Day Ten

Sunday 24 October – Hitchin to Dunstable

Today’s route was a departure from the original plan. I was going to loop round Luton and head for Leighton Buzzard. But I had second thoughts, on the grounds that Leighton Buzzard is a less-than-thrilling place to visit, while there were some goodies lurking West of Luton, of which more later. So it was to be a game of two halves, through countryside in the first half, with a plunge through the urban mass after the break. First I had to walk through Hitchin.

What a pleasant surprise it was. It helped that traffic was light – I was starting before 9.30 on a Sunday morning. The most annoying noise came from a single church bell, apparently rung by someone with a serious twitch or palsy. The car park near the town centre was suspiciously full, but the reason was soon obvious: a market was in full swing, a cross between a car boot and a farmers market. Bargains were being earnestly sought in the chilly air under a cloudless sky. There had been frost on the fields as I travelled out of London on the train.

Hitchin is described as a Royal Manor in the Domesday Book. The town is notable for St. Mary’s Church which is remarkably large for town of its size. The size of the church is evidence of how Hitchin prospered from the wool trade. It is alleged (the allegers are at it again!) to be the largest parish church in Hertfordshire.

The Sunday calm allowed me to appreciate the street pattern of the market town, remarkably unspoilt. People were breakfasting in coffee shops. I took a lane South near the River Hiz  towards the hamlet of Charlton, turning half right on to a footpath which ran almost parallel to the lane. The first part of the path had been obliterated, but the going wasn’t too bad; then came a couple of meadows before I turned sharp right (West) on to a farm track cum bridleway.

The map showed a windmill, but I couldn’t see it. If it was lurking behind the farm, it must be just a stump. The going was excellent; a string of bridleways and paths headed generally Southwest towards Great Offley. The ground was not flat, with a few steepish climbs. The name of a nearby track – Chalk Hill – gave a clue, but the giveaway was that I had joined the Chiltern Way. This was the North-Eastern end of the Chiltern Hills.

The Chilterns stretch in a 47 mile, Southwest to Northeast diagonal from Goring-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, through Buckinghamshire, via Dunstable Downs and Deacon Hill in Bedfordshire, to where I was currently walking. The other end of the range ends abruptly at the Thames; here it was a gradual affair. The most obvious feature of the range is the steep scarp slope facing North West – I would encounter it several times before I left the Chilterns to cross the Vale of Aylesbury. Behind the scarp slope, the gentle decline to the South East is far from simple; the Chilterns are characterised by folds and wrinkles with sometimes brutal climbs and falls, as though some god had taken the tilted surface and rucked it up randomly. All in all, an interesting walk was promised.

As I approached Great Offley, the church bells (several of them, rung well) were signalling the eleven o’clock, while on the soccer field the muddied oafs were all shouting loudly for the ball. The pub was still in darkness. I followed the Chiltern Way round two sides of the village, and then I turned West along what used to be the main road between Hitchin and Luton, now superseded by the noisy monster a field away.

I scented a conspiracy: another invisible windmill was marked on the map. This time, I could see a suspiciously-round farm building which presumably used to be the mill. A farm road took me under the A505, and then the Chiltern Way headed West again, on good field-edge paths.

A remarkably well-preserved notice on a post advertised a public meeting to protest about development. The meeting had taken place 18 months ago. There was a website address, which I looked up. The website belongs to an organisation called Keep East of Luton Green. Several of the remaining fields between here and Luton had been earmarked for house building, and I had come across the resistance movement. So far the campaign has been successful – a big building scheme has been turned down by the council - but it’s the sort of threat which has a habit of coming back, so the fight goes on.

The path crossed a road at the village of Lilley. A sign at the cricket ground claimed that the club was Hertfordshire’s “finest band of cricketers since 1895”. That’s a long time to be cock of the roost, even if it is just in their own estimation.

The path was a bit muddy, but only so far as it coexisted with access to the allotments; beyond that it was good again. When I emerged from the enclosed path, a tree ahead stood out at the top of a hill. As I stepped back a few feet to get some greenery into shot as framing for a picture, I was startled by a disembodied voice asking, “Are you doing the same as me?”

I resisted the temptation to answer, “It rather depends what you’re up to”. When I stepped forward again, I could see the man who had spoken. “Are you taking a photo of that tree?” he asked. I said I was. “I ‘ve photographed it through all four seasons,” he enthused, and I could see why: it was completely on its own on the horizon, at the top of a field which had probably been cropped and harvested while he returned to take his photos. After the usual weather chat (it was still great, though with a few more clouds than earlier), I left him to his current task – photographing a single sunflower at the field edge. When I reached the top of the climb and looked back, he had not moved. Sensible fellow.

As I turned briefly North West, I could see what lay in the next dip. It was Luton. Not wanting to picnic in the town, I found a spot for my lunch. But I was well within dog-walking and jogging range of the urban area; my munching was interspersed with hellos. It brought home to me what a blow it would have been if any of the network of paths round here were to be lost under housing: this is the green lung for the Eastern part of Luton.

The central feature is a country park based on two hills, Galley and Warden. This ran right up to the edge of the housing. The trick from now on was to find a reasonably agreeable route through the town, and my old chum, the Icknield Way, came in useful again. The Way had sidled in through the country park, having taken a more Northerly route from Hitchin. With its help I found some quiet roads, a playing field to cross, and footpaths through a grassy corridor near the infant River Lea/Lee, which rises nearby and flows to the Thames East of London, with spelling variations as it goes.

I walked firstly through Limbury and then Leagrave, both of which used to be villages before they were swallowed up by Luton. Leagrave, indeed, was a place of resort in the 19^th Century, the “Blockers’ Seaside”. Blocking was a trade in the straw hat-making industry for which Luton was famed.

A few hundred yards West of Leagrave Station, I reached a - to me - significant junction. My current East-West Walk crossed the line of my Alternative End-to-End Walk, which I was due to resume next week at Fort William.

Some suburban roads and a litter-strewn footpath led me to a road crossing the M1. West of the motorway lay Dunstable, but first there was to be an unexpected further burst of Chilterns. I had spotted on the map what looked like a useful green corridor alongside the old Luton to Leighton Buzzard railway line. What I hadn’t registered – not paying attention – was that this corridor was in fact part of the scarp slope, Blow’s Downs by name, a lovely bit of chalk downland with, I guess, the remains of a chalk quarry, now overgrown and mysterious to walk through.

There were signs of things happening to the old railway, apart from its use as a rubbish dump and a park for those things which aren’t really caravans and neither are they bungalows, which come on the back of a lorry. The former route of the railway is being transformed into a busway, along which “guided buses” will travel at up to 50 miles an hour on specially-designed tracks. Why not just revive the old railway? you ask. Good question. The cunning part of the plan is that the buses will be able to leave the track and serve districts surrounding it and further afield. Removal of the single-track rails has just begun, prior to the building of twin tracks for the busway. Cunning. eh?

The trackside footpath took me to within a quarter of a mile of the centre of Dunstable. The centre itself is an unfriendly crossroads, formerly graced with an Eleanor Cross, which Edward I had erected at the nightly resting places of the body of his dead wife, Eleanor of Castile. The crosses were firstly made of wood and later of stone. The final cross, at Charing Cross, has just been restored.

In Roman times Dunstable’s name was Durocobrivis. There was already some form of settlement by the time that the Romans built Watling Street, crossing the older Icknield Way here. Dunstable Priory was the setting for a special court which approved the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. This didn’t stop it going the way of all such institutions later in Henry’s reign. Dunstable itself prospered in the 17th and 18th Centuries because of its role as a transport hub, reinforced in the 19th Century by the opening of the aforementioned railway line between Luton and Leighton Buzzard. The town participated in the boom in straw hat making in Luton in the 19th Century, and lost any claim not to be a satellite of its bigger neighbour in the 20th. Ironically, the M1 serves as the only barrier to a seamless join between the two.

Even though the priory was supressed, the priory church survives, and a very handsome building it is, its precincts providing a sense of place entirely lacking in the shopping streets. Harrumph!