Barton-le-Clay to Sundon Hills Country Park

Today we “did” John Bunyan’s “delectable mountains”, which felt quite appropriate for the Easter weekend. We’d originally planned to walk yesterday too, but after a spell of glorious weather yesterday’s weather forecast for the Bedford area had been for rain all day, so we’d stayed at home and just driven across to the Bedford South Premier Inn in the late afternoon. This meant that, without having to have a particular early start today, we were walking well before 9am, after leaving one car at the Sundon Hills Country Park carpark (at TL047286) then driving back via Streatley to Barton-le-Clay and leaving the other car outside Ramsey Manor Lower School (TL086308). It stayed dry all day, but it was cold and generally quite dull. More cheerfully, there were plenty of signs of spring, from bluebells to cowslips to lambs to birdsong, and the Chiltern Hills, in particularly the northern escarpment, were very attractive.

Unfortunately I felt a bit light-headed for much of day; I’ve no idea why this was, but a convoluted route (with an almost circular loop from the Icknield Way/Bunyan Trail intersection at TL106274 to Lilley and then back) and a rather out of date map didn’t help; I suspect that our copy of OS Explorer Sheet 193 is more out of date that its 2006 copyright would indicate. We had problems with this particular sheet when walking the Icknield Way Path, though I didn’t realise that until writing up today’s route; indeed it was not being able to reconcile the route of the Icknield Way Path as shown on the map with what we saw on the ground and our (poor) memory of our 2011 route that made me think I really was going mad!

We climbed almost immediately out of Barton-le-Clay, with good views down to the Church that we had just walked past. There were several other walkers about, mostly with dogs. Unfortunately our enthusiasm for climbing resulted in us finding ourselves on a path which is not the route of the John Bunyan Trail and which is not on our OS map at all (though it is on OpenStreetMap). We can’t really blame our error at this point on the map or signposting, but we can and would argue that the route we took is nicer than the official one. We climbed to and then followed the edge of northern escarpment of the Barton Hills with good views down to Lee Wood, whilst the official route appeared to cross fields and, certainly at the point at which the two routes converged just to the north of Stonley Wood, it appeared to be on rather boring tracks whilst "our route" was on an attractive path across open access land.

We turned right onto the boring track. To be fair, there were initially still excellent views and after leaving the escarpment behind we were soon passing Stanley Wood, which had a beautiful display of bluebells. We passed Barton Hill Farm then turned right onto a road and, shortly afterwards, turned left off the road again (there is no Bunyan Trail signpost at this point, but it was fairly obvious that this was the route we needed to take).

About a kilometre south of the road we reached a cross-roads of tracks and turned left*. The more major track on which we now found ourselves as marked on the map as "Icknield Way" and in places there were Icknield Way Path signposts, but given all the confusion over route, we weren't entirely sure whether we had come this way. The track joined a road on a bend, with the line of our route continuing straight ahead, then half a kilometre or so further on, another track left the road on another bend, still with the Icknield Way carrying on straight ahead. This bit seemed vaguely familiar and indeed, in checking JordanWalks and our Icknield Way Guidebook on our return home, it appears that we walked this section in reverse on 13th November 2011.

Very shortly after leaving the road on the bend we parted company with the Icknield Way Path for now, turning right onto a path across fields, with the attractive rise of Lilley Hoo to our left. We did a dog-leg to the left and had expected to cut down to the road through the long village of Lilley shortly afterwards, but we were delighted to see our route signposted straight ahead at this point then around another dog leg left before taking a tree-lined track into the centre of Lilley. Lilley is an attractive enough village, with a Church with a curiously offset tower, but I'm not entirely convinced it is worth the detour to get here. If we had kept straight ahead at the point marked * above, we'd have been at the point marked ** below in less than a kilometre (and turning left at the point marked * would have given us an even more direct route to ***). And I have failed to find any mention of Bunyan visiting Lilley. [Note added after walking through Lilley on the Chiltern Way: I think I was unfair; I realise now that it was likely that Bunyan preached near here AND I now think the village is delightful.]

What Lilley did have was a bench, and it was almost exactly 11am, so we stopped for a snack (actually part of our lunch..). We then took the track from where we had been sitting, past the pub, and out into attractive undulating countryside. The track wiggled its way around Ward's Wood, which was fenced off but again had attractive bluebells. After turning left off the track** we found ourselves approaching the northern edge of Luton. Warden Hill was up to our left, with Galley Hill to our right, and as we passed the South Beds Golf Course*** the Icknield Way Path signs reappeared. Had we been this way before? (It turns out that the answer to this question is, I think, no - though our Icknield Way Path guide has the route coming this way; I think we stayed further north - we climbed up onto Galley Hill, but then descended back to Maulden Firs before cutting across to the A6 and Streatley without doing the bit we were about to do today around the outskirts of Luton.)

There were several parallel paths between the golf course and the edge of Luton, but it wasn't difficult to find the route. It was quite difficult to cross the A6! We continued almost straight ahead to what is marked on the map as Betty Robinson House, now known as the Keech Hospice. We turned right on a footpath past the hospice and soon reached open countryside again. Our route (still signposted Icknield Way Path as well as John Bunyan Trail) lay straight ahead, across a ploughed field. The soil was dry so this wasn't too much a problem. We reached George Wood; there was a signpost on the ground - thankfully the onward route was quite clear - and a log which provided a convenient place on which to sit to eat the rest of our lunch.

We continued around the edge of George Wood (more bluebells) and then across fields to the pond on the outskirts of Streatley, where we rejoined the route that I think we followed last time we were here. We soon parted company with our previous route again; last time I think that we walked straight down the road into the village (I think this was because we were anxious we might miss the Chequers Inn, where we were staying) but the route of both actually takes a path to the west of the road, and that we the route we followed today. This brought us out into the churchyard and so to the Church. It was really weird; I knew we had stayed at the Chequers Inn, and visited the Church before setting off for Whipsnade on 14th November 2011, so why didn't I recognise it? Thankfully I did recognise the Church from the other side and also the Chequers Inn next door.

We took the road out of Streatley towards Sharpenhoe, turning left onto a path just before the end of the village, close to a radio mast. We reached the wooded edge of the Chiltern escarpment, and turned left; the John Bunyan Trail actually goes left and right at this point because we were joining the spur out to the Sundon Hills Country Park. This section, shared with the Chiltern Way and the Icknield Way Path, was delightful. We were walking away from Sharpenhoe Clappers (a spur heading out from the main ridge of the Chilterns) and we had good views back all the way to the Sundon Hills Country Park, which is where we had left the car.

Following leg