Shefford to Barton-le-Clay

This leg of the John Bunyan Trail includes rather a lot of road walking which is a pity; more positively, the final couple of miles runs close to the Chiltern Hills (Bunyan's "Delectable Mountains") with good views to them. We drove over from Norfolk to Barton-le-Clay in the late morning, with some delays as a result of a short single carriageway section on the A6, and left one car in a little car park at Ramsey Manor Lower School (TL086308). Then we drove back to Shefford by way of the A6 and the A507, and parked the other car in the long stay car park on Old Station Way (TL143392), as last week. We ate our lunch in the car before setting off; it was a dry afternoon if not particularly sunny.

From the car park we returned to Shefford's attractive High Street, then turned left onto New Street. This took us to a modern housing estate, but thankfully there was a clear route through. However beyond the housing estate there was a patch of rough ground leading to the A507, and here the route was not as shown on the map - instead of cutting across the rough ground as shown by the green diamonds on the map, we took the path around the edge. We reached the River Hit (from which the town of Hitchin takes its name and a very small river at this stage) and crossed to the opposite side of the A507. Here the signposted route was not the shortest; we stayed alongside the river through an attractive little wood, then turned left - this brought us back to a rather obvious path which we could have followed all the way from the road!

The path took us across a ploughed field near Polehangar Farm, but fortunately it was quite dry and others had been this way before us, so we didn't suffer from the usual heavy soil on boots problem. We climbed, with good views back to Campton Church. As we approached the village of Meppershill we reached a well-equipped children's playground, but it was all fenced off and even the hedges had covers over them! It appears that this whole area is the site of a new housing development. We reached the main road through Meppershall and turned right. After half a mile or so we left the road again and took a path past an attractive church. Once again the route as shown on the map, and as signposted as the John Bunyan Trail on the ground, was not the most obvious route - we turned to the right and then to the left but there was a perfectly decent path straight across a field by the Motte and Bailey.

We could see a church in the distance; this was All Saints Church, Shillington which remained in sight for much of the rest of today's walk. The track we were on took us past two scarecrows and down to the road at Bury End. After about a mile of walking through Shillington, we climbed up to the Church. It's not the most attractive of places, but it is distinctive - and large - and it is positioned on a hill with attractive buildings around it; John Betjeman called the church the "Cathedral of the Chilterns". We headed downhill again, back to a road which we then followed out to the south of Shillington, past some pretty houses.

The route also took us past Shillington Manor, though we couldn't see the Manor from the road. Eventually we turned right onto a track across the fields. We followed this to a hedge boundary, then due south towards the Chiltern Hills near Pegsdon. The views of the hills were lovely. We turned to the right along Mill Lane, past a cottage, a lake (not visible) and a sewage works! - it was just slightly irritating that we were still on a tarmacked surface.

We turned to the left into the hamlet of Hexton, with quite a lot of activity centred on The Raven pub. We left Hexton past the Cricket Club and - at last - left the hard surface for a footpath. It was the footpath sign which identified that we were transiently in Hertfordshire and it was from the field that we crossed that we had the final view of the day back to Shillington Church.

We crossed two fields and eventually took a path into Barton-le-Clay, just a short distance from the School where we had left the car. We had a straightforward journey back to Shefford and then on to the Bedford South Premier Inn where we were staying.

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