‘Inviting, dramatic, magnetic’:
The longest day of the year demands an incredible walk to fill it. This is ours:19 miles, four little mountains and one of the finest skylines in England…
T COULD SEEM ODD, if you think about it, to structure a day’s walk around a fleeting moment of spatial mechanics. As far as our solar system is concerned, Thursday June 21st will be no different from any other day (not that the solar system really understands days anyway; this whole day/night business is a very local affair for the planets that have them).
But on that day, the third planet of the Sol system will be leaning with its northern half closer to its parent star than at any other time in its 365-day orbit. Those living in that half will be closer to the star than they were the day before, and closer than they will be the day after. And, hopefully, they will luxuriate in something like 16 hours of warm, nourishing sunlight. So we hope, anyway.
Welcome to Midsummer’s Day in the United Kingdom. The summer solstice. The longest day.
And here at Country Walking, it set us thinking: how could we fill all those hours of sunlight – or a good percentage of them at least – with a really special walk?
There were some obvious contenders, because there are a few ‘default settings’ whenever walkers try to think about a really long single-day endeavour. The 24-mile Yorkshire Three Peaks might be one. The 40-mile Lyke Wake Walk might be another. But we fancied creating our own: a multi-mile bonanza with plenty of attractions, loads of variety, and a route that a) feels new and b) makes logical sense. And that’s when we settled on Shropshire. When I first visited the town of Church Stretton, some 11 years ago, I was struck by its skyline. The town lies in what’s known as the Stretton Gap, a long north-south schism in the fabric of the Shropshire Hills. To the east are three beautiful mini-mountains, near-identical yet subtly different, which line up like supertankers going through the Panama Canal. They are the Lawley, Caer Caradoc and Ragleth.
To the west is the great bumpy mass of the Long Mynd, one of the most architecturally fascinating uplands in Britain; a labyrinth of bulbous domes and little valleys known as hollows and batches.
“And then it gets sexy, turning on to the ridgeline to switchback over the Lawley and Caer Caradoc.”
The two sides of the Gap are as different as chalk and chips, but they are both inviting, dramatic, magnetic. I’ve climbed all their components before, but I’d always wondered what it would be like to do the whole ‘Stretton Skyline’ in one day. Great idea, I thought, but it’d be a hell of a walk, something like 20 miles, with a lot of hills involved. You’d need a really long day for it. A day like… (You’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?) And that’s how we came to choose this walk as our dawn-to-dusk midsummer meander.
The beauty of it is, it’s adaptable. Fast movers might not need anything like 16 hours to do it (at a decent clop, I went round in just over eight and a half, but it still felt like a wonderfully long day). Amblers, particularly those who like to go slow on steep ascents and descents, could take anywhere from ten to twelve. There’s also the potential for a pub lunch halfway round, in lovely Church Stretton, so you can chow down and fill up without worrying if you’re going to lose the light. You can’t do that on the Y3P or the Lyke Wake.
And if 19 miles sounds a bit much, you could easily split it into two days with no loss of face as far as the solar system is concerned.
It all starts in All Stretton, the northernmost of the three townships in the Stretton Gap, then takes a long and mostly flat loop to the north-east, along the lower flanks of Caer Caradoc and the Lawley.
Then it gets sexy: turning onto the ridgeline, the route switchbacks over both those hills, before diverting into Church Stretton for a lunch stop (or the end of Day 1, if you’re so minded).
Then it goes back out to the ridge, to climb the last of the three eastern sentinels, Ragleth. After that, we cross the Gap again at its southernmost end – the village of Little Stretton (which also has a pub, woohoo) – and then it’s up into the magical mounds of the Long Mynd. Wending up Small Batch and around the heathery domes of Grindle and Callow,
the route arrives at Pole Bank, summit of the Long Mynd and axis of one of the best panoramic views in two nations (England and Wales, as most of what you’re looking at to the west is in Wales).
The standard descent from Pole Bank would be via Mott’s Road and Carding Mill Valley, but this is not a day for standard descents. Instead our route carries on to the northern tip of the Mynd, descending into the far less frequented idylls of Jonathan’s Hollow and the Batch Valley, and back into All Stretton.
So that’s the route. But what about the detail? Well, with 4490ft of ascent, you’ll be climbing higher than you would to the summit of Ben Nevis, and in the interest of full disclosure, some of it is pretty steep and slow (mainly the upper parts of the Lawley and Caer Caradoc). But as these aren’t huge hills in themselves, each of those sloggy bits ends sooner than you might expect – and the rewards for defeating them are truly immense.
And what will you see along the way? Views that extend from the skyscrapers of Birmingham to Cadair Idris in Snowdonia; an ornamental crow on top of the Lawley; three beautiful woodland brooks; a medieval market town built on its deftness with wool; wild ponies; rocky outcrops that have schooled generations of geologists and entertained millions of young adventurers; three hawthorns on the Long Mynd that are home to a ten-year-old CW geocache; endless blankets of heather and good, healthy bog. An entire area that was christened ‘Little Switzerland’ by the Victorians on account of the houses and hotels that creep up the woody flanks of the Mynd. In fact I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that this route actually has more variety than the Yorkshire Three Peaks – plus it’s slightly shorter and, on Midsummer’s Day, it’s likely to be a lot less crowded too.
And I haven’t even gone into detail yet about Caer Caradoc, one of the most dramatically sited and best preserved Iron Age hillforts in the land. Allegedly this volcanic knobble was the scene of the battle between the Roman Empire and the stubbornly resistant British chieftain Caractacus in 50AD. The Romans won, and later carted Caractacus off to Rome for execution – but he made such a good speech to the Emperor Claudius that the latter spared him and his family, and allowed them to live out their lives in Rome as his guests.
Other places also claim to be the battle site, like British Camp in the Malverns and Caersws in Powys; but it’s very hard to be up on top of Caer Caradoc and not get swept away in a vision of a defiant Brit and the oncoming storm of Rome.
Then there’s a lot to say about the Long Mynd. It is at its benevolent best in midsummer; in winter
it’s a different beast. Just ask the Reverend
“I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that this route has even more variety than the Yorkshire Three Peaks.”
Edmund Donald Carr, who famously got lost on its seemingly infinite plateau in a snowstorm in the winter of 1865. He was found next morning, frozen but alive, and described his ordeal in A Night in the Snow. (Handily, the proceeds paid for a refurb of his church, so it wasn’t all bad).
But if I had to speak personally, I’d tell you that my favourite of these many tumbling hills is Ragleth. Its flank is slightly less steep and sustained than its two predecessors, and its summit ridge is a grassy promenade in the sky.
Maybe it’s just a matter of timing: on this route, I hit Ragleth just after my, erm, lunch stop in the Buck’s Head in Church Stretton, so all was right with the world when I got up here and bounced along its verdant runway. And across the Gap, the Mynd just looked fantastic.
But let’s skip across to the end of the day; after the climb up Small Batch and the immensity of the views from Pole Bank. Descending into Jonathan’s Hollow, with the sun just beginning to think about bedtime, you might just find the Shropshire Hills bathed in an impossibly pure, warm light. It picks out the lines of the hollows, and crests along the trio of hills across the Gap.
At this moment you can ignore the fact that tomorrow will be shorter than today, and that we are now drifting gently further away from our home star. Instead you can appreciate midsummer; its merriment and bountifulness; its colour and its warmth. You’ll understand the ancientness of our love for the solstice and the way it forged our habits as farmers and tamers of the land.
On a cosmological scale, what has happened today has been huge. But it has also given a wonderful day to one human being on one hillside in one corner of one planet. One thing is certain: tonight you’ll sleep well. Your midsummer night’s dream will be well earned.