This was not an easy start either. Pauline (my wife) and I trailed up onto the hill behind our house. After taking in the view of Leighton Buzzard and the winding River Ouzel we walked under the trees of Linslade Wood. In the bright light of a fine May morning there can be few sights prettier than a bluebell wood. As we walked amongst the waxy smelling stems it looked like Monet had been hired by the town council to airbrush some colour into the understore. Pauline cried as we stood together.

I went. The first few steps reluctant and half hearted but with the small slope before me I could not help but stride out. Then as the sheer exhilaration of adrenaline grabbed my feet I flew down the hill glad that at last that I was on my way.

The modest valley of the Ouzel is a transport corridor. A gap in the Greensand Ridge through which generations of navvies have had to pass going north. In the space of the first three hundred yards of my walk I stepped over the modern history of transport. The main road to Milton Keynes, the railway line to Euston and then as I dropped down an alleyway by the side of the railway’s dark bricked embankment I was looking down into the still water of the Grand Union Canal. Three problems with the same pragmatic solution. Bang a hole through the hill to the north of Leighton Buzzard.

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland .

This valley had not always been like this. In the morning mist the hard lines of the cuttings faded. All I could see as I crossed the flood plain of the Ouzel were the skeletal fingers of the willows marking the lines of the drainage ditches and the big broad leaf trees at the edge of the meadows. It was quiet for a moment. The silence broken only by the cry of a hunting heron. Just for a second I got a sense of what it must have looked like here before the coming of man. A winding lowland mead. A river full of fish, a wet water meadow and trees, and trees as far as the eye can see. The landscape has changed quite a lot since then.

It was WG Hoskins wonderful book ‘the Making of the English Landscape’ that finally convinced me that I had been walking around this part of England with my eyes closed. Far from being flat and uninteresting, with a map and a lifetime of research Hoskins found Lowland England fascinating. Hoskins’ interpretations are an insight into the history of fifteen hundred years of ordinary people trying to earn a crust against all the odds. It was a history I was only beginning to appreciate.

Prior to reading Hoskins I had regarded landscape beauty as a remote thing, brought up on a reading diet of Wainwright and the Romantic poets. I would drive for hours to escape the South East, adding my car fumes to the list of things oppressing the region. I searched for the wild notes that you can hear high on the fells of the Lake District or of Scotland. It had never occurred to me to listen to what Hoskins describes as the ‘chamber music of Bedfordshire’.

On this particular morning the quiet was finally broken by the chug-chug of a holiday narrow boat on the canal, which looked comic as it floated on the mist, ten feet above the natural level of the valley. The gap in the hedge through which the canal boat passed then framed the warm stone of St Mary’s church which glowed like a halo in the bright sun above the mist. Not all of man’s intrusions on the landscape are ugly or unwanted. On a winter’s evening even the express trains speeding on to Scotland can make a remarkable sight in this unassuming valley. I remembered the times Pauline and I had enjoyed the hearth light of the warm trains whipping past us as we tramped across this field in the dark.

It was time to be gone. To Ramble On. To taste my first tang of testosterone. I ran, head down, until I was out of breath.

For the next couple of days I followed the Greensand Ridge Walk. This was familiar territory for me as I had often wandered along this route designated by Bedfordshire County Council. It’s a lovely way to walk across the county as it uses the virtue of the small rise of the sand ridge to give the walker a view over the flat claylands of Bedford. It is not really a continuous path but a knitting together of field paths and bridle ways, taking in fine parklands and the occasional road through a village. It was typical of the way I wanted to walk this Summer, a winding route taking me deep into the countryside.

I was experiencing a strange mixture of apprehension and euphoria as I sped my way through the woods that run up to Rammamere Heath. I felt a bit like an over valued market. I was overrunning, fuelled by a mixture of ignorance and unquestioning optimism. My bubble soon burst however. I was walking rather awkwardly by the time that I reached the Woburn estate and when I crossed the M1 I was limping like a foot-sore soldier. It was not really surprising. I was using bits of body which had done nothing for years but reside in the dark under my desk. No amount of training could have prepared me for this walk. I made a pit stop beside the car test track at Millbrook and while I squinted through the fence at the engineers testing next year’s models I administered first aid to my poor sad toes. I had only walked thirty miles and I was already in trouble. I hissed like an overheating radiator as I put some cooling blister gel on my toes. It was a good thing at the time that I did not realise that I was facing two weeks of hell before my feet finally hardened up.

One of the real discoveries of the planning stages of this journey was that the distance that you could cover in one day determines where you stop and sleep. By walking you enforce on yourself a sense of distance that reaches back to the sixteenth century. It gives you a localised sense of your surroundings, so that what you come to see is an England of fields, reedy rivers, hedgerows and villages rather than of arterial roads and major towns. The need to find a bed also takes you to places you would have ordinarily by-passed.

You would not, for instance, put Stewartby on any list of pretty postcard villages of England and yet the twenty odd miles that I could walk in one day from Leighton Buzzard determined that I stopped there.

Stewartby is an extraordinary place, an early Twentieth century model village sited in the industrialised landscape of the Marston Vale . It was built by the publicity shy Stewart family, the original owners of the brick works that dominates the village. The Stewarts were frankly brick bonkers. At Stewartby there are bungalows of brick, there are offices of brick, a common room of brick and there was at one time even a statue outside the works that was made of their familiar red product.

This ubiquitous use of brick makes Stewartby strikingly uniform. The village looks like an artist’s impression of itself. After fifty years it is still stark and linear; it is still waiting for mature trees and for a bit of anarchy to break up its laid-out spaces.

The inhabitants of nearby Bedford know the village by the smell produced by its chimneys. ‘The Stewartby Stink’ they say, referring to the stench that the locally extracted clay produces when it is fired.

I spent two nights in the village staying with Pauline’s parents in Stewartby and I was lucky enough to meet some of the villagers at a party held in my honour. A lot of the pensioners in the village had been given homes by the Stewarts, I was told. Far from being apologetic about their village and its works, they radiated a pride in its uniqueness and wanted to drag me on a walk around its sights that first evening.

The next morning back on the ridge I took in the whole Marston Vale from the empty windows of Houghton House. From up here it is clear that not all of the instruments of the chamber orchestra of Bedfordshire are rural. The scale of the view was dwarfed by the wholesale way in which man has manipulated it.

As you would expect, the panorama is dominated by the brickworks, in the foreground Stewartby with its conveyor belt for the clay and further back Kempston Hardwick. Surrounding the works are vast holes, the pits from which the brick clay was extracted. In the shadows of a sunny day it looks like whole sections of the Vale have been spirited away, in most cases to be replaced by landfilled rubbish.

Beyond the brickworks the eye wanders further and further, from the flare of burnt biogas from the dragon’s lair of Brogborough wastesite, to the wheeling flocks of gulls getting fat on the food in the landfill at Elstow. Those holes that have not been turned into giant mole hills have become man-made lakes which mirror the scene that surrounds them; the flame, the clay cap of the brand new landfill hills and the ever smoking chimneys.

It was a good day to dwell (there was next to no smell as an easterly breeze was whipping the Stewartby stink over towards Cranfield) so I had a look round the shell of this old house. Before fire and neglect had gutted Houghton House it must have been a fine stately home built on a site that commands a view of most of the Vale. Everyone in this area will tell you that Houghton House was ‘House Beautiful’, in John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’(Image of John Bunyan reproduced with the kind permission of Acacia.pair.com). Although every one knows this, no one apparently has actually read Bunyan or can tell you what exactly House Beautiful was in his story. Bedford’s famous son lies lost like the landscape he knew and loved.

I spent the rest of the morning weaving my way from field to field, taking in newly sprouting crops, flower-filled meadows and small copses and woods. The woodland stretches were particularly inspiring. The floor of the woodlands were all carpetted in blue and as I rushed along I scared tiny Muntjac deer out of their hiding places. However despite enjoying the quietness of the walk at first, I became uneasy as the day went on. I became more and more aware of the fact that I had not seen a single soul all day. In the fields there was live-stock milling around and the occasional sprinkler spinning out in the centre of a field. However, there were no people. It was as if the countryside was a green factory run by unseen robots. When I crossed roads there were vehicles of course, but at speed they appeared empty, their contents obscured by the reflections of their windscreens.

I had hoped this walk would be a chance to bump into people. I had expected conversations over the farmyard fence. You know, a sort of personalised version of the Archers, where Farmer Giles teaches you all about farming. If nothing else I had hoped for some old jokes to liven up the day. What I had not expected was to rely on my own impressions all the time. Some of them, particularly after a day of blistered walking, were not very balanced I am afraid.

Sandy, for example, came in for a bit of stick in my notes later in the day. I remember, despite enjoying the water meadows beside the River Ivel, that it was a depressing experience walking through the town at rush hour. In fairness, the route I took through Sandy could have been anywhere. However it gave me my first flavour of seeing a modern English town from the outside. I can’t say that I found its particular taste at all appetising. I remember slumping down on the far side of the town and writing:

Sandy? Sandy!!( underline, underline).

The first thing you notice as you approach suburbia on a footpath is the smell of dog crap. Its everywhere on the first available open ground. Its smell announces approaching habitation. Then, as the footpath is funnelled through a narrow corridor of wood panelled fences you really hear for the first time the noise of the traffic passing through the centre of town. After the quiet of a woodland it feels like you are walking into a foundry. Senses that have become tuned to the movements of leaves in a breeze, suddenly alarmed at the mad darting of machines.

My early optimism had completely leached away by now and an injury to my left foot flared up suddenly.

The reality of long distance walking is that, at times, it is sheer drudgery. Not every step can be interesting or enjoyable to walk. In panning for gold you see a lot of gravel.

This last bit of walking for the day took me along a flat cart track that had once been an important Roman road. A long straight line out into the flat fields beyond the ridge I had been following since I left Leighton Buzzard. I was coming to the end of the Greensand Ridge Walk and also of Bedfordshire and my intimate knowledge of the path. To the north and the east there was a change in the landscape as the greensand gave up its right to be called a ridge; a slow shift into cinemascope as the horizon flattened and widened. My eyes adjusted to the openness of East Anglia. I walked on into a land of enormous skies.

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© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004