You may have noticed the short break. Two weeks ago I trod on a stone when out for the normal Saturday morning not parkrun with Helen. This hurt quite a bit at the time, but I managed to jog home the last kilometre with a bit of a limp. This gradually got a lot worse, so by Sunday it was all I could do to hop one and a half kilometres round part of the Black course at the Guildford Orienteers event at Puttenham Common. I hardly left the house for the next week, just about managed a short run on the Saturday and Sunday, and then had another week off. But yesterday I got round five kilometres OK with Helen, so we decided to go for a short leg to see how things went.
James decided on Thursday to give up on London and move home. For three days we were in the odd situation that this leg was in Tier 3 but St Albans was in Tier 2, but today all of Hertfordshire is in Tier 4 so off we set. We parked by the café and headed round the edge of Shenley Park. Several noisy parakeets made an appearance and more showed up throughout the day. First photo stop of the day was for the view over the Denis Compton Oval at Shenley Cricket Club.
We dropped down through the woods and crossed the road into the open fields behind the Arsenal and Watford training grounds. There was a brief debate about exactly where the path was but we headed in vaguely the right direction between various horse fields and ended up at the road by the farm as expected. This was meant to be a familiar leg since it was another area where Helen had lost a lot of D of E expeditions in the past, but I certainly hadn't done much of it before.
The path passed the large house at Rabley Park behind a high hedge and we came to a small stone monument at the end of the garden. This was awkwardly located by a bend in the fence with the plaque at just the wrong angle, but we could read enough to see that this was a memorial to Lord Nelson. Apparently Nelson stopped here to visit family on the way to Trafalgar in 1805. But the Earl of Warwick probably didn't die here after the Battle of Barnet in 1471.
We were now within sight of the M25 and could follow Catherine Bourne all the way to it. The stream passed yet more muddy fields of turnips and a picturesque ford before going under the motorway. We passed a traffic sign warning about rising Covid cases and then reached the Black Horse pub in South Mimms. This had been one of the places we used to go to for lunch when I was working in Borehamwood, but I hadn't been back for at least 23 years.
That completed a truncated day on the Hertfordshire Way but at least we had ticked off another six kilometres. My foot was sore but I was still managing to keep up, and we set off through South Mimms to St Giles church. This was a convenient place for a snack in what was a large and predominantly wooded churchyard. The entrance to the churchyard was dominated by a very large tomb complete with skeleton carvings and an extensive covering of lichen. It turned out that this was Sir John Austen MP, Baronet of Derehams, South Mimms, and Highgate who died in 1741, and his sister Arabella who died in 1714. So it had been there longer than America had been a country as James pointed out. But then so had most of the church which was built between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.
The road headed steadily upwards past a canal boat sitting in a farmyard for no obvious reason and over the M25 and then we set off across the fields towards the imaginatively named village of Ridge located at the end of the ridge running round from Shenley. The mud was somehow getting even deeper as we squelched upwards and finally arrived at a farm complete with two fields full of Shetland ponies. The obvious route out of the field turned out not to be the footpath. This was made quite clear by the man who shouted at us and less clear by the faded sheet of A4 paper pinned hopefully to a fence post and not visible from anywhere in particular.
I took the standard photograph to prove we had visited St Margarets Church and it was then more fields full of mud and standing water as we headed along the top of the ridge back towards Shenley. St Albans Abbey was clearly visible just below the skyline over ten kilometres away to the north west.
We came to a small wood that was full of flocks of tits and finches flying in and out to the adjacent hedgerows and sunflowers growing along the edge of the field. A buzzard flew over and landed on a distant lamppost and a great spotted woodpecker could be heard drumming in the distance. Combined with flocks of starlings, redwings and parakeets that we had seen earlier this seemed to be one of the better days for birds.
The path dropped down into the last valley before Shenley through more turnips towards two large fields that from a distance appeared a very bright green. Having reached them these turned out not to be wheat as I was expecting but instead a dense covering of linseed plants, only a few centimetres tall.
The final stretch along the road through Shenley proved a bit of a grind as my foot had now decided it had nearly had enough. Helen made sure to point out the housing estate that used to be a nursery and where we had bought a Christmas tree in 1997. This involved a two-week old James in his shiny new blue and orange pram which was luckily big enough to have a large tree wedged on top of it for the walk home. Google Streetview has the whole story from The Garden Nursery in 2008 to a building site in 2012 to the finished houses in 2014.
The first red kites of the day appeared as we approached the pond, with three floating backward and forwards across the road. The final historic site of the day was the Shenley Cage next to the pond. This small but substantial building dating from the eighteenth century was used to lock up local offenders.
And with a final sprint through the woods of Shenley Park, with Helen setting off as if she was aiming for a personal best parkrun time, that was it for the shortest leg so far.
