Bedford

Bedford. For Richard, the town is associated with visits as a boy to see his Bedford Grandma. For me, it is a town just off my route between Norfolk and Milton Keynes; thankfully the southern bypass was built just before I started making the journey regularly in 2000, because before that you needed to go through the town, and you could expect to queue. Not a particularly pretty place. When Richard's father heard that we planned to walk along the River Great Ouse today, he mentioned the dirty, smelly gasworks.

If you are a regular reader of JordanWalks you'll realise that I seem quite frequently to say that a walk was more enjoyable than expected, but I can't remember a walk that was so much better than I'd expected as was the case today.

We did the walk on a free morning between a series of work events yesterday (for which Richard and I had travelled to Milton Keynes together) and a Newport Pagnell Singers rehearsal and concert. We stayed in the Bedford Travelodge; quite ordinary, though even that was better than expected. It was a pleasant summer day, just slightly on the warm side for walking but OK given that we had finished walking by 12.30

The only more industrial section was near the railway. We passed under one railway bridge, then there were railway sidings to our left and a few somewhat drunk people sitting by the path. We passed under a second, very low and graffiti-rich railway bridge; we could have avoided this by using a high level pedestrian/cycle bridge over the railway, but only if we'd been willing to climb up round spirals and then down again in similar fashion. Stooping to pass underneath the railway seemed an easier option!

We passed some distinctly upmarket apartment blocks on the other side of the river, then we reached 'County Bridge', near County Hall. The river was now wide and majestic. We continued straight ahead past a rowing club, with both rowers and canoeists preparing for action. We had to divert away from the river for a short distance in order to avoid building works, but this enabled us to see the Salvation Army's Bedford Congress Hall (significant because Richard's Grandma was a Salvationist) and the attractive street markets near the Church.

We passed under a road bridge and our route became a little unclear - there was an Ouse Valley Way sign pointing right, but the map clearly showed the route as leading left over a footbridge then right alongside the river. We followed the map and after several twists and turns, crossing a meadow and passing a marina, we came to a lovely section of path by the river, not tarmacked for once.

We emerged past a concrete waterway, a hive of activity with youngsters (from their minibuw, it would appear they were air cadets ) putting grey box-like things in place. We later discovered that this is the Cardington canoe slalom course, I hadn't expected all this boating activity around Bedford; it turns out that Etienne Stott (of 2012 Olympic fame) is a member of the Viking Kayak Club, some of whose members we had seen back in the centre of Bedford, so it's serious stuff.

We reached Cardington Lock, with two boats just passing through. We had decided to end our walk along the Ouse Valley Way somewhere round here, but in trying to find the route through Priory Country Park to the Bedford to Sandy cycle route, which we thought would give us a more direct route back to Bedford, we managed to take the wrong turning twice. However, the route we ended up taking was rather good; essentially around Priory Lake and then back to our outward route by the marina.