Day Nine

Tuesday 19 October – Royston to Hitchin

“After you quit Ware, which is a mere market town, the land grows by degrees poorer; the chalk lies nearer and nearer to the surface, till you come to the open common-fields within a few miles of Royston. Along here the land is poor enough. It is not the stiff red loam mixed with large blue-grey flints, lying upon the chalk, such as you see in the north of Hampshire; but a whitish sort of clay, with little yellow flattish stones amongst it; sure signs of a hungry soil. Yet this land bears wheat sometimes. Royston is at the foot of this high poor land; or rather in a dell, the open side of which looks towards the North. It is a common market town. Not mean, but having nothing of beauty about it; and having on it, on three of the sides out of the four, those very ugly things, common-fields, which have all the nakedness, without any of the smoothness, of Downs.”

This was William Cobbett in 1822, on one of his rural rides. Royston is still not mean. The skeleton of the coaching village can still be seen in the dormitory town. The town centre has shops with local names alongside the national clichés. And thanks to the by-pass, the traffic is light at the old crossroads. I bought what proved to be an excellent sandwich for lunch, before walking South along the main shopping street, and then turning West along a residential road, with houses dating from (I think) the 50s.

A bridleway, the Icknield Way again, then led me South. From Royston to Hitchin, the railway describes a wide arc, Westerly at first and gradually turning South. My route was a distorted mirror image of this, South first and then West into Hitchin.

The Icknield Way was easy to follow, sometimes taking on the characteristics of a sunken green lane, sometimes becoming a field-edge path. It climbed for half a mile on to the chalk, levelled off for the same, then climbed again gently towards Therfield. Cobbett’s lack of enthusiasm for the area is not surprising; there is no drama in this landscape, the fields rolling but never folding like the South Downs. And there is certainly nothing approaching the scarp slope of the North Downs. But the walking was pleasant enough in the rapidly-disappearing sunshine. The forecast clouds were rolling in, increasingly dark and threatening, driven by a keen North wind. Patches of blue sky persisted, but you’d have had to sew them together to make a sailor his trousers.

Wikipedia tells me that from near Therfield you can see Ely Cathedral on a clear day. I forgot to look. The village has a nice green, overlooked by a pub, and a church down an attractive lane. Some people called Hagger hold an annual open meeting in the pub, hoping to attract Haggers unknown or information about their family tree.

Half a mile of field paths led to the next village, Kelshall. Kelshall is little more than a hamlet, but it turns up on a great number of websites because of two brothers, born locally, who emigrated to Australia in the mid-19th Century and founded Sole Brothers Circus, which in some form still exists. The Soles of Kelshall, like the Haggers of Therfield, are avid ancestor-hunters.

A field path headed South West. Actually, the route of the path took this direction. The path itself had been dug up by the farmer. In one field he’d actually planted a crop without redefining the crop, the silly s*d. The young crop will be trampled far more by walkers trying to navigate their way across it than they would if he’d just run his tractor across the proper route. There are drongoes in farming as there are in most jobs.

I looked for a tasty titbit of history or gossip about the next village, Sandon, or nearby Roe Green, but drew a blank. Sandon had a really nice village green, but was otherwise unremarkable. The paths to Roe Green weaved their way through a series of paddocks; this is horsey country. Another badly-defined path reached a road at one of Sandon’s outliers, Redhill. A small deer poked its nose out of a hedge, clocked me and a passing van, and turned on a sixpence.

West from Redhill, the walking was much better. Well-defined paths followed field edges and bisected woodland. As well as being the Icknield Way, this was also the Hertfordshire Way. The Oldman Way toyed with these two for several miles, abandoning them when they didn’t suit. I skirted round the hamlet of Clothall. Thomas Stanley, author of The History of the Philosophers, was born in Clohall, in 1625; he died in 1678, and was buried in the parish church. The book is not big on Amazon.

A mile further on lay the much bigger village of Weston. But before I reached it, I had to hole up under a tree for a quarter of an hour while a heavy shower passed across. Weston had a most attractive village green, a duck-pond with attendant weeping willow, and a post office which dispensed coffee, a winning combination. Of Weston, the Hertfordshire Genealogy website has a good story, culled from a magazine called Hertfordshire Countryside:

In the churchyard there are two stones which - without much foundation - local tradition claims to be the gravestones of Jack o' Legs, a local "Robin Hood" of gigantic stature. Although the stones are fourteen feet apart, it is said that he had to be bent double before being lowered into the grave. A more probable explanation is that the stones are some standard of measurement. It is said that he was killed by the baker of Baldock who objected to his custom of stealing their bread to feed the poor. He begged one last wish - to be given his favourite bow and be buried wherever the arrow should fall. Apparently it landed neatly in Weston churchyard.

A plaque under the village sign says his arrow hit the church itself; either way it was quite a shot from Baldock, more than three miles away!

I followed a bridleway West and then North, expecting to have a bit of road walking to come. But a study of the map and a recce on the ground held out the attractive alternative of a farm track along some field edges – not strictly a right of way, but very useful, eventually reaching a road opposite the bridleway which would take me under the A1(M) through a muddy tunnel. For a few hundred yards, my path was part of National Cycle Route 12, with the usual shale surface but not very well engineered – several puddles spoilt the effect.

A lane took me North into the former village of Wellian. Wellian has been swallowed by Letchworth Garden City, along with Norton and a third village whose name was taken by the new town. The Garden City was founded in 1903 by Ebenezer Howard, was one of the first new towns, and is the world's first Garden City. Its development inspired another Garden City project at Welwyn Garden City, as well as many other smaller projects worldwide (Canberra, the Australian capital, was influenced by its design concepts, as was Hellerau, Germany), and had great influence on future town planning and the New Towns movement. Today it has a population of around 33,600. Thanks, as ever, to Wikipedia.

Instead of walking further into Letchworth, I turned West again towards Hitchin. A mile of grotty road looked unavoidable, but an open gate suggested an escape route. A very nice track followed the edge of fields a hedge away from the busy road. Then I passed a sign: I was legit after all. This was part of the Garden City Greenway, and by the time it ran out I was on the outskirts of Hitchin, with the railway station 15 minutes away by suburban pavement and a final stretch of field path. A light drizzle fell on Hitchin’s rush-hour traffic.