Dunstable and the Olympic Torch

We Missed the Olympic Torch Relay Nearer Home, but Caught up in Dunstable

Bedfordshire

Why Dunstable?

Why Dunstable? Well, we were staying nearby, cat sitting while daughter, son-in-law and infant were on holiday. I drove them to the airport yesterday (you can drive to Luton airport without ever encountering Luton, which is a blessing).

This morning they were in Rome, Lynne and I were in Dunstable. Where would I rather be? Which would I rather be writing about? But Rome has been extensively chronicled by great writers, inconsequential bloggers and everybody in between, so what is there to add? And today Dunstable has something else, something Rome has not seen for over fifty years. Today Dunstable has the Olympic Torch.

Having missed the torch twice when it was much closer to home, we made an effort this time and were in Dunstable High Street by 6.15. The torch was not due for an hour and a half, but we wanted a good spot, and we wanted to be in the front.

The Varying Architectural Styles of Dunstable

The charms of Rome are well known and obvious, those of Dunstable more hidden - if they exist at all. We first drove through the town five years ago and immediately it felt wrong. I have been there many times since and still struggle to find anything to like about it. It is not the people, by and large they seem as decent as anywhere else, nor is the town especially poor or down at heel; indeed some regard it as the posh end of Luton (though that may say more about Luton than it does about Dunstable). It is not even that the buildings are especially ugly, well not all of them. It is the ensemble that is wrong, the way they are put together.

The charms of Dunstable

Dunstable has at least one building in every architectural style from medieval to last week, and they have been plonked down side by side with no attempt at harmony, no thought as to how they may look among their neighbours. It makes Dunstable seem sad and unloved. I feel sorry for the current planners; it all went wrong so long ago there is no way back now, no non-apocalyptic exit to their blind alley. Perhaps John Betjeman’s ‘friendly bombs’ should have been aimed at Dunstable, not Slough.

Banks can go bust in unison, but they can't co-ordinate their buildings, Barclays and Lloyds TSB, Dunstable

The Crowd Gathers

To give them their due, the good people of Dunstable turned out in their thousands, lining the High Street several deep for as far as the eye could see. And they were the ‘good people’ so why such a huge police presence? They arrived by the minibus load, they arrived on motorbikes, they arrived in marked and unmarked police cars and they hovered overhead in a helicopter. There were enough of them to deal with a riot, but the worst that was ever going to happen was a little dropping of litter, and that mostly by accident rather than malice.

The crowds begin to gather, Dunstable High Street

Police and Sponsors

The staff of the local branch of Lloyds TSB were busy unrolling a banner, handing out balloons and ensuring that everybody who wanted had green and yellow ribbons to wave – by sheer co-incidence Lloyds TSB colours.

Nothing happened for quite a long time. The road was eventually closed to traffic, though the occasional police car drove by, their occupants waving to the crowd as though they were the attraction.

Then nothing happened again. At 7.40, right on time, a flurry of police motorcycles – enough outriders to bring a smile to the face of a third world dictator – heralded the advent of the sponsor’s floats. I have mentioned one of them already (because of their local effort), but I have no intention of naming the others.

Plenty of police outriders, Dunstable High Street

The Torch Arrives

Another wait, then more out-riders, and finally the torch arrived. The torch bearers are variously celebrities, athletes and people who have contributed something to the local community. The girl with the torch was not a celebrity (as far as I know – the world seems full of ‘celebrities’ I have never heard of) and did not move like an athlete, so we gave her a cheer for being a good citizen. And then she was gone and it was all over.

At last the Olympic Torch, Dunstable High Street

I was glad we went to see it, fleeting as it was, and I was looking forward to the Olympics, though I only intended watching on television. I hope it will, in the end, be about the community and the athletes, but it is well on the way to being hijacked by the sponsors and the police.[Update: I think most would agree my worries were unfounded and I now wish I had gone to one of the events - I would have liked to see Ussain Bolt, but I would have settled for an afternoon of weightlifting]

As we left Dunstable I wondered if the best use of the torch might have been to burn the place down and start again. Sadly the wettest June on record had given way to an equally damp July - it would be nigh on impossible to set fire to anything.

Old Sodbury to Swineford: Day15 of the South West Odyssey (English Branch)

The South West Odyssey was a long distance walk.

Five like-minded people started in 2008 from the Cardingmill Valley in Shropshire and by walking three days a year finished at Start Bay on the South Devon Coast in May 2019.

Saturday promised to be a much better day; the rain had gone, the wind had dropped and there was even a patch of blue in the sky.

Brian, Mike & Francis prepare to leave the Dog Inn
Old Sodbury

After another hearty breakfast and with Alison duly re-fetched from Yate station we set off southwards across the fields towards the hamlet of Coomb's End.

Nearing Coomb's End

From here we crossed the Dodington Estate with its sweeping vistas of sheep bespattered parkland dotted with clumps of trees for raising pheasants. The park was laid out by Capability Brown in 1764 when the estate was owned by the Codrington family, who made their fortune from sugar plantations in the West Indies. It is now the home – or one of the homes - of James Dyson who bought the estate in 2003 after making his fortune rather more ethically from bagless vacuum cleaners and air-blades rather than by exploiting several hundred slaves.


Dodington Park

A few deer would have made the view perfect, but we had to settle for a large metal sculpture of a stag watching us motionlessly from a distant bank.

Plenty of sheep but no deer,
Dodington Park

The park provides a painless way of slipping back onto the Cotswold scarp. At its highest point we could look back over the valley and see the pylons of the Severn Bridge in the distance.

Crossing the park took some time, crossing the A46 was quicker, much less pleasant and considerably more dangerous. Having survived that it was only a short step to the village of Tormarton where we were meeting Heather, Francis and Alison’s daughter, who last walked with us on Day 11 (Perrott’s Brook).



Tormarton

Heather walked out of Tormarton on the path she had expected us to arrive on and saw us across the fields on another path, though we did not see her. Even after this early sighting we had considerable difficulty finding each other. Several phone calls simply added to the confusion.

Tormarton is not large, so we eventually we succeeded and together left the village via the bridge over the M4.

Over the M4

On the southern side we crossed fields of barley, the first cereal crop we had seen since Bredon Hill in 2010.



A lone poppy in a field of barley

The Cotswold Way took us west along Beacon Lane and back towards the motorway. Brian was very proud of his new walking poles which he had bought for the princely sum of 100 Hong Kong dollars (£8) in Stanley Market. They had been unveiled on Thursday and bent on Friday so they no longer telescoped properly and Brian was walking with a lightning conductor sticking up above his head. It is a wonderful place, Stanley Market, sometimes you get a bargain, sometimes you get what you pay for.



Brian carries his periscope along Beacon Lane

We re-crossed the A46 and visited the adjacent picnic site for coffee. With a car park and vehicle inspection centre it is not the most scenic spot, but looks fine if you point the camera in the right direction.

A sedge of Cranes at the feeding table

The Cotswold Way runs briefly parallel to the M4 giving an interesting view of the motorway climbing the hill opposite.

An unusual view of the M4

We turned south and followed the boundary of another cereal field for the next kilometre. Yesterday’s rain had smeared the compacted soil with a slick of wet clay, making it difficult walking; at times it was a struggle to keep upright.

I was glad to reach the end of this field and we soon found ourselves traversing the edge of a small valley below the wall of Dyrham Park. The valley side was covered with strip lynchets, banks of earth built up on the downslope of the field by generations of ploughing. Lynchets usually indicate Celtic farming and although they appear regularly on maps they are not always so easy to see on the ground.

Strip lynchets on the far side of the valley

We descended to the hamlet of Dyrham, passing the western frontage of Dyrham Park, built in 1694. The eastern front, the work of a different architect, was built a few years later. The house, constructed for William Blathwayt, Secretary of War to William III, is now owned by the National Trust. It featured in the films Remains of the Day (1993) and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) as well as a 2010 episode of Doctor Who.



The western front of Dyrham Park

Beyond the village we found ourselves in the flattest land we had encountered since crossing the Severn Valley at the end of 2009 and start of 2010.



Approaching Doynton

The signed paths did not match up with those on the map so we arrived in Doynton unsure as to exactly where we were. Lynne waited patiently outside the pub while we indulged in a lengthy and misguided circumnavigation of the village before joining her. The Cross House was doing good business on a Saturday lunchtime, and the weather had improved so much that we chose to drink our lunch in the garden – though Lynne did not think it was warm enough to remove her fleece.



A glass of lunch in the garden of the Cross House
Doynton

As we left we passed a cricket match – what did we expect in an English village on a sunny Saturday afternoon? I merely took the picture and moved on, it was only later that I wondered what the fielding captain was doing. Why had he left so much space on the leg side? Why is the batsman not already shaping to work the ball that way? What is going on here?



Doynton cricket club - questionable tactics

With these questions still unasked we headed up Toghill Lane, climbing the Cotswold scarp for the seventh time in three days. Over the A420 we continued along the top of the hill to join Freezinghill Lane, a B road which was narrow and very busy. It was warmer than its name suggests, but the traffic made it an uncomfortable place to be and we were stuck with it for some 500m. We found what should have been our exit but the footpath sign had been reclaimed by the hedge and there was no way through.



The wooden footpath sign had been reclaimed by the hedge
Freezinghill Lane

We backtracked to a gateway, and improvised our own route through the long grass.......


through the long grass

.....and down Freezing Hill.

Down Freezing Hill

Once we had descended there was nothing for it but to start our eighth and final ascent. The Cotswolds may not be the largest of hills, and the scarp may be higher in some places than others, but climbing up and down it nine times in three days is hard work. Hanging Hill is a grassy slope, the path zig-zagging upwards through a herd of cows. Reaching the top, we arrived at the site of the Battle of Lansdown.

Hanging Hill, site of the Battle of Lansdown in 1643

The battle, on July the 5th 1643, was not one of the major confrontations of the Civil War, but it did involve some 10 000 men and resulted in the deaths of 300 of them, mostly Royalists. It was a Royalist victory, in that they pushed the Parliamentarian army from their hilltop stronghold, but they lost so many men they were unable to complete their strategic aim of taking Bath.

From the top we had views over the outskirts of Bristol, the rest of the city stretching away into the distance.

Bristol from the top of Hanging Hill

Tracking along the top of the hill, we failed to find the remains of the Roman villa marked on the map, but Lansdown Golf Course was easier to locate. The golf club had signed a route outside the course, but Francis was adamant that we should take the slightly shorter right-of-way round top of the scarp. This involved walking along the edge of a couple of fairways and we were fortunate that no shouts of ‘fore’ came our way.

The long descent started down the golf course access road towards the hamlet of North Stoke. Somewhere along this path we entered Somerset having taken 8 days to cross Gloucestershire (though hardly in a straight line). We finished the descent on yet another sunken lane which deposited us at a picnic site in Swineford near the banks of the ‘Bristol’ Avon, not to be confused with the ‘Warwickshire’ Avon which we crossed (in Worcestershire!) in 2010, nor any of the Avons in Hampshire, Devon or Strathspey.

Down to North Stoke

We had survived a day of rain and a day of wind and enjoyed a day of sunshine. Perhaps it will be sunshine all the way when (all being well) we meet here in 2013 for the next instalment; and perhaps it won't. All that remained was to return various people to their cars and then to drive home. For us that meant a trip from Swineford (near North Stoke) to Swynnerton (near Stoke-on-Trent) - from a place where pigs can cross a river, to a homestead where pigs are kept; a feeble effort from a region that can offer such nominal splendours as Pucklechurch, Mangotsfield and Wickwar.

The South West Odyssey (English Branch)

Introduction

Day 1 to 3 (2008);Cardingmill Valley to Great Whitley

Day 4 to 6 (2009) Great Whitely to Upton-on-Severn via the Malvern Ridge

Day 7 to 9 (2010) Upton-on-Severn to Andoversford
Day 10 (2011) Andoversford to Perrott's Brook

Day 11 (2011) Perrott's Brook to the Round Elm Crossroads

Day 12 (2011) Walking Round Stroud

Day 13 (2012) Stroud to North Nibley

Day 14 (2012) North Nibley to Old Sodbury

Day 15 (2012) Old Sodbury to Swineford

Day 16 (2013) Along the Chew Valley

Day 17 (2013) Over the Mendips to Wells

Day 18 (2013) Wells to Glastonbury 'The Mountain Route'

Day 19 (2014) Glastonbury to Langport

 Day 20 (2014) Along the Parrett and over the Tone

 Day 21 (2014) Into the Quantocks

Day 22 (2015) From the Quantocks to the Sea

Day 23 (2015) Watchet, Dunster and Dunkery Hill

Day 24 (2015) Dunkery Beacon to Withypool
Day 25 (2016) Entering Devon and Leaving Exmoor
Day 26 (2016) Knowstone to Black Dog on the Two Moors Way
Day 27 (2016) Morchard Bishop to Copplestone
Day 28 (2017) Down St Mary to Drewsteignton
Day 29 (2017) Drewsteignton to Bennett's Cross
Day 30 (2017) Bennett's Cross to Lustleigh
Day 31 (2018) Southwest Across the Moor from Lustleigh
Day 32 (2018): South to Ugborough
Day 33 (2018): Ugborough to Ringmore
Day 34 (2019): Around the Avon Estuary to Hope Cove
Day 35 (2019): Hope Cove to Prawle Point
Day 36 (2019): Prawle Point to Start Bay: The End
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The Last Post

That's All Folks - The Odyssey is over

North Nibley to Old Sodbury: Day 14 of the South West Odyssey (English Branch)

The South West Odyssey was a long distance walk.
Five like-minded people started in 2008 from the Cardingmill Valley in Shropshire and by walking three days a year finished at Start Bay on the South Devon Coast in May 2019.

Gloucestershire

Stroud District

I have long been a connoisseur of place names, both the magnificent (Krasnoyarsk, Lithuania, Samarkand) and the faintly ridiculous (Piddletrenthide, Erfurt, Yonkers). Day 14 started and finished at places worth visiting for their names alone.

After a hearty breakfast and a trip to fetch Alison from Yate station, we headed out to face whatever the weather might throw at us. The rain had mostly moved north during the night, but the wind was still gusting strongly and we had a rather huddled look as we posed in front of the Black Horse

A fine North Nibley morning
(picture credit: Francis)

North Nibley occupies a small plateau 80 metres above the Severn Valley, the Tyndale Monument is perched on top of the Cotswold scarp a further 80 metres above the village.

To reach the monument we walked up a narrow gully and then climbed up its side with the aid of some rough steps. Being sheltered from the howling wind was a relief, but the noise it made in the trees and the precarious way some of them were anchored on the steep slope made it feel like a dangerous place. Hearing a sharp crack behind me I turned expecting to see a falling bough, but nothing happened.

The monument stands on a spur so windswept I had difficulty holding the camera steady. It commemorates William Tyndale, who certainly spent his youth in North Nibley and may have been born there. After he published his English translation of the Bible in 1525, a grateful church had him burnt as a heretic. The monument, built 1866, seems a rather belated recognition of his efforts, but building monuments was a popular job creation scheme in the mid-1800s.

The Tyndale Monument above
North Nibley

It is possible to climb the 34 metre high tower, but as we had difficult standing on the ground beside it none of us felt the need to be blown off the top, and anyway the view would have been largely of mist. Instead we battled our way across the top of Nibley Knoll and into the welcome, if hazardous, shelter of Westridge Wood.

Across Nibley Knoll

The wind had moderated by the time we reached Wotton Hill above Wotton-under-Edge. A sharp descent brought us into the streets of the first town we had walked through since Winchcombe in 2010.


On Wotton Hill

Like Winchcombe, Wotton is built of Cotswold stone and manages to look quaint without being twee. It has all the usual facilities, some of which we used (an ATM) and others we looked at but reluctantly accepted they were unsuitable for the present occasion (a spectacular cake shop).



Through Wotton-under-Edge

Also like Winchcombe, Wotton also has several handsome almshouses which are still in use though the poverty they were built to alleviate left Wotton many decades ago.

Almshouses
Wotton-under-Edge

Once through the town we climbed back onto the edge and paused for coffee near the top of Blackquarries Hill. We picked a sheltered spot, but the wind had risen again and the next part of our route required us to walk straight into the gale across an exposed summit.

From here to Wortley Hill – actually a spur overlooking the village of Wortley – we were buffeted by moisture laden winds.

The descent to Wortley was down a long sunken lane. In several places fallen trees lay across the top of the banks, though none of them had come down in the current storm.



Down the Sunken Lane to Wortley

We also passed this magnificent fungus growing on a well-rotted log. Exhaustive research (ten minutes Googling and a glance at Collins Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools) leads me to believe it is Trametes Cinnabarina, though I say this with no great confidence.



Trametes Cinnabarina
(maybe)

We touched the edge of the hamlet of Wortley from where field paths took us on to Alderley....



Leaving Wortley

...and then a minor road took us to Hillesley. It went down and then up, but after hopping on and off the scarp twice in the morning such gentle slopes were a relief.

The Fleece in Hillesley was our intended lunch stop, but I spotted the ‘for sale’ sign a long way off and walked the last hundred metres with foreboding. We were six months late for lunch. A group of villagers, I have since learned, are trying to raise the money to buy the pub, but they are struggling and in the meantime Hillesley has to be added to the growing list of publess villages. [The revived Fleece was local CAMRA Pub of the Year 2018, currently (July 20) closed for pandemic, but will re-open.]

We might have already known this had Alison deployed her smart phone earlier. The map showed a pub in Hawkesbury Upton, two kilometres further down our route and Alison quickly confirmed it had a website, which does not prove it is open. A phone call confirmed they were.

We briefly continued along the minor road before leaving it to climb the scarp again – thankfully it is a lot lower here – to the splendidly named Splatt’s Barn. A farm track then pointed us straight at the Somerset Monument. Somewhere between Hillesly and the monument we left the District of Stroud and entered South Gloucestershire.

A farm track pointing straight at the Somerset Monument

Strangely similar to the Tyndale Monument but built twenty years earlier in 1846, it commemorates Robert Henry Edward Somerset, a general who fought beside Wellington at Waterloo. Building towers and columns in memory of the notable dead was fashionable at the time - though Nelson (column built 1840) had already bagged the best site.

The Somerset Monument
Hillesley

Approaching Hawkesbury Upton we passed this sign. Given the rate of attrition of country pubs the name might be prophetic.



Roadsign
Hawkesbury Upton

Hawkesbury Upton is a larger village than Hillesley and the Beaufort Arms was both open and doing good business. I phoned Lynne whilst enjoying a glass of lunch to find she was at Horton Court, a mere two kilometres away, where it was raining heavily. It was a very local shower as we had encountered little rain in the morning and would meet none during the afternoon. The wind also dropped after lunch and although it was hardly a ‘nice day’ conditions for walking were pleasant enough.

The enforced revision of our lunch plans had required a small diversion from our planned route and the start of the field path back to the Cotswold Way had disappeared under a new estate. Somehow Francis divined the right route and we then followed the top of the low scarp until we were above Horton Court were the rain Lynne reported had long disappeared.

The path above Horton Court

Horton Court is a 16th century manor house now in the care of the National Trust, but all we could see from our vantage point was the top of the church tower.



Horton Court is down there somewhere

I am a bit vague about where we went next. The map shows the Cotswold Way descending the scarp almost to Horton Court and then following the minor road to the village of Horton. We followed the Cotswold way signs, but they led us first along the scarp…..



Mike and Brian look down the scarp into the bottomless abyss that is
the Severn Valley

…. and then south east to a small hill fort before descending directly into the village, a route not shown on the map.

At the start of the descent we passed this building…..



A fitting home for owls and swallows

….. which was constructed as a millennium project for the use of nesting barn owls and swallows. Whether a vote of thanks was ever passed by a parliament of owls I do not know, but the only swallows I saw were in the Beaufort Arms.

From Horton field paths took us to Little Sodbury…..



Field paths from Horton to Little Sodbury

….and past the low, compact 19th century church of St Adeline. Little Sodbury is a ‘Thankful’ or ‘Blessed’ village, phrases coined in the 1930s for those settlements that lost no servicemen in the First World War. A 2010 survey established that there were 54 civil parishes in England and Wales which were so ‘blessed’, three of them in Gloucestershire (none in Staffordshire). The only village in Gloucestershire that is ‘doubly blessed’ (i.e. 'blessed' in both World Wars) is Upper Slaughter, which proves that God does irony – assuming (s)he exists.



St Adeline's, Little Sodbury

Simple, flat field paths took us the last kilometre and a half to Old Sodbury and the sanctuary of the Dog Inn.



Arriving in Old Sodbury (picture credit: Francis)

The South West Odyssey (English Branch)
Introduction
Day 1 to 3 (2008) Cardingmill Valley to Great Whitley
Day 4 to 6 (2009) Great Whitely to Upton-on-Severn via the Malvern Ridge
Day 7 to 9 (2010) Upton-on-Severn to Andoversford
Day 10 (2011) Andoversford to Perrott's Brook
Day 11 (2011) Perrott's Brook to the Round Elm Crossroads
Day 12 (2011) Walking Round Stroud
Day 13 (2012) Stroud to North Nibley
Day 14 (2012) North Nibley to Old Sodbury
Day 15 (2012) Old Sodbury to Swineford
Day 16 (2013) Along the Chew Valley
Day 17 (2013) Over the Mendips to Wells
Day 18 (2013) Wells to Glastonbury 'The Mountain Route'
Day 19 (2014) Glastonbury to Langport
Day 20 (2014) Along the Parrett and over the Tone
Day 21 (2014) Into the Quantocks
Day 22 (2015) From the Quantocks to the Sea
Day 23 (2015) Watchet, Dunster and Dunkery Hill
Day 24 (2015) Dunkery Beacon to Withypool
Day 25 (2016) Entering Devon and Leaving Exmoor
Day 26 (2016) Knowstone to Black Dog on the Two Moors Way
Day 27 (2016) Morchard Bishop to Copplestone
Day 28 (2017) Down St Mary to Drewsteignton
Day 29 (2017) Drewsteignton to Bennett's Cross
Day 30 (2017) Bennett's Cross to Lustleigh
Day 31 (2018) Southwest Across the Moor from Lustleigh
Day 32 (2018) South to Ugborough
Day 33 (2018) Ugborough to Ringmore
Day 34 (2019) Around the Avon Estuary to Hope Cove
Day 35 (2019):  Hope Cove to Prawle Point
Day 36 (2019) Prawle Point to Start Bay: The End
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The Last Post

That's All Folks - The Odyssey is done.