Deep in the Southwolds
Next year will mark 35 years since I wrote my first walking guidebook, way back in 1989. It is perfect symmetry, given that 2024 will also see the publication of my 35th book! The provisional title is Short Walks near Bath & Bristol, nothing more than four miles, perfect as I approach my 70th birthday and the aches and pains of life set in. This walk from Hawkesbury Upton will be walk 2 in the book.
Too many of our villages appear to be dying a literal death, being home to long distance commuters or retirees or second-home owners. With local money being spent on upmarket home food deliveries, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker have long since departed. And with young families thin on the ground, what was once one of the centres of the community has now been renamed ‘The Old School’ and turned into yet another rural idyll of a conversion for some harassed commuter.
Hawkesbury Upton appears an altogether different place. As well as a village store, a post office and a hairdresser, there is an excellent pub, a school and a village hall that runs a host of activities for the locals. It is strung out along a lengthy main street, with grey stone houses, some Georgian and some Victorian. One guidebook talks about the special quality in the place, with its bleak, remote and unchanging character breeding a well-knit village community. About the only thing missing is a church tower or spire.
This walk from the village drops down through woodland and combes to the secretive Kilcott Valley before following a section of the Cotswold Way back up to the vast Somerset Monument, built by workers from the Badminton estate to commemorate Lord Robert edward Somerset who fought valiantly in the Peninsular War. Beyond the monument we find the Drovers Pool, where cattle would have taken water. Sadly these days, it is as normally as dry as the proverbial bone.
There is nothing ‘dry’ in the prohibition sense about Hawkesbury Upton. The Beaufort Arms is as traditional a pub as it is possible to find these days. No frills or fancies, no ‘hand crushed Jersey Royals with a trio of Cumberland sausages and minted crushed petit pois drizzled in onion jus’. Just plain old ‘bangers and mash’ with prices that reflect decent down-toearth food.
And with my 70th birthday approaching, and the appetite diminishing, how good to see both large and small portions on the menu, so highly rated by CAMRA.
Getting there
■ Leave the A46 at Dunkirk, between Bath and Stroud, to follow a road signposted to Hawkesbury Upton. In 1½ miles, with the Beaufort Arms on the left in the centre of the village, turn right into the Village Hall car park, (leave a donation in the honesty box).
■ 1. Leave the car park, turn left, past the Beaufort Arms, to a junction at the end of Hawkesbury Upton’s High Street past the Fox Inn. Turn left along the road signposted to Starveall, keeping left at an early junction into Back Street. Follow this road out of the village to reach a road junction in 350 yards. Follow the footpath opposite that bears right down to a handgate and field. Continue across the field ahead, dropping downhill through three fields into a valley.
■ 2. In a fourth field, continue to a small footbridge over a stream before following a track to the right down to gate and wooded combe. Follow the grassy path through the bottom of this combe, ignoring occasional tracks that climb the adjoining hillsides, to reach a gate and the lane in the Kilcott Valley in ½ mile. Turn left and follow the lane for 600 yards to reach Mickley Cottage on the right. At this point, turn left and follow the Cotswold Way uphill, keeping left at a fork in 300 yards.
■ 3. Pass through a gateway at the top of a climb in 150 yards into a hilltop field. Walk along the left edge of this field before entering Claypit Wood at the end of the field. Follow the path through this woodland for 250 yards before passing through a gateway on the left to follow a path up the left edge of a field. At the top of this field, turn right and follow the path for ½ mile to the the Somerset Monument. Just before the monument, pass through a gateway on the left to follow a permissive path across the right edge of a field to the High Street. Turn left to walk back to the car park.