Winter Hill - Cockmarsh - Cookham

18 Dec 04

• Total distance : 4 miles (of which about a mile is on metalled road). The circuit can easily be reduced to 3 miles by cutting out the bit through Cookham.
• Start point : Park in layby on Winter Hill SU 870861. You could just as easily start from the car park on Cookham Moor (SU 892853) and you'd have a selection of pubs to come back to.
• Weather : Cloudless, light wind. Temperature at start +2C
• Muddiness rating (*=dry, *****=awful) **
• People passed : Dozens of joggers, dog-walkers, power-walkers etc, especially along the river.
• Camera : Leica M6, 50mm lens, Ilford FP4. Total images taken = 14. Negatives were scanned on a Minolta Dimage 3 scanner.

The last Saturday before Christmas is traditionally a time for last-minute shopping, decorating the tree, getting your cards in the post, singing carols and making all those final arrangements. Anyway, I went for a walk.

Cockmarsh is barely three miles north of Maidenhead but it feels like a different world. Sitting at the foot of Winter Hill, which is named (supposedly) from the custom of keeping livestock there through the winter though I reckon it's more likely to have something to do with the wind that whips along the top on most days, the area feels genuinely unspoiled in spite of the large numbers of people who use if for exercise and the cattle kept there today. Why the eastern part of Cockmarsh has never been cultivated is a mystery, as it's fertile enough. Maybe the explanation lies somewhere in the ancient tumuli that lie in the middle of the common land.

I'd taken only my film camera, knowing that I'd find good landscape opportunities and needing some promising negatives to work on during the holidays. As usual I took just one lens. I do this because I find it helps me to sustain a consistent mental perspective, which in turn seems to let me to see potential pictures more instinctively than I would when carrying a zoom. Of the single lenses I much prefer the 50mm to any other. It's small, and has a natural sort of feel to it. If I take a selection of lenses I spend all day swopping them around.

I usually climb up onto the top of Winter Hill, partly for the exercise, partly because the views can be excellent and partly because there are less people around, but today I kept on the path along the bottom of the hill. There's debate over whether the path is of Roman origin or not : it's certainly been there for centuries, and suffers less than most other tracks from off-roaders. They probably haven't discovered it yet.

The area at the base of the hill is a puzzle to me. When I first went there, in the mid 80's, a long pond circled much of the hill and was crossed by a wooden causeway, which seemed a logical structure if you wanted to get to the river. But by the mid 90's there was rarely any standing water, irrespective of the season, and the causeway crossed only dry pasture. Two years ago, in what seemed a dryish autumn, I found a full pool once again, but today the flooded part covers only a small area. "Global Warming", you're muttering, but that simply suggests it's warming up. Rainfall hasn't substantially changed. Beats me.

I walked through Cookham with the intention of stopping at the unique and inspiring little Stanley Spencer Gallery, but time was getting on so I took the path past the 12th century Holy Trinity church and followed the Thames Path back. The Bounty at Bourne End, reachable only by foot or boat, had a sign in the window saying "Open Weekends only" but at midday, today at least, it was shut.

Click here for map> CockmarshMap

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