by Nick Corble
That the Ordnance Survey should have designated this spot as their middle, or centre, was in some ways highly appropriate. Not far from here the Battle of Bosworth Field took place, during which Henry VII had defeated Richard III in the culmination of the Wars of the Roses. This event marked the end of one era, and the beginning of another. Defeat for Richard meant the end of the Plantagenet line, and more importantly for him personally, marked him down as the last English king to be killed in battle. The crown was reputedly found in a hedge and placed upon the head of Henry, marking the start of the Tudor dynasty, on a spot now called, you’ve guessed it, Crown Hill. Still, at least it wasn’t Coronation Street. Richard’s body of course, was famously lost for centuries, until it was dug up under a car park in Leicester, thereby making him the only king to be buried in a car park. So far anyway.
My next port of call was Stoke Golding, with its sign proclaiming it as ‘Birthplace of the Tudor Dynasty’, which was probably pushing things a bit. The sign was also proud to announce the village as a ‘Neighbourhood Watch and Smartwater Village’, which sounded slightly less impressive. More importantly for me, Stoke Golding was where I could allow things to calm down a bit, as it sat on an arm of the Coventry Canal last seen in Atherstone the day before, grandly called the Ashby-de-la-Zouche Canal, or more commonly the Ashby Canal. This thirty-one-mile stretch used to connect a coalfield to the main canal network, but these days is busy with leisure craft plying the twenty-two miles that remain navigable.
I was walking along, collecting my thoughts and banking my achievements, when I was interrupted by the sight and sound of three excited young women, practically running down the slight incline by a bridge onto the canal.
‘Water!’ they exclaimed, like deprived explorers in a desert. ‘It says here there’s water.’
‘Not just any water,’ I told them, ‘but the Ashby-de-la-Zouche Canal!’
All three looked relieved. They were each around the same height, with one wearing an army T-shirt. I couldn’t guess their ages, which is one reason why I’d never make a good barman. In fact, two turned out to be seventeen and the third nineteen. We quickly fell into conversation. The three, Orla, Ailsha and Keira, were all Public Service Students. When I asked what this meant two of my new friends were suddenly stuck for words, but the third, the oldest, tried to explain it to me.
‘We focus on going into the army, police, firefighters, all the uniformed public services. We do various tasks to help us get into them careers,’ she said.
One of them was keen on going into the fire service, one to go into the CID and one to become an army or police dog handler. They learn various skills on the course, and their challenge that day was to master map reading, following a pre-assigned route simply by following a map, eschewing use of their phones. Their route was five miles long, and seeing as a good mile and a half of that was along the canal, it didn’t appear to be too onerous a task. I told them my schedule, and the awe this inspired instantly broke any remaining ice.
This was a golden opportunity to hear from a group of people dedicated to helping run the social fabric of the country, who, at best, had barely been conceived at the time I’d undertaken my previous country-wide trek. So I took it. Their views were interesting. When I asked them to come up with what they thought were the biggest changes they’d faced in their short lives, they started, unsurprisingly, with technology. What was more surprising was the ambiguous relationship they enjoyed with it. They took some of the wonders technology offered for granted. For an old duffer like me, who’d grown up in an age when pocket calculators and digital watches where the height of modern technology, this sense of wonder was renewed on practically a daily basis, but for these young people it was just something routine.
More significantly, they saw the threats technology brought with it, particularly in the shape of social media and photographs, and specifically the pernicious impact on them as young women. One told how she used to be on twenty social media apps (I didn’t realise there were twenty), but had cut back severely when she’d realised keeping up-to-date was ruining her sense of connection with her family. They were also slightly scared of it, pleased to be out of school before iPads came in. This comment surprised me. Surely iPads had been around for years – were they only just filtering down to schools?
They were also concerned about a lack of respect, both from their own age group to others, and from older age groups towards them. To some extent, this maybe wasn’t surprising, given they were probably undergoing some advanced indoctrination in social values on their course. On the other hand, maybe they’d chosen their course because they held these views? I didn’t know.
We then moved onto climate change, a subject on which they were remarkably well informed, from the state of the oceans to problems with palm oil production in Indonesia. I was impressed.
It was only after an interlude involving much stroking of dogs belonging to a fellow towpath walker, and after I’d summarised what they’d told me and asked if there was anything else on their mind, that they uttered the B-word. Brexit. Only one of them had been old enough to vote in the referendum, and she’d voted Leave. She expressed a fervent belief in the capability of the country to stand on its own two feet, but also to an ignorance of what the EU actually did. The other two readily admitted they knew very little about the issue, beyond knowing theirs was the generation most likely to be affected by it. When I pointed out that sixteen-year-olds had been given the vote in the Scottish independence referendum this blew their collective minds.
Both this inability to grasp the complexity of the whole EU debate and its low position in their list of priorities was, I suspected, a common experience. Nowhere on my travels so far had I seen, or heard, evidence of an ongoing debate. Although Brexit dominated the headlines, people appeared to regard it as yesterday’s news, the referendum result as an end, rather than the beginning of a long, long road.
I thanked the women and wished them well, as they posed for a photo outside a KFC – not for social media they assured me, but as evidence that they’d actually walked the route. As we finally went our separate ways, we agreed that our exchange had been interesting and helped pass the time, as well as miles, along. As it happened, we left the canal at the same bridge, with the women going right and me left, to explore Hinckley. Not strictly on my route, this was an opportunity to take the temperature of another town. As a parting shot I asked my companions if there was much there. In retrospect I wished I’d listened to them. Maybe I was tired (it turned out to be a lot further than I’d expected), but when I got there Hinckley had little to offer.
Like Atherstone, it too was once dependent on a single industry, in Hinckley’s case hosiery. That’s stockings to you and me. These days it is supposed to be a hub for more creative types, but if this is so, they were keeping a low profile that day. It is also home to Triumph Motorcycles, which occupies a large factory on the opposite bank to the canal. If ever an industry typified the ups and downs of British manufacturing, motorcycles is probably it. These days, the town’s position near a number of motorway networks makes it a favoured spot for warehousing, a story that was becoming familiar. Maybe I didn’t give Hinckley a fair shot, after all it had been an eventful and emotional day, but it wasn’t exactly throwing itself at me, so I gave up and found a taxi to take me to my bed and dinner. Oh, and possibly a pint.
I completed three more miles of the towpath the next morning, an overcast day with little traffic on either the canal or the towpath. My main problem was actually the wind, and not because of the cooked breakfast I’d enjoyed. There’d been veiled hints on the TV that morning of a storm to the north and I could feel specks of rain on the air. My concerns about the weather at the start of this leg of the walk resurfaced, but as I’d always known, there was no option but to press on.
Having passed through the pretty village of Barton Hastings, a more immediate challenge presented itself:
crossing the M69. My map suggested an underpass, but when I got there it was flooded, and I couldn’t be certain all the liquid I could see was water. Time to improvise. I could see there was a footpath along and just above the motorway, and that this led to a bridge, so I followed that. Curiously, this wasn’t a particularly popular path, and as a result it consisted mainly of tall grasses and the occasional hidden badger set as trip hazards. Stinging nettles were also another popular option, meaning the couple of hundred yards to the bridge took at least half a painful hour to complete. On exiting the path I was greeted with whatever the collective noun might be for a mass of burst bin liners full of rubbish, along with enough dumped mattresses to furnish a hostel.
I was free of the nettles, though, walking along the sides of fields ploughed to create eighteen-inch-high trenches of red-tinged soil nurturing seed potatoes. My day had settled into a routine, of pretty small villages followed by stretches of fields, some passable, others less so. A good early example was Wolvey, where thatched cottages were scattered randomly around the village and a decorated sign proudly displayed the village’s name on a small triangle of carefully tended land opposite a doctor’s surgery. This was located in a decent-sized house, where it had moved in 2002, having previously been located in the Village Hall. On the one hand, it was quite impressive that this small village, with a population of around 2,000, has its own practice; on the other, it could be considered incredible that delivering twenty-first-century healthcare from a converted house is still seen as acceptable.
A small statue, or maybe it was a trophy, sat below the village sign. Made of bronze and about two feet high, it was a bear and ragged staff, the motif of Warwickshire county. This was for the ‘Dr. Flack Memorial Award for a Village With Over 500 Souls’. There were no further details, and I couldn’t find out anything more about it afterwards, so I decided to settle for being suitably impressed it wasn’t a Best Kept Village Award or another Sunday Times recommendation and pressed on.
Equally bucolic was Monks Kirby, where there was a delightful pub opposite the impressive church. I paused here to gather my wits and my breath, as well as to slake my thirst. The wind had died down, the day once again a hot and sunny one. A group of what might once have been called pensioners, but who were probably more accurately called local residents, were enjoying a convivial meal inside. They paused only to glance up at the strange unshaven man, with elderflowers stuck to his sweaty arms, the remnants of stinging nettles on his boots and a large blue rucksack on his back. They weren’t glances of encouragement. I decided to prolong my stay a while by ordering a sandwich and using the facilities, in that order. That I was expected to produce a jacket and tie and remove my two-day stubble in order to eat inside wasn’t expressly stated, but felt implicit. I therefore ventured outdoors where the sun shone and the WiFi failed.
My afternoon took me along the edge of Newnham Paddox, where Capability Brown had designed a large mansion for the fifth and sixth Earls of Denbigh in the eighteenth century. The house was eventually demolished in 1952 after flood damage caused by the thawing of frozen water pipes. The current Earl, for there still is one, lives in a modern house in the grounds, while the surrounding lands have steadily been sold off in blocks. Oh, how the mighty eventually fall, undone by a combination of plumbing and death duties.
My final stop that day was at Churchover, yet another delightful small village, where the pub marked on the map had been replaced by a bar in the Village Hall. I waited here for a taxi into Rugby, the nearest place I’d been able to find a bed for the night. As I waited a tall man, probably not that many years older than myself, dragged himself over and initiated an encounter. He opened by apologising that he suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, although I assured him there was no reason to say sorry for that. He clearly wanted to talk to me about his treatment, our conversation developing quickly as I happened to know a bit about the subject. Our discussion about recent advances in medical science was eventually curtailed by the arrival of my taxi, so I wished him well and headed for my latest digs.
Although not strictly on my route, and my stay there was by necessity limited, I took to Rugby. It has a range of restaurants, which was important to me at the end of an exhausting day, as well as some interesting streets. The area I was staying in was dominated by Rugby School, where football wasn’t invented. Every second property appeared to be part of the school, which even had its own Sanatorium. Not the headmaster’s secretary and a first aid box mind you, but a whole Sanatorium. It must be all those playing-field injuries. I reflected how these fee-paying schools (private, but public, just to confuse foreigners) had, if anything, become more entrenched over the first two decades of the century, in part through an influx of overseas students. Private education, it seemed, was just as much an export industry as our universities, while at the same time making it okay for nationals able to afford it (7 per cent of the country’s schoolchildren are privately educated) to pay for the ‘decent start in life’ that would more or less secure their middle-class status for another generation.
My hotel was run by a couple of Chinese origin, who were delightful, if a little eccentric. On checking in, I was told that breakfast was £6 extra, cash preferred, but my ‘eat when you can’ philosophy meant I was in. So it was that the next morning I found myself alone in a decidedly retro-looking dining room, alone that was except for a young man also of Chinese origin. After he’d left I asked the proprietor if this was his son and he laughed. No, he was a customer, here for an interview at the school. He was still laughing as he went to fetch my toast, leaving me sensitive to any further ethnic faux pas.
Returning with a full toast rack, my easily amused host decided to engage me in conversation.
‘So, you walk it, yes?’ he asked.
‘Yes, off to Long Buckby today,’ I replied, slightly bemused, as we’d gone through all this the evening before.
‘No, walk it?’ he insisted.
‘Yes, walking,’ I confirmed, correcting his English.
It was only then that I realised that the T-shirt I’d pulled out of my rucksack that morning proudly stated, ‘I have walked the Great Wall of China’ (which I have, although not all of it, obviously). I confirmed my status as a Great Wall Walker and he picked up my dirty cereal bowl before retreating once more into the kitchen, looking decidedly less jolly.
Another taxi trip later, I picked up the route and came upon Colton House. This was once the management training centre for the Royal Mail. Yes, they actually had one; it even had its own sub-post office. The centre burned down in 2010, and the grounds were being converted into a high-end housing development, which of course provided an opportunity to ‘lose’ footpaths while no one was looking. This led to an early battle around a field edge. Insects upset at being disturbed seemed to take solace in the fresh source of nutrients offered by the open scratches all along my arms. This was followed by another motorway crossing.
Luckily, this one was dry, and after passing through the village of Newton via some fishing ponds, I set a course for the A5, Watling Street, a few hundred yards ahead. The passage ahead was enclosed by tall trees and wooden fences on either side and was occupied entirely by tall leggy stinging nettles striving for the light. I could hear the road ahead, but first I had to get through these. My map and Pathwatch app were all well and good, but whilst they could confirm I was on the right path this couldn’t guarantee the quality of said path. Sure, I now had the capability to report it, but this came as little immediate consolation.
I managed around 95 per cent of it and, just as I was congratulating myself and reflecting on how awful it would have been to fall into the nettles, I did just that. Too busy looking down, I’d missed the overhanging branch which caught the top of the head pouch of my rucksack, pulled it back and then flung me with extra motive force to the left and the embrace of mother nettle. It was quick, and yet it was also in slow motion, if that makes sense. Strangely in
evitable, really. Once free, I sat by the side of the road and smothered myself in sting relief cream, before negotiating the A5 and pressing on, trying hard not to scratch too much.
The following paths were relatively straightforward, and it hit me how footpaths are a bit like technology: great when they work, but amazingly frustrating when they don’t. They both present a perfectly reasonable scenario, the difficulty being in the execution. I also mused (I was spending a lot of time on my own) on how it was possible to tell when you passed from one landowner’s jurisdiction to another by how well the footpaths were maintained. They may own the land, but the footpaths were there before they were and would be so afterwards. Managing them is just good practice, as well as making economic sense. If a path cuts an angle across a field, why sow crops over it – people with a right to walk that route will either trample the crops down, or go around the edge of the field and probably do even more damage that way. And that is just the economic argument, putting aside simple goodwill and manners, before even touching on legal obligations.
Still, as I’d already reflected, we English are remarkably lucky to have our footpaths at all. It’s just a shame they vary so much. The Ramblers Association recently cited a figure of over 100,000 reported problems,15 based on a survey of sixty-eight councils. So given that’s not all councils and only covers reported problems, the real figure must easily be in the hundreds of thousands, or around a problem per mile, all in all a fairly damning statistic. At a time when we are all being encouraged to exercise more, and the CRT (the body responsible for the canal network, remember) has rebranded itself as providing ‘Wellbeing for Everyone’ in recognition of the value of the increasing need for peace and quiet (it was Hippocrates himself who declared that walking was ‘man’s best medicine’), this comes across as counter-intuitive. It was a good example of decision makers in cash-strapped councils and beyond being too tied up in simply surviving and dealing with the day-to-day to be able to think outside the box.