The Pike and Eel (Needingworth) to Earith Bridge and return

We were heading to Newport Pagnell for the evening, for a joint concert of Newport Pagnell Singers, Andante and Heart and Music, raising money for the extremely worthy cause of Willen Hospice. Because I'm more than a little busy at work, and we've been away rather a lot (we came home from Barcelona a week ago and we were in Sussex for my mother-in-law's 90th birthday on Wednesday), we decided not to stay overnight after the concert, but we did want some time out and some exercise. A short walk on the Ouse Velley Way en route to Newport Pagnell was the obvious solution.

We left home about 11.30 am and drove, in just one car on this occasion, back to the lay-by near the Pike and Eel (TL358714), where we parked when we were last here. We stopped for a picnic in the car and set off around 1pm. A tractor was ploughing in a nearby field and it felt appropriately autumnal.

We walked down towards the river then along a bank at some distance from it. There was quite a lot of activity on the river and good views to Bluntisham Church in the distance ahead of us; Over Church appeared from time to time, to the right and behind us. We passed a metal board indicating that we were crossing the Greenwich Meridian, then we passed a gravel pit.

We were following two other walkers - a tall man and a short woman - but they crossed the river at Brownshill Sluice and Lock. We came within sight of a flooded gravel pit to our left and then the path divided - a multitude of routes, including the Pathfinder Long Distance Path, the Greenwich Meridian Trail and the Rothschild Way, veered to the left towards Bluntisham whilst we stayed closer to the river on the Ouse Valley Way.

We were now walking alongside Berry Fen and about a kilometre south of Bluntisham. Berry Fen is a nature reserve and we eventually realised that we were not repeatedly seeing the same heron, rather there were lots of them about, plus other birds, and cows on the fen. The only downside was traffic noise from the A1123.

On the outskirts of Earith and just before a marina, the path headed away from the river. We managed to persuade some cows to move off the path and we walked up to the A1123, then followed the main road through the village.

The river was essentially running the other side of the houses to our right, and at the end of the High Street we came within sight of it again. We passed the southern end of the Old Bedford and New Bedford rivers.

We turned right onto the B1050 towards Willingham, the village where we lived from 1984 to 1988. However for now this was the end of our walk along the Ouse Valley Way; the route (looking worrying overgrown) continues on the other side of the road past Hermitage Marina, but we crossed Hermitage Lock then turned right back the way we had come but on the other side of the river. We followed a flood defence bank all the way back to Brownshill Lock, then crossed the river by the lock and sluices (or are they staunches?) and retraced our steps back to the Pike and Eel.

Following leg