Old Linslade to Hollingdon and return
Walked by Sally and Richard, Sunday 15th October 2017
8.4 miles of walking, about 3.5 miles on the route of the Cross Bucks Way (or trying to find it!) and 2.5 miles on the route of the Grand Union Canal Walk
For photographs of today's walk click here
Today was a first for JordanWalks and not in a good way, but we eventually had a very pleasant walk. Read on...
I'd been singing in a concert in Newport Pagnell the evening before, and we'd stayed at the Bedford South Premier Inn. We left after breakfast and drove to Winslow and left one car in the free carpark at SP771273, then back to a large layby opposite Linslade Wood at SP909263. It was a slightly murky morning, but the autumn colours were lovely, and the sun came out later on.
We walked along the road to cross the railway, close to the entrance to the Linslade Tunnel. The railway here is the West Coast Main Line, so it's quite busy. We took the slope that leads down to the Grand Union Canal by The Globe, but at the bridge over the canal leading both to the pub and to the point at which the Greensand Ridge Walk leaves the canal (see last week's walk), we turned left before crossing the canal. The towpath here is on the other side of the canal; we were on a rough path beneath the railway embankment and the canal. As the railway veered to the west, our path entered an attractive wooded area and we noticed a dredging barge moored on the opposite back of the canal.
We climbed uphill and passed Old Linslade Church to emerge onto the busy little road leading down to Rushmere Country Park and Heath and Reach. The map shows the path going straight across the road here, but it doesn't; we turned right and had walked almost back to the canal before we came to a gate through which we assumed (rightly) that we were meant to go. We climbed quite steeply across a sheep field, with good views opening up behind us. We reached a pedestrian bridge across the railway and crossed.
We had not seen any Cross Bucks Way signs, and there weren't a great number of ordinary footpath signs either, and it was becoming clear that the path is not much walked, at least in this section. Things were about to get rather worse! We had some difficulty finding the route from the railway to the A4146 (it was definitely not as shown on our map) and parts of the path were overgrown, so our legs were getting both wet and stung by nettles. We eventually found some signposts near Chelmscote Manor Farm, but the route it sent us on towards the A4146 was extremely overgrown - not much fun at all.
After crossing the main road the vegetation was less of a problem, but now we had to cross a couple of ploughed fields. Relative to some ploughed fields we have crossed in the past, these were not too bad, and the countryside was attractive. However, the walking was rather slow and I was getting anxious about the length of time that the walk would take us (I knew I had work to do before tomorrow).
We reached the outskirts of the attractive village of Soulbury and walked through the churchyard then across to the road which leads to Stewkley, passing the cricket field. We turned left onto the road then took a path on the other side. This led across another field to Grove Farm, a rather horsey place. It look us some time to find our way through, though one of the horsey people said she thought the path was in the vaguely straight ahead direction and she was right, and where we had to get to the other side of an electric fence, there was a handle to allow us to lift the wire out of the way.
We continued on another overgrown path down to a stream and on to the hamlet of Hollingdon. After a short walk along a minor road, we turned onto another distinctly nettly path, and I was on the point of giving up. Richard spotted that we were heading towards a wood and suggested we continued to see what happened there. Well, what happened was a stream with no apparent way through...so we gave up!
This was the point at which Richard had inspiration...rather than walking back along the paths we had struggled with, or taking roads, he suggested that we should cut across to the Grand Union Canal and follow that back to Linslade. We started by walking back to Soulbury (by road) and here we found a conveniently placed bench where we stopped for lunch. Then we headed on across the A4146 and the railway to rejoin the canal at "Three Locks" (where there are three locks and a pub of the same name). We turned right onto the eastern towpath and followed this for a couple of miles as the canal looped around Old Linslade and back to the bridge near The Globe pub where we had joined it.
We returned to the car by Linslade Wood and of course we had to drive back to Winslow to rescue the other car. We deliberately drove through the villages in between, including Soulbury, Stewkley and Swanbourne. Whether we manage to continue along the Cross Bucks Way and so to walk through Stewkley, Swanbourne and Winslow remains to be seen. [Later note: after looking at OpenStreetMap it appears that large sections of the path through these villages do not exist, so if we return to the path we will re-start in Addington.]
