Three Shires Way

With a name like the Three Shires Way one might be forgiven for assuming that this route traverses just three counties. However, so far as I can see, it actually passes through four: Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire (just), Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It is a bridleway which (in the direction in which we walked it) starts at Grafham Water in the part of Cambridgeshire that used to be Huntingdonshire and ends at Tathall End, which is actually in the Milton Keynes Unitary Authority but the ceremonial county of Buckinghamshire. Why does it have to be so complicated? The Long Distance Walkers Association Website suggests that the name may come from the fact that the route passes the county boundaries of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire at Threeshire Wood. It also spends quite a lot of time following county boundaries! Whichever county the route is actually in at any time, the sometimes flat and sometimes undulating countryside is generally attractive and the route passes through some delightful villages, characteristically with churches with tall elegant spires.

The basic route is officially 37 miles long, but a circuit of Grafham Water has been added, making it 47 miles. I think it was probably designed as a horse-riding route, which put us off walking it for some time. I don't think we encountered any horses on the Three Shires Way, but the fact that horses can't go on ordinary footpaths means that there is more road walking than we like; on several occasions we got around this very satisfactorily by finding alternative routes making use of footpaths. Our other problem, though less of an issue than as described by some others who have walked the route, was mud. Some parts are classified as a 'Byway Open to All Traffic' or a 'Road Used as a Public Path' (generally open April to October), and are therefore legally accessible by motor vehicles. We encountered motor bikes occasionally, and definitely not between April and October, and it is clear that some of the byways are more muddy and rutted than they would be if motor bikes stopped using the paths when they shouldn't.

The signposting of the route is a bit sporadic, so it is definitely a case in which OS maps (Explorer sheets 225, 224 and 207 - and a corner of 208) are needed. We started walking the route in September 2018 and completed it in March 2019, walking mostly on Sundays en route between home in Norfolk and the Milton Keynes area. That's pretty slow progress, even by our standards, but we did sell a house (Richard's parents' house in Sussex) and buy a flat (in the village of Simpson in Milton Keynes) during that time, and we also had more than a month "off" because of ill health.