There was time for one final leg before Christmas in the convenient weather window on Christmas Eve. It was only just above freezing with a cold northerly wind, but at least the sky was blue and the sun was shining. Unfortunately, what it was shining on mostly was mud. Where it wasn't shining on mud it was shining on the standing water on top of the mud. I have described some of the previous legs as muddy. But this was the next level.
After the false impression given by a hundred yards of road and what felt like a run down a private driveway we got to the first field. The gateway was ankle deep in mud. The grass in the field was covered in puddles and every step was a bit slippery. After making it through the fields we got to a gravel track alongside the A1(M). But this was no better, being flooded in several places, so there was much hanging on to the fence as you tried to stay out of the worst of it.
At least the tunnel under the A1(M) was dry and we then splashed past the ford at the junction of Mimmshall Brook and Potters Bar Brook. A solar farm was visible on the hill off to the left before we reached the industrial estate to confirm we had arrived in Potters Bar. Back in the days when there used to be major orienteering events and Buff used to sponsor them this is where Helen used to come to collect prizes from the Buff warehouse.
We left the industrial estate through a tunnel under the East Coast Main Line and emerged onto Potters Bar golf course. It was immediately obvious that this hadn't been used as a golf course for a fair time since the grass on the fairways was rampant. It has some quite reasonable contour features and scattered woodland and would probably be worth mapping if it escapes being turned into houses or hotels as seems to be the current plan.
The golf course apparently has two remaining World War II pill boxes although we only found one of them. This inevitably triggered a discussion of the three-day orienteering event that James and I had gone to in Albania which included controls on some of the 173,000 concrete bunkers that are still scattered around everywhere you go there.
Leaving the golf course James caught sight of a crenelated brick tower on the far hillside which we would get to an hour later. There was then a stretch along the roads past some rather nice houses until we got to a gate with a stream flowing out of it onto the main road. This was coming from the National Trust parkland at Morven. The orienteering map I produced in 2014 would need quite a lot more blue on it to reflect the current state of the ground.
There was standing water and mud all the way through Morven and this continued on the paths as we headed north to the somewhat arbitrary end to today's Hertfordshire Way section at the corner of the garden of Northaw Place. This part of Hertfordshire has surprisingly few footpaths and trying to find out and back routes that don't involve extensive repetition is surprisingly difficult. Stopping here avoided running two kilometres mainly on roads to Northaw and then straight back again.
The next path proved that the Hertfordshire Way didn't have the monopoly on mud. Eventually we reached the Great North Road (A1000) and crossed it to run up the hill through Swanley Bar. At the top of the hill stands Folly Arch which is what James had seen from the golf course earlier. This is a gateway into the Gobions estate. The fields by the arch gave views back towards St Albans and the Abbey was yet again visible on the far hillside.
The gate into the woods at the bottom of the hill was as muddy as any we had come to, and we decided it was time for a snack stop on the convenient bench just inside the woods. Three aged Bassett hounds plodded slowly over the bridge towards us, their legs only just long enough to keep their stomachs out of the mud.
We headed off through the woods to discover the valley completely flooded with standing water as far as you could see under the trees. This time we ended up discussing the Estonian forests at the World Orienteering Championships in 2017 which looked remarkably similar. In that case the flooding was caused by beavers and their dams. The other highlight in the woods was the ruined outline of a building which turned out, after some later investigation, to be the remains of the former Brookmans Park sewage works. There is a lot more in Gobions Wood that we didn't get to see, but that is likely to feature at the end of the next leg since we will be coming back this way.
The mud and flooding continued and then unbelievably got worse. The last 200 metres onto the road had been used by a tractor and was closer to knee deep in places. For one horrible moment it looked like we might have to retrace our steps through this but luckily Helen pressed on and found there was a way through at the far end.
The big houses of Brookmans Park backed onto the stream along the next field edge and it almost felt like being back on the canal in Berkhamsted there were so many waterside seating areas. The far side of the field brought us to the East Coast Main Line again and we had to do a big dog leg south and back north to get across it. I had been fairly pessimistic about keeping up our record of seeing a red kite on every leg but there was one floating over the Royal Veterinary College alongside the railway.
After a few more fields and streams, including a strange path that had grass but no mud, we crossed a footbridge over a very full and fast-flowing Mimmshall Brook and headed up the road through Water End. This takes its name from the local swallow-holes where the various streams and brooks disappear underground into the chalk in the valley bottom, which is "another hydrogeological feature for which Hertfordshire is famous" according to my copy of "Hertfordshire Geology and Landscape".
The next bridge took us over the A1(M). And that will be the last motorway crossing of this lap of Hertfordshire. We have now crossed the A1(M) four times (three under, one over), the M1 twice (one under, one over) and the M25 four times (two under, two under). We'll get close to the M11 in Bishop's Stortford but we won't cross it, and anyway the county boundary runs along the M11 and doesn't cross it. It is beginning to feel like we are getting somewhere.
This slight northern detour took us past the cricket pitch (where Peter was famously chased by cows on a D of E expedition) and on to St Mary's Church, North Mymms. All that was left was to head up through North Mymms Estate passing the main house and gardens hidden behind high hedges. The brambles in the woods on either side seemed to be even thicker than when we first rejected this area as a possible orienteering area, and we then emerged into the rough open grassland in Potwells Valley. The path here was quite deep in water and mud, and a group of walkers cheered us on as we splashed past them. The path itself had running water down the middle as we did the final climb through a short section of runnable sweet chestnut woodland to the top of the hill in Hawkshead Wood.
Now it was just the narrow road down to South Mimms and the car and another leg was done. I admitted that I wasn't too sure I had any photos of note, but it seems to have turned out OK in the end.
