White Waltham - Shottesbrooke Park - Bottle Lane - Pitlands Farm - Waltham St Lawrence

10 Dec 2005

• Total distance : just over 4 miles.
• Start point : Near the war memorial in White Waltham. SU 849774
• Weather : Bright, cold, still.
• Temperature at start 3C.
• Muddiness rating ***** but only really gooey south of Pitlands Farm (*=dry, *****=awful)
• People passed : No-one.
• Step counter : 8975.
• Camera : Olympus C-5060W. Images taken before deletions = 67.

With just a couple of hours to spare on a crisp December afternoon, Shottesbrooke seemed like a good bet. Its history extends a very long way back - to the fourteenth century for the church and the sixteenth for the house - but the photographer is likely to find its potential centred around its three core elements - avenues of lime and copper beeches, a striking cruciform church, and a picturesque lake.

Well, at the moment it's a lake. In the twenty years since I moved here it has been through at least two cycles of drying up and then refilling. Today it looks as if it's been full for years, but intriguingly its image on Googlemap, which can't be very old, shows it empty.

I'd expected to get some photographic return from the elegant curving avenue of limes which runs roughly north west from the house, but the low sun was directly aligned with them and the area was a nightmare to photograph. So I hurried through it and turned north up Bottle Lane (or Bottle's Lane as it's known at its southern end. Maybe somewhere along its length there's a solitary "s", rusting in the hedge like a discarded hubcap).

Half a mile after crossing the railway I turned left, past Pitlands Farm, and - thanks to a farmer whose idea of maintaining the public right of way is to plough over it and then selflessly drive a tractor along its course - was soon wading through some of the stickiest mud I've encountered for years. A hundred yards in, my boots weighed a ton each and had the grip of ice skates. Hampered by this and the sun, which was bright, low and directly in my face, I tottered carefully across the wide and slippery field until I slid gratefully out onto tarmac again, at Waltham St Lawrence.

I tread the little lane which runs south towards Hall's Farm with a sense of anticipation. Many years ago I was walking along it on a bleak and very misty morning when, rounding a corner, I was confronted by a tall, gaunt man clad in black, wearing a top hat and walking ahead of a horse-drawn funeral carriage. Now that's not something you see every day.

Happily there was no such distraction today and I turned left onto the path back towards Shottesbrooke. And that's when something really strange happened. Not supernatural or mysterious - just a natural phenomenon, but one that I hadn't expected, the sort of thing that probably happens all the time outside the comfortably heated world in which we spend most of our lives, but abrupt enough to remind me of how quickly we can find ourselves out of our depth.

I'd noticed a mist forming, a white blanket six or eight feet deep, at first little more than an interesting addition to the landscape as it softened with the setting sun. I walked out fifty yards or so into a field, intending to take some photos and happy that the mud on my boots was being brushed off by the damp grass.

The mist was intensifying quickly, and suddenly I realised that I couldn't see where I was going, or where I'd come from. I took a few shots of a tree with my film camera. The film ran out so I put in a new one. While I was doing this the temperature dropped noticeably. I looked around but could see nothing, and had no idea of which direction I was looking in. Then for a few seconds I was able to make out the sun, and gratefully used it as a bearing to head back to the path. As I did so the grass, wet less than ten minutes earlier, crunched around my feet, its water droplets now turned to ice.

The mist thickened again, and I had to keep close to the edge of the field to keep a visual reference. But when I emerged from the little brick tunnel at Shottesbrooke the flint-walled church was bathed in warm sunlight.

Although it's privately owned land I made a short excursion around the lake, taking lots of photos, but maintaining a watchful eye on the surroundings to avoid being caught out again.

Back in White Waltham the mist was rolling in over the cricket field, but the war memorial remained bathed in a golden light despite the freezing temperature. Above me the sky was dotted with bright stars.

Click here for map > ShottesbrookeMap

Google maps > http://maps.google.co.uk/

Choose another walk > TheWalks

-- RodBird - 24 Dec 2005