhe is a broad, shallow lake and an important landmark on the path. From its foot runs a little stream, Fèith Buidhe, which plunges down the corrie to the east into Loch Avon: it may be considered the source of the River Avon.
From Lochan Buidhe, the path turns south again and climbs relentlessly over rocky ground: thank goodness for sturdy boots with solid soles. There is eventually a line of tiny cairns to mark the way. I thought at the time that to find the top I would just have to look for the highest mountain going and walk to it, but the landscape is very misleading – gorgeous, frightful, but misleading, as all around there are other famous peaks of the Cairngorms, and in this the mountain top just a mile and a half away may be lost. At this point though another walker appeared heading for the summit and reassured me of the way and spurred me on notwithstanding the ground.
Ben Macdhui: the summit
Then, eventually, there was the summit, marked with a crafted cairn and a toposcope. Ranged all around it in the distance to the south were other mountains with whose names I was very familiar, even if I had not trodden their slopes, yet: Braeriach, Carn Toul, Carn a’ Mhaim, Derry Cairngorm, and far off somewhere The Fiddler. Then the cloud lifted and far in the distance to the south-west appeared a familiar shape: Ben Nevis. Here the two highest mountains in the kingdom can salute each other.
There I stood in the midst of the Cairngorms, higher than any man in civilisation, unless they stood on the summit glimpsed for a moment in the distance. My companion of the last climb had disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared, leaving the mountain to me alone. It just remained then to find a way back.
In a post last month, I looked at the county top of Hampshire (and Berkshire). What is a county top though?
Basically, a county top is the highest point of a county. It should only be a traditional county: there are no prizes for the highest bureaucratic interference.
Therefore as there are 92 counties in the United Kingdom, and 26 in the Republic of Ireland, there should be 118 county tops in the British Isles, except that some of them are shared between two counties; the summit of the hill marking the county border. Of these, Ben Macdhui is the top of Aberdeenshire and of Banffshire; Cuilcagh of Fermanagh and of County Cavan; Sawel of County Londonderry and of Tyrone; Arderin of Laois and of Offaly; Mount Leinster of both Carlow and Wexford. Some hills have two county tops on them in different places, like Meikle Says Law in East Lothian and Berwickshire, and Walbury Hill in Hampshire and Berkshire, where the very summit belongs to one county alone. Therefore there are by this reckoning 89 county tops in the United Kingdom, or 114 county tops in the whole of the British Isles. You could add the Isle of Man too, though it is not a county, making 115.
Serious toppers have made another sensible rule too: it should be the natural ground level, so no artificial structure counts: neither banks nor buildings. Otherwise you might take the lift to the top of One Canada Square in Canary Wharf and claim to have topped Middlesex.
With all this in mind, serious research was carried out for the Historic Counties Trust, resulting in a list published on Wikishire:
Andy Strangeway has set out to sleep overnight on every county top: by September 2012 he had become the first person to sleep on the summit of all 52 counties of England and Wales. (I joined him for the penultimate top on that list, which was Bush Ground in Huntingdonshire.)
Lancashire has given us many things: hotpot, Eccles cake, Stan Laurel – oh, and the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the Modern Age. It is a county of wonder and practicality, with some of the kingdom’s greatest cities and greatest wild places, so every celebration of the county is deeply meant.
A Lancashire Border Walk is being devised, to provide a walking route all around the bounds of the county. The idea was the first inspiration for the county boundary walks being hosted on WildþingUK, and likewise the Lancashire project page is being hosted here. It is more challenging than any other yet devised, as Lancashire is one of the biggest counties in Britain, stretching from the River Mersey and the vast conurbations of South Lancashire, to the Furness Fells of the Lake District. The route will have to take a long coastline, and the Pennine fell country, where the county borders its rival, Yorkshire.
The Friends of Real Lancashire are looking for help to complete the drawing of the route by 27 November – Lancashire Day. Then the next challenge is for a hardy soul to walk the new route for the first time.
When anyone is going to walk the route – please drop us a line. Blog on it here if you can. It won’t be me though!
Pilot Hill is not what it seems. In published lists of county tops, the hill frequently listed as the county top of Hampshire is Pilot Hill, at 938 feet on the ridge of the North Hampshire Downs. However, the cartography has been checked by the Association of British Counties and it is not: the compilers of these lists have been misled by modern administrative boundaries. Since county tops are reckoned by traditional counties, not by shifting administrative conveniences, that will not do.
To the south of the ridge lies Combe, in Hampshire, whose administrative bounds have been redrawn by bureaucrats to encompass parts of Berkshire (no doubt they had their reasons for doing it) and while that does not affect the historic counties, it does cause confusion on maps.
The county boundary runs along the path that follows the chalk ridge of the downs here (a beautiful place for walking), and through the middle of a vast Iron Age hill fort, and this is where counties toppers should be visiting: the county top of Hampshire is the summit of Walbury Hill, at 974 feet, the hill encompassed by the Iron Age fortifications. The summit point is marked by a trig point in the middle of a farmer’s field.
The erroneous lists frequently give Walbury Hill as the county top of Berkshire, and they are right there, though the summit is exclusive to Hampshire: the highest point of Berkshire is on the county border, on the ridge path by the gate leading up to the summit (at 965 feet).
The route along the ridge here is known as the ‘Wayfarer’s Walk’, and a pleasant walk it is on a sunny day; past the impressive earthworks on Walbury Hill walking eastward the path dips and climbs through open land with broad vistas over the Berkshire countryside, and then climbs suddenly through a wood to the top of Pilot Hill, which is worth a visit, even if it has been knocked off its perch.
Pilot Hill holds its own however as the highest hill wholly in Hampshire.
