Hemel Hempstead to Bovingdon on circuit from Bovingdon
Walked by Sally and Richard, Sunday 7th June 2020.
6 miles of walking (2 hours 20 minutes) including 2.6 miles progress on Chiltern Way.
For our photographs taken on this walk click here.
We were still working at home in Norfolk (the "new normal" for the Coronavirus Pandemic) but we'd been over to our flat in Milton Keynes to check everything was OK and to do some decorating. We were heading back to Norfolk today and had hoped to stop off to do a leg of the Nene Way on a circuit from Wansford Station; today's walk needed to be a circuit because we only had one car with us. However the weather forecast for the Wansford area was rather wet. Fortunately the forecast was better further south, so we decided to head back to the Chiltern Way instead. We'd finished the Northern Extension, so it was the main route of the Chiltern Way we were returning to, at Hemel Hempstead, where the guidebook. "The Chiltern Way" by Nick Moon describes the Chiltern Way as starting from here (though since it's a circular route it actually doesn't matter where you start and we were actually over halfway round the main route.
It remained dry the whole time we were walking, and we thoroughly enjoyed the walk, which made use of sections of the Hertfordshire Way and the Grand Union Canal Walk as well as the Chiltern Way. The only thing that was less than perfect was that there were a fair number of other walkers about, which was something of a culture shock as we were only on our third walk after the period of complete lockdown for the Coronavirus pandemic, which we had spent in rather more sparsely populated West Norfolk.
We could have parked at Hemel Hempstead Station, but we opted instance for the free on-street parking in Bovingdon, finding a space on the High Street without any difficulty. We inspected at the Ryder Memorial (a well cover built in 1881 in memory of a Lord of the Manor of a nearby house, who had died two years previously) then turned down Church Street and left onto a path across the attractive churchyard, on the route of the Hertfordshire Way. We walked between a double row of yew bushes then past the church and a section of the churchyard where the grass had not been cut, I think deliberately. A short distance the other side of the churchyard we turned onto Stoney Lane, passing some destinctly "des res" houses, some mock tudor and with large manicured gardens. The guidebook says that "much of Bovingdon today with its housing estates, "infill" development, shops etc. has a very suburban appearance"; this was suburban in a sense, but not at all what I had expected. We turned left onto Bushfield Road (more posh houses) which brought us to Box Lane, the road along which we had driven to Bovingdon.
On the other side of the road, and after waiting for a number of other walkers who were either leaving or returning to cars parked by Box Lane, we took a path through the pleasant Gorsefield Wood, which emerged onto a golf course. We passed the Little Hay Golf Complex, with the buildings still closed, though there was plenty of activity in the car park and on the greens, which had presumably reopened just recently. We parted company with the road through the complex and took an attractive path around the edges of the bunkers and greens, with excellent views in front of us down to the valley of the River Bulbourne (through which the Grand Union Canal, the railway and the A41 all pass), and across the valley to Hemel Hempstead. We were following another walker who seemed to know where he was going (always dangerous, though in this occasion it seems both that he was following the same route as us and that he really did know the way). We followed the walker's route onto the bridge across the A41, losing sight of him on the other side and so taking two sides of a triangle around a new little nature reserve. We continued to descend and reached Bourne End by way of a track, just as a horse rider set off up the track in the opposite direction.
The Hertfordshire Way turns left onto the A4251 for a short distance at this point, but we turned right for a similar distance, then took a lane down to the Grand Union Canal at Winkwell. Much to my delight I had read the map correctly, and we reached the canal right at swing bridge by the Three Horseshoes Pub. It's a pretty little spot; when we walked past on the Grand Union Canal Walk in December 2019 we might have expected the pub to be quite a lot busier on a Sunday in June - sadly, because of Coronavirus, this was not the case; like all pubs, the Three Horseshoes was firmly shut. We turned right towards Hemel Hempstead though soon stopped to take more photographs when we encountered a family of geese and goslings a short distance further on, at Winkwell Dock, blissfully undisturbed by the noise of metalcutting from the boatyard beyond. We passed underneath the railway then continued to Bridge 148 (the Old Fishery Lane Bridge), which we crossed and then turned north when we were on the Chiltern Way in October 2019. Today we left the canal here and headed south, now on a new leg of the Chiltern Way. It was a bit fiddly to start with. We went through a tunnel under both the railway line and the A41, with some interesting graffiti. Lots of people were also passing through the tunnel, but most continued straight ahead at the other end, whilst we turned left across common ground, keeping close to the road up above us. We reached the far corner just before a couple of bridges over the A4251, one carrying the A41 and the other carrying the railway. We crossed the A4251 but stayed to the right of the A41 and the railway line, on a narrow wooded path with soon joined with an underpass coming from the station. Here we turned right on a tree-lined path which climbed up to Roughdown Common.
We were now in the district of Felden (more posh houses and more good views down to the Bulbourne Valley) and at one stage we emerged onto a road, then took a path up the other side of it, then back down to the road. We walked along the road for a while, climbing steadily, then took a right hand fork on the entrance drive to Felden Lodge (the UK HQ of the Boys' Brigade). We soon left the drive and cut across the fields, passing Hyde Farm and Felden Barns. After crossing a pea field we reached the edge of Bury Wood, and from here until we were within sight of Bovingdon we felt as if we had wood to our right and open fields to our left. However, after a while, closer inspection revealed that to our right there was actually just a narrow band of trees and beyond were the extensive gardens of some of the des res houses on Stoney Lane (the continuation of the route we'd followed out of Bovingdon). There were rather a lot of other people out walking along this section, mostly very considerate and some of whom put considerably more than the "social distancing" recommendation of 2 metres between them and us. At a slight dog-leg on the path, we noticed gorgeous miniature goats in the wood, with a grand house beyond.
Eventually, we emerged into a large field with views to Bovingdon Church to the right and a path diagonally across the field, which most of the (rather too large a number of) other people seemed to be taking). However we continued straight ahead which led between houses and so to Chipperfield Road (the continuation of High Street) in Bovingdon. We turned right and walked past the continuation of the Chiltern Way on the left and past modern houses back to the Ryder Memorial. We were about to continue to the car when we realised that we'd walked past a bench, so we returned to this for our lunch before returning to the car for the drive back to Norfolk. We passed through quite a lot of rain on the way, so we'd been lucky with the weather.
