Maidenhead Thicket - Burchett's Green - Hyde Farm - Pinkneys Green

12 Feb 05

• Total distance : 4 miles.
• Start point : Anywhere on the circuit. The Thicket car park SU857809 would be a logical place but you might encounter some, ahem, unwanted attention there. I wouldn't wear too much designer gear, put it that way.
• Weather : Dry, with a lively wind and scudding multicoloured clouds. Temperature at start +10C
• Muddiness rating (*=dry, *****=awful) *** in the Thicket, otherwise good.
• People passed : Not a soul. No walkers, joggers, or cyclists, and no dogs or dog walkers (or dog-related activity of any sort, thank goodness).
• Step counter : 8776
• Camera : Olympus C-5060W. Images taken before deletions = 50.

This short walk is something of a default for me : if I feel the need for some quick exercise but don't have the time to drive somewhere more exotic, I'll go round it in a couple of hours or less. Photographically it ain't Yosemite, but it's where I took one my favourite landscapes (thanks to the lucky coincidence of sunlight and thunderclouds) a few years back.

The Thicket has existed more or less unchanged by man for over a thousand years, the arrival of the A404M? excepted. Peaceful as it may be today, it was not always as benign. In the 13th century the vicar of Hurley was paid danger money for preaching in Maidenhead, having to run the gauntlet of the many footpads who frequented the area. In his book " A Millennium in the Royal Borough" Luke Over explains how the rogues favoured travellers coming from the west, those from the east likely to have been turned over already on Hounslow Heath.

Burchett's Green is graced by an apostrophe, while the luckless burghers of nearby Pinkneys Green have lost theirs. I'd like to think it was a quirk of the socially divisive Comma Tax introduced on a whim by Henry VIII, but it's more likely to be a data input error by a punchcard operator in the old Berkshire CC. But hey, don't let that stop you from going there. I walked past the Crown, noticing that all six cars in the car park were Mercedes, and didn't stop.

At the end of the village you can head north for a hundred yards along the A404 slip road and scramble up the bank after the bridge (I normally do), but for a change I walked a similar distance in the opposite direction towards Stubbings, slipping through a conveniently smashed-in bit of fence onto the old overgrown road which runs parallel to the dual carriageway. Either way leads you to Carpenter Wood which is both a lovely piece of Woodland Trust, which means you are free to walk in it, and the site of a tragic aeroplane accident at the end of the second world war, now commemorated by a memorial. I didn't pass it on this occasion - hopefully I'll document it another day - but followed the straight, level path across the fields towards Hyde Farm. The first field on your right as you walk away from the A404 looks natural enough, but its lazy swell is the result of thousands of tons of spoil from the road widening scheme in the late eighties.

A red kite drifted overhead, apparently unconcerned by my presence but careful not to give me any opportunities for a good photo. As a boy I remember being taken on an interminable car journey across mid Wales to be shown a speck on the horizon which the adults present somehow identified as a red kite - the unspoken message being "well these things'll be extinct any day soon, but at least you'll be able to tell your grandchildren you saw one". How things have changed.

The day by this point was threatening rain, but just when I'd packed away the camera against the elements the sun came out, and for the second time this year the little copse on Pinkneys Green, bordering the grounds of a large house called St Timothee, provided inspiration and I hastily retrieved it from the murky depths of my jacket. The digital camera seems to be very good at recording sky detail, which I'm sure would have been lost on slide film. Or is it my imagination?

Click here for map> HydeFarmmap

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-- RodBird - 04 Mar 2005