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Misadventures in the Cotswold Edgelands.

This should be decent country for a walk - and parts of the route are really nice - but the bad bits were so bad that this route is currently a non-starter as a Slow Way.

I set out to walk from Dursley to Thornbury on a sultry day. It was good for the first few miles (as you’d expect given that a fair portion of that was along the Cotswold Way) but it was all change once the route departed the national trail at North Nibley, leaving the dependable footpath-maintenance territory of the Cotswold AONB and heading into a Bermuda Triangle of unwelcoming arable with little signage or path infrastructure.

First the suggested path south out of the village, which partly routes through someone’s garden, was almost impassable with brambles, so I found my way round via Nibley House Farm instead along a right of way which is not quite as marked on the map, then headed happily enough downhill to the arable zone where the bigger problems started and the Slow Way eventually made it into a select group of routes I have given up on altogether.

Usually such failures use a dangerous road, or are blocked by scrub, new building or major flood works, and once (in the western highlands of Scotland) simply headed straight up a cliff! No such drama with this one. It was simply that after traipsing about for a while on looking for a rerouted bridleway north of Elmcote, then improvising on a farm access track and rounding the long, long, edge of a vast inhospitable bean field, I was faced with a vegetated ditch that I couldn't see into ahead of a brambly gap into a wheat field that had absolutely no sign of any ongoing path. Checked my GPS. Yup. That was the way!

Knowing that there were further arable fields to come and any forced backtrack might just get longer and more unpleasant, I resentfully retraced my footsteps back around the bean field, fantasising about a future, kinder world in which each arable field must, by law, have a five metre headland full of wildflowers for walkers and nature around their edges. There was barely a creature to be seen in the area except one desperate bumble bee that came to investigate my bright blue shirt.

I then peered at the next path immediately to the south (from Elmcote) which didn’t look much of an appealing prospect either (but possibly works earlier in the year or after harvest time as there was a new post with a yellow arrow on it, pointing confidently into the wheaty oblivion) and opted to make my hot weary way around via lanes and a track west of Kitesnest Farm instead. I have no idea whether there is a right of way through that way but I didn’t give a rat’s backside by that point.

Then, immediately west of the railway, there were some further access challenges around Cosy Farm, including a locked gate out of a little poached paddock full of beautiful but jumpy thoroughbreds and a passageway full of nettles and hemlock behind a dressage practise arena, which had narrow electrical wire tied across the the stile at shoulder height going in. Nice! Thanks!

Most of the remainder of the route I know from previous walks and is generally fine with only some more boring arable, a few big cronky stiles with wire under them and the usual nettlesome corners and occasional scratchy overgrowth typical of high summer walking in farmland. However, the route plot is totally wayward around Pound House Farm near the Thornbury end and needs to be redrawn, and I know that there is a slightly longer but much nicer route option in the Tortworth area.....

On this latter part of the route I met several groups of teenagers doing their Duke of Edinburgh award hike, complete with pots and pans hanging from their full rucksacks. I chatted with one group of polite, friendly girls. They were on their way up to Dursley. Hope they had a better route than this one and didn’t get put off.

By the time I got to the edge of Thornbury, I was an hour behind schedule, had walked 13 miles already instead of the 11 billed and couldn't face the trek into town along the B-road, so I jumped on the bus back home at the first opportunity. Do I feel up for figuring out a better route? Hmmm.... maybe. Give me a while to recover!

But to finish on a positive note:- some small pleasures.... The skylarks are still singing and a green woodpecker flew up off the path right in front of me, yaffling indignantly, and then sat on a nearby branch, allowing me to admire it close up. I also quite liked that single giant wind turbine on the top of hill above Rockhampton that was whirring gently around in the breeze, and I was charmed by some fence posts made of crack willow branches which had rooted and were sprouting!.

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