Piddington - Wheeler End - West Wycombe

11 Mar 05

• Total distance : 7 miles. Only about 500 yards are on metalled track.
• Start point : Lay-by in Piddington SU810943. The car park in West Wycombe would be a more logical starting point.
• Weather : Mild, very windy, thick grey clouds with frequent gaps.
• Temperature at start 9C.
• Muddiness rating (*=dry, *****=awful) ** Better than I expected
• People passed : One man with three dogs - one black, one white, and one white with black spots. For a moment I thought I'd walked into a Kentmere advert.
• Step counter : 13620
• Camera : Olympus C-5060W. Images taken before deletions = 67.

I'd planned to start this page with the phrase "I just happened to be in Piddington", but changed my mind. Piddington is not somewhere you can just happen to be. With its solitary pub (closed lunchtimes) and a population of about 100 it's somewhere you need a good reason to visit. Its salvation comes in the unexpected form of Digital First, a company which sells nothing but digital photography equipment, housed in a converted industrial unit at the side of the A40.

I've bought several scanners, a printer and a camera from them and they always offer very good prices, but my real reason for choosing them is to have an actual human being I can deal with if something goes wrong. I've spent far too many lunchtimes and evenings listening to variations on the "Your Call Is Important To Us Please Hold" theme, so these days my purchasing is done with an appreciation of the true cost of ownership, factoring in not just the price but the likely stress and delay in repair, and so on. That's why I choose to use local businesses such as Digital First and the IT Shop in St Mark's Road, in preference to Internet-only suppliers, for anything that might need service.

My camera had doggedly refused to give back the fifty photos I'd taken the previous weekend, so I was back to Piddington in a shot. Within ten minutes of my arriving Terry at Digital First had confirmed there was a fault, retrieved the lost images with some snazzy software, burnt them onto a CD, fitted a new memory card and tested it. That would have taken weeks with Cheapo-Cams.com - and I coudn't have got the camera cheaper from them anyway.

The sun was licking the hillside as I emerged, so I pulled on my boots and set out to follow a wide track first along, then up, the hill on the southern side of the valley, towards Wheeler End. Most of the time the sun was behind dense clouds, but the howling wind ensured that patches of bright sunlight whipped by every ten minutes or so. Great conditions for the landscape photographer, but the time my camera takes to go through its power-up sequence started to get on my nerves. It's only a couple of seconds but it seemed to match the time from seeing the sunlight to it disappearing over the horizon, almost exactly.

Unusually, I had my Minolta film SLR with me too. I hadn't used it for about six weeks. The first time I looked through the viewfinder was an enjoyable shock - the huge, bright, crystal clear image made me realise how pathetic by comparison are the LCD displays on the back of digital cameras. Frankly, the one on my Olympus is useless in bright daylight despite getting five stars in the magazine review I read before I bought it. But I stopped for a breather, and once again discovered what it could do when I tried photographing some pale yellow lichens on the rock I'd chosen to sit on. The camera was less than an inch from the lichen. I've never been able to do that before, on film. True, they weren't all perfectly focussed, but with digital you can take twenty times as many photos without penalty and the odds are that some will come out OK. (That's me - a true professional).

From the grassy-greened flint-faced Brickmaker-Armed Wheeler End I headed through beech and ash woods towards West Wycombe. The map tried to convince me I walked through a place called "Towerage" - suggesting a collection of towers, or the science of building them - while the signs on the farm and surrounding lanes were emphatically "Toweridge", more descriptive and much more plausible. Pondering this I spied sunrays climbing the ridge opposite and was forced into some emergency trespassing, arriving the other side of a hawthorn hedge just in time to catch the light on the church of St Lawrence and the Dashwood Mausoleum, two miles away across the valley. The church, with its huge golden ball, is reputedly the least religiously-designed church in the country. Built on the top of the hill, presenting the parishioners it was intended to serve with a two hundred-foot climb before they could attend to their devotions, it was clearly built for less straightforward reasons.

But nothing created, inspired or promoted by Francis Dashwood (1708-1781) surprises me any more. I'd intended to end this piece with a few witty epithets summarising the man's life..... but I give up. It's not possible. Read this (it'll take you fifteen minutes or more, but it's worth it) - and you'll see what I mean. "Colourful" doesn't come close.

http://www.controverscial.com/Sir%20Francis%20Dashwood.htm

Click here for Digital First > http://www.digitalfirst.co.uk/

Click here for map > PiddingtonMap

Click here to choose another walk > TheWalks

-- RodBird - 17 Mar 2005