TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

A walk in the country looks peaceful enough, as seen on TV; but there is always the unexpected.

On one occasion, in September 1997, a visiting rambler arrived at The Plough in Ashmansworth for a drink. He had just completed a ten-mile circular walk. He said there was more helicopter noise on this walk he’d just done than in all his experience of walking in the English countryside, even including the military areas of Dartmoor and Salisbury Plain.

Half a century ago, some Newbury people took a walk from Crux Easton. When they returned to their cars, they found all the tyres had been let down but there was not a soul to be seen. A frisson of fear ran through the group.  It was rather like that Burt Reynolds movie Deliverance, where the town-dwellers, on holiday in the hills, are preyed upon by rustic half-wits who resent the intrusion. Perhaps we could market it as “The Crux Easton Experience.”

I once led a walk for the WI, accompanied by the children, from Ashmansworth to Woodcott Village Hall, like some kind of Pied Piper. It was a hot day in June. I had cleared the route the week before but, in just one week, the nettles and brambles had surged back and reclaimed the path. Needless to say, in that summer heat everyone had turned up with bare arms and legs, quite unsuitable for brambles and nettles. I went ahead with a machete, hacking back the undergrowth, with the eager children hard on my heels, oblivious of the flailing blade. Who needs the Amazon when we have the jungle and danger so close?

Things like these are part of the excitement of paths … but there’s also the striking difference you find once you leave the tarmac. Take the ‘Priests’ Path’ to Crux Easton: there’s beauty and variety all the way, every kind of ground underfoot, every kind of wayside flora, first enclosed and then with open sky, up and down hills, wheat-field and meadow, copses and forgotten lanes, glimpses of sheep and cows, with hills all round, and always the change of the seasons.

Our paths are rather like the church – perhaps not often used, but necessary to us. As our post-mistress Kate Thayer once put it: “I want to know they’re there,” she said. “If only I had the time …”

Agricola, February 2024