Great Offley to Hitch Wood
Walked by Sally and Richard, Sunday 19th January 2020
7.4 miles of walking (3 hours 20 minutes, including lunch stop), 7.25 miles on the route of the Chiltern Way Northern Extension
For all photographs taken on this walk click here
This was a glorious walk on a cold but sunny January Sunday and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The rolling Hertfordshire countryside, which we didn't know previously, was lovely - and after a horribly wet winter so far, with widespread flooding, the weather was an unexpected bonus and the occasional mud didn't bother us too much. However perhaps the greatest pleasure was that we'd been through rather a "full on" period in both our work and home lives, and we didn't expect to be out on a "proper walk" today. We'd originally planned to have visitors for lunch on both Saturday and Sunday, but both arrangements fell through (which was a pity); next we thought about driving over to Miton Keynes on Saturday evening and then heading to London for a leg of the Grand Union Canal on Sunday - but I felt the need of a whole day at home on Saturday just to catch up a bit. So, suddenly, there we were with a day which was ideally suited to this leg, which is the furthest east of all our Chiltern Way walks and therefore a good one for walking en route from Norfolk to Milton Keynes.
We made the decision to do this walk quite late on Saturday and left home before 8am on Sunday. Really, the only negative part of the whole day was road closures on the A14 meaning that we had to use the minor route along Queen Adelaide Drive to the east of the A10, then along the A14 to the east of the closures and down the A11 to Duxford. This route is great if you are heading south, but not so good when you also want to go west - and more significantly, Queen Adelaide Drive was distinctly slippery. Thankfully we both made it safely to a useful little car park opposite Hitch Wood at TL197239. The car park was nearly full, but we got a parking space; HItch Wood is apparently a bluebell wood, so I imagine that it is just about impossible in the spring. We drove in Richard's car by a narrow, twisting and muddy route which brought us into Great Offley from the south and we parked outside the Church at TL145268, close to where we were a fortnight ago. Whereas we arrived at the same time as the vicar a fortnight ago, today I think there was a church service already in progress, so there were more cars outside the Church, but there was still space for us. We set off walking just as the Church clock chimed 10.
"Offley" is a reference to the same King Offa who was responsible for the building of Offa's Dyke which we walked along in 2006; Offa is believed to have had a palace on the site of the modern-day Offley Place, and to have died here in 944. Offley Place is now a country house hotel and wedding venue and Great Offley is an attractive village on the old Luton-Hitchin road at the top of the Chiltern escarpment. There were once six pubs in the village, most if not all were coaching inns established to enable weary travellers to rest after climbing the hill. Just two pubs remain, and our path left the village from close to one of them, the Red Lion. The path was initially enclosed by fences on both sides, which (as is usually the case) led to it being rather muddy. Fortunately the available route soon widened, and in what felt like no time at all we reached the top of the escarpment, with lovely views down towards Hitchin. We passed through a kissing gate then descended alongside Aldwicks Plantation. We continued to descend gradually for a couple of miles, on footpaths and green lanes, heading in a generally easterly if meandering direction, then turning to the south.
We emerged onto a small lane, but immediately turned off it again to the right, now climbing up Pinnacle Hill, with a classic Chiltern hill-top group of trees to our right and a wood up at the top of the slope (shown at the top of the page). We reached this wood (West Wood) and descended through it, then climbed again. After further meanderings, passing a large field of sheep, we found ourselves (very much alive) on Dead Woman's Lane. A footpath led from here to the village of Preston.
Nick Moon's guide to "The Chiltern Way and Chiltern Way Extensions" goes on about Preston's picturesque village green. It was pretty enough, but I couldn't get a decent photo because of the Sun shining from directly behind the pub and rather a lot of parked cars in the opposite direction. We left Preston on the road we'd driven through on our route between Hitch Wood and Great Offley, passing Princess Helena College, an independent school on the site of Temple Dinsley, a sometime manor house and monastery.
After about a kilometre of road walking we turned left then right onto a footpath past an enclosed reservoir. We were soon at Poynders End, where there was a group of barn conversions and an attractive farmhouse. We were approaching the most easterly point on the Chiltern Way and were on a section which, when you look at the map, makes you wonder why on Earth this route is followed: the route heads northeast for about a kilometre to the B656, a very short distance down the road, then straight back to the south and slightly west. Of course the route has to follow footpaths wherever they are, and various points of interest became apparent as we walked this section - the immediate and striking thing was, again, the superb views from the top of the escarpment, which we reached at Poynders End, this time looking towards Stevenage. We descended, passing various other groups of walkers, including what looked like a two-family group, with a teenager complaining that walking is boring. Not to us!
As we descended towards the B656 we walked past one of the long sausage-shaped white plastic things that we had seen as we drove along the road; Richard speculated that these are being used to store sweetcorn for animal feed, but we had no way of proving or disproving this. The road looked a bit busy from a distance but it wasn't a problem when we were walking along the verge and we realised when driving back along the road that the apparent busy-ness was probably due to traffic being in spurts because of the traffic-light control of a section slightly further north which is single carriageway because of road works.
We reached "The Rusty Gun", home to a produce shop as well as an interesting-looking pub. Our route left the road just past the pub and took us past their pigs; we stopped to photograph one of the pigs, trying not to draw the obvious conclusion about where it was destined to end up. We climbed quite gradually, next to and then across a ploughed field, but a firmer strip of land had been left for us to walk on. We reached Minsden Chapel Plantation, with the (apparently haunted) remains of Minsden Chapel visible amongst the trees. Unfortunately the very last bit of today's walk along the Chiltern Way, did cross a muddy field. It was only a very short distance and we just got on with it, in a rather more straightforward way than the couple of dog walkers who we had overtaken just before the muddy bit, who attempted to make a wider loop round across the field - I suspect that was even muddier! We were just grateful that, despite the very wet weather of the previous weeks, we had not encountered more mud.
Almost as soon as we'd emerged onto the road, the route of the Chiltern Way continued up a bridleway on the other side, towards Langley End. However we continued along the road for a short distance, back towards the car park. However before getting into the car, we ventured briefly into Hitch Wood. It's not on the route of the Chiltern Way, but there are a number of paths through it, and it's a lovely place, even without bluebells!
