.jpg "Heading west under the A1(M) at Graveley")
The day started with a-two hour work meeting. Four people, four countries (England, the Netherlands, Belgium and Cyprus), three time zones. Such is the modern office environment. But luckily I managed to start it early so we were all set to go by mid-morning.
The first disaster became apparent as we got changed in the car park next to the church at Weston. It turned out that I had left the SD card from my camera in the PC at home, so I was restricted to my phone camera for the day. If nothing else this meant we went quite a lot quicker than we might have done since there was no excuse to stop to try to take any sort of artistic photo. It was just the occasional "this is what we saw" stops.
Before we managed to start Helen was accosted by a dog walker returning to the car next to ours, who was keen to discuss (or at least expound on) the merits of Skodas. He had a Yeti: I bet you didn't see that coming on a trip around the Hertfordshire Way. I settled for watching a kestrel hunting over the fields next to the church, which I guess was quite likely to be the one I had seen in the churchyard on leg 2.
The first section was through the mature parkland around Weston Park, with old oak trees scattered across rough grassland. This was easy running on the flat with no real excuse to stop. We covered nine kilometres in the first hour. I grabbed a quick photo of the ruins of the Church of St Etheldreda at Chesfield, which is apparently one of Hertfordshire's deserted villages. The ruins now seem to be part of Manor Farm and there was not really much to see. We pressed on to the huge open fields on the north edge of Stevenage with views down to the south dominated by the buildings of the Lister Hospital.
This is Forster Country and there are various signs around to prove it. E M Forster lived at Rooks Nest House which was a bit further down the hill from where we turned right to head back north. Once you have remembered the easy stuff, such as that he wrote "A Passage to India" and "A Room with a View" and "Howards End" (which gave us the phrase "Only Connect"), Wikipedia can fill you in with lesser-known bits such as that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature 16 times without ever winning it. But I still haven't read anything he wrote.
The rather smart farm on the edge of Gravely was busy with horsy people doing horsy things. Next door was St Mary's Church which was equally well looked after with neat lawns, topiary and trimmed hedges. Round the corner we found out how it was done. One man drove the tractor with a large bucket on the front. The other man stood in the digger bucket with an enormous hedge trimmer and was lifted up to attack the hedge.
The airstrip on the map turned out to be little more than some poorly mown grass and a faded windsock but just up the hill was a fruit farm with neat rows of apple trees and around the corner it became a caravan park. Quite who comes to Stevenage for a caravan holiday is not immediately obvious, but there were a few people there so obviously there is a demand. It's probably marketed as "convenient for the A1(M)", which was just a few hundred metres further on once we had managed the rather dodgy road crossing that involved steep steps down to a blind bend. And then it was under the A1(M) and we could really feel we were getting somewhere.
The route looped north towards Letchworth and then back south. We checked the road heading for Great Wymondley but it looked a bit narrow and fast, so we returned to the parallel path through the fields that led into the recreation ground. We passed a man having an animated discussion on his mobile phone, with a large metal detector and spade propped up next to him. It wasn't obvious he had found anything, but the field did have an excellent crop of stones to search through, as do so many that we have passed through (and indeed as does Helen's allotment).
Great Wymondley's church offering was St Mary The Virgin, and there followed an assortment of history with a motte and bailey in the adjacent field, Delamere House with associations with Cardinal Wolsey in view off to the west, and various Roman artefacts within a short distance.
A bridge under the East Coast Main Line brought us into Little Wymondley. I took photos of Helen next to The Plume of Feathers pub sign to mark the end of the leg: we would have finished at the village sign next to the pub if I had not failed to spot it, but that will have to wait until the next leg.
It was now lunchtime so it must be time for a church. We took the opportunity to shelter from the wind in the porch of St Mary's Church. The notice board was mainly memorable for the schedule of charges for various things you might decide the church could provide you with: weddings, baptisms, parish records extracts, burials with and without church services, and that sort of thing.
There was a short detour when we took the wrong exit from the churchyard, and a slightly longer detour trying to find the path around the fields next to the A1(M). Our excuse was that the path was overgrown and hidden by a parked van when we first investigated it. The footbridge over the railway wobbled more than you might have liked as a train went under: it was a Hitachi IEP so I can claim a minor involvement. We did a tour of A1(M) Junction 8 and then picked up the cycle path to Graveley. This brought us into a part of the village we had missed earlier, including the duck pond with the impressive Gothic House behind it.
We picked up Church Road and which helpfully took us back towards the church. I spotted two grey pigeons in the top of a tree some way ahead. One flew off as I approached and turned out to be a kestrel rather than a pigeon. I was mentally debating why a kestrel and pigeon would be sitting so close together in a tree when the second pigeon flew off and turned out to be a kestrel as well.
There was a long steady climb up the hill out of Graveley with dark storm clouds gathering ahead. This was not in the weather forecast. The first spots of rain started as we got to the top of the hill but we decided to press on: it will soon blow over. It didn't, and the rain got heavier and the wind got stronger and colder. We stopped to put on extra layers of clothing, and then settled down to a steady trot for what was quite an unpleasant half hour. Luckily, it was reasonably flat and we eventually reached Damask Green and took the path along the fields south of Weston. This revealed a surprisingly posh rugby pitch with mobile floodlights, as well as tennis courts, but we were too wet and cold to investigate further.
Not the most exciting of days. It felt like lots of quite long flat stretches with no real scenery of interest. Today's addition to the list of necessary equipment to be kept on the car was a towel. And finally there was time for a quick detour into Stevenage to hand over a wifi router to someone James shared a house with at university.
