John Bunyan Trail

John Bunyan was a nonconformist preacher and writer, who lived in the Bedford area in the 17th Century. He is best known for the Christian allegory "The Pilgrim's Progress" which was mostly written whilst he was in Bedford County Gaol; he spent 12 years here, having been arrested for his religious activity. The photograph shows the statue of Bunyan in the centre of Bedford.

The John Bunyan Trail is a 77-mile "circular" walk linking places associated with Bunyan, including his birthplace in Elstow, the Chiltern Hills (thought to be the inspiration for the "Delectable Mountains" in Pilgrim's Progress), Houghton House near Ampthill ("House Beautiful") and Bedford itself. The walk is usually described in two halves; the first heads northwards from Sundon Hills Country Park in the Chilterns to the Bedford area and then back through Bedford itself to Elstow (described on an external site here); the second part is shorter and heads from Elstow back to Sundon Hills Country Park (described here). However, since the total walk forms a circuit, you can start it where you like, and we chose to start on a loop close to the River Great Ouse at the northern extremity of the trail. We followed the trail from here, around to Elstow and then south to the Sundon Hills Country Park in a fairly straightward series of walks between January and April 2017, but then circumstances conspired against us and our next few legs were shorter, linking from the Bedford South Premier Inn (where we were spending most Sunday nights at the time) to the trail and then working backwards from the northwest "corner" of the route near Stevington. In the end we walked the whole of the rest of the path in this retrograde fashion.

The descriptions are given in an order which moves on around the Trail in logical order, but in fact the leg from the Sundon Hills Country Park to Westoning was the last we walked, on 17th September 2017. If you follow my links in logical order you'll find that from that point you are going back in time (though the photographs are in date order. Just to add to the confusion, this leg from from the Sundon Hills Country Park, retraces the route we took back in April; in other words the John Bunyan Trail is not actually a simple circuit. It is also the case that parts of it meander considerably, with perhaps the worst section in this regard being the north-bound section from Sharpenhoe to Pulloxhill, then back south to Harlington before heading north again to Westoning. I think these meanders are included to visit places of significance in Bunyan's life, in this case "Bunyan's Oak" under which Bunyan preached and Lower Samsill, where he was arrested.

The route is signposted, mostly with signs just saying "The Bunyan Trail", which are clearly designed to sit on top of ordinary footpath signs - but whoever put them up doesn't ways get it right! There are also occasional older "John Bunyan Way" signs in evidence. The route crosses OS Exploxer Sheets 208, 193 and 192.

We did not set out on this route in a deliberate attempt to link other routes together, but the path does cross or coincide with several paths we had already walked, including the Ouse Valley Way, the Greensand Ridge Walk and the Icknield Way Path, plus the Chiltern Way and the shorter Bromham Heritage Trail, Clay Way, Marston Vale Timberland Trail, and Two Moors Heritage Trail which we hadn't walked.

Photographs of John Bunyan Trail.

First leg of path