Fingest – Gravesend – Twigside Bottom – Cadmore End – Hanger Wood

2 Dec 2006

• Total distance: five and a half miles
• Start point: Fingest church, SU 777911.
• Weather: Grey at first, but wintry low sun later.
• Temperature at start: 8C.
• Muddiness rating: **** (*=dry, *****=awful) Terrible in places, but navigable.
• People passed: I overtook two ramblers leaving Fingest, then nobody.
• Step counter: 12300
• Camera: Olympus C-5060W. Images taken before deletions = 93.

All the walks in this series are my own inventions. I haven’t followed routes recommended or documented by others. Life’s just too short to plough through the rambles described in books of the 100 Best Chiltern Walks variety. “Enter the field by way of the gate”, they tell us, “and follow the white arrows indicating the footpath, noting the fine pasture on your left”. Do they think there’s a risk that we’d ignore the gate and try to walk through the hawthorn hedge instead? Do we need to be told what to look at? I think not. The only reason I can come up with to explain their painful verbosity is that the writers were paid by the word.

Give me a map and I’m happy.

So it was unusual for me to be leafing through a Pathfinder Guide called 'Chilterns and Thames Valley Walks' one evening, and amazing that I should discover in it a chapter detailing much of the walk I’d returned from, just two hours earlier. True to its genre it offered useful tips such as “climb the stile” and “descend into the valley”, but I thought its introductory sentence was worth quoting.

“There is a tranquillity and sense of remoteness about this walk which could place it in the more inaccessible parts of the Pennines or the depths of Dartmoor, but the landscape of beech woods and sweeping dry chalk valleys is unmistakably that of the Chilterns”.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

I parked outside the village church of St Bartholomew, which has a massive 12th century Norman tower with, unusually, two gables. Equally unusual is the yellow-pink plaster which covers the whole building.

As I walked north out of the little village, a herd of about forty nervous deer tip-toed hesitantly along the edge of Hanger Wood high on my right, stopped to sniff the air for a few minutes, then swept swiftly but noiselessly down the hill and away into the distance.

I turned left off the metalled lane onto a footpath at Gravesend, a place so insignificant it has neither church, farm, nor pub, nor in fact any building of any description, nor any inhabitants. How did it get a name? Within minutes I was questioning the wisdom of my route, as the path deteriorated into something halfway between a stream and a slurry channel. But I kept at it, able to get around the worst bits, and it improved after a mile. Gradually the sun appeared and put a more optimistic light on things, and then I noticed a much dryer path on the other (presumably private) side of the fence, so I hopped over and used that one instead. Just the sort of advice you’d hope to find in the Pathfinder guides.

The bare brow to the east of the footpath at Twigside Bottom was providing lift for no less than seventeen red kites. I couldn’t get more than six in the viewfinder at once so I gave up hope of coming home with photographic evidence. Ah, I’ll add a couple in Photoshop later. Who said the camera never lies?

Photographing airborne birds isn’t easy. The camera sees acres of bright sky and assumes I want detail in it, setting an exposure which renders the birds as black dots. But compensating a couple of stops to get more detail on the undersides of the birds leaves a burnt-out sky. The histogram – my favourite photographic invention since the arrival of arsenic-free developer - is of little help as the birds occupy so few pixels, and in any case they’re constantly wheeling and turning, so their brightness is changing. In a static landscape this problem could be addressed by taking two shots, one exposing for the shadows and one for the highlights, then combining them with judicious use of a Photoshop mask. Obviously this is isn’t possible with moving subjects. One way (which I’m trying, but haven’t really mastered yet) is to use the RAW handler twice on the same frame – once to emphasise the highlights, then a second time to bring out shadow detail, paste them on separate layers and again use a mask to combine them. Cool or what? I took a photo of some mud instead.

The long path runs north to Stokenchurch, but my route took me sharp right just after Twigside Bottom. The woods on the steep path up the hill are deserted and very quiet, and the tall deciduous trees rarely seem bothered by wind. Here and there a forestry track winds off to the side, but I’ve never seen a soul here in my dozen or more visits.

On top of the hill the path crosses an arable field and, in accordance with tradition in the Chilterns, the farmer had ploughed over it. As a result mountains of sticky clay clumped up on my boots, and I was pleased to get onto the tarmac of Chequers Lane and start levering it off. The lane is narrow and carries very little traffic, and thus offered a scenic and straightforward downhill walk back to Fingest, but I had other plans and cut off left towards Cadmore End.

I say plans, but that implies some degree of preparation, which wasn’t the case. I hadn’t walked through Hanger Woods for years and decided on a whim to do so again, vaguely remembering an interesting wooden display in the depths of the forest, giving details of its history. I hadn’t photographed it then – it was in the pre-digital days when you had to carry a leather box of glass negatives and a black cloak as far as I recall – but I was pleased to find the display beside the path. It’s been enlarged since I last saw it.

Many of us remember the two big storms at the end of the 1980’s. The one in October 1987 is the one most people remember, often in vivid detail, probably because it woke us up and forced us to hide under our duvets hoping our roofs would stay on. But I’ve always maintained that the one three years later was worse, at least in Maidenhead. That one reached its peak in the middle of a weekday, and perhaps we weren't as traumatised by the thought of the office roof blowing off.

Some fifteen million trees were blown down across the UK in 1987 compared to a mere three million in 1990, but many more lives were lost in 1990 and the wind reached similar speeds.

The Hanger Wood display backed me up, rating the 1990 event as “major storm damage” while the earlier one was just “minor”. It's easy to forget the way these two events decimated our countryside. They both felt pretty scary at the time.

Click for info on > The Great Storm of 1987 : The “Burns Day” storm of 1990

Info on Fingest Church

Click here for map > FingestMap

Choose another walk > TheWalks

-- RodBird - 27 Dec 2006