Circuit from Bedford South Premier Inn to John Bunyan Trail and return

This walk was a very pleasant surprise. We'd had a friend to stay for the weekend so hadn't expected to do any walking today, but we were staying in the Bedford area overnight as usual and decided that it would be nice to get out for a quick stomp and to combine this with linking from the Bedford South Premier Inn (currently our "third home" - we stay here more Sunday nights than we don't) to the John Bunyan Trail. I'd expected the walk to be essentially about getting out for a bit of exercise and satisfying my peculiar obsession with linking everything together. However, especially on the outward leg, there was some attractive walking, thanks largely to the regeneration work that is creating the Forest of Marston Vale on the site of former brick works. It is however worth bearing in mind that many of the paths on which we were walking are not shown as public rights of way on the Ordnance Survey map. We'd found them on Google maps satellite view, but they're obviously quite well known locally, because there were a fair few dog walkers etc. about.

We had left home at about 3 pm, with me slightly ahead of Richard; he also had to stop for petrol, so I had time to book in and unpack at the Premier Inn before Richard arrived. We have never had a bad room at this Premier Inn but there was a humming noise on this occasion; I decided to wait until after the walk to sort this out. We left the hotel on foot and walked down Wilkinson Street, where house building is still going on and the final surface on the road and pavements has still to be laid. A short distance from the Premier Inn, just after a children's play area, a path led off to the left underneath the A428. This path is shown as a public right of way on the map, but we soon reached Wiles Wood and turned right onto a track that meandered its way through the wood, with alternative horse-riders routes going off from time to time and a good selection of picnic benches etc. There were views to Wootton Church to our left, to some brickwork chimneys behind us, and to a slight rise in the otherwise flat landscape ahead of us. The woodland became more mature as we headed north through Wiles Wood and then turned left to pass through Ridgeway Wood.

We cut across a field to Keeley Green, being passed by some horse riders. We reached a road on a bend and had the choice of turning left or right; we really weren't sure which way to go, Left was a shorter route and looked the best...provided, that is, there was public access through the wood we were approaching. There was! This went by the bizarre name of "Hoo and Kill", with boards marking first "Hoo Corner" and then "The Kill" and in between there was more pleasant walking through youngish-but-more-established-than-Wiles-Wood woodland.

We crossed another road, now joining the John Bunyan Trail, and walked along the edge of Buttons Ramsey (yet another young wood) before turning right through a hedge and walking across a field, past cows, to an attractive thatched cottage. This is close to where Kempston House is marked on the map, though I'm not entirely sure whether it was Kempston House we were looking at; we'd have had to turn left along the track leading to the house to find out and this would have felt nosy and probably have been trespassing. Instead we crossed straight over the track and passed around the edge of manicured grounds to emerge on road close to Green End. We left the John Bunyan Trail again here; it turns left along the road whilst we went through a narrow gap in the hedge opposite.

The journey back from the John Bunyan Trail to the Premier Inn was shorter than the outward journey, though not so nice; the narrow gap we had passed through led to an area of rough ground which we crossed to reach the A428, with occasional views to the church at Kempston Church End and good views of the housing development on which the Premier Inn sits (but which extends up the entire western edge of Bedford). We crossed the A428 at the Cemetery Road roundabout and entered a more mature phase of the development. I thought I had seen a fairly direct way through from here, but I must have dreamt it. From Cemetery Road we turned right onto Martrell Drive - well that's in the correct direction - but after after a few hundred yards we were confronted by a building site that we couldn't get through. We turned left on a path past a children's play area and eventually we managed to cut through onto Ridge Road, which we followed through a more established area of Kempston to Kempston Rural Lower School - the School which had appeared just a stone's throw away when we were on Martrell Drive. Google Maps shows Wilkinson Road leading all the way from opposite the School to the Premier Inn but beware - there is another building site part way along! We knew about that one, so took Smith Mews (a wide tarmacked path) which runs close to Wilkinson Road and eventually joins it. The hum in our Premier Inn room was still there when we returned, but the very helpful (and tall!) man from reception knew what it was, removed a panel from the ceiling and turned off the offending pump.