Wander through 1,000 years of history in Warwickshire – the beating heart of England
The gently rolling pastures of the English Midlands are scattered with pretty villages, gnarly castles and quirky country houses. Marie Kreft explores the wonders of Warwickshire and beyond
No one knows how Meriden came to be known as the centre of England. Maybe it began with drovers moving livestock diagonally through the country, finding Meriden to be three days from London and three days from Chester. Maybe it was dreamed up by tallow light in the Bull’s Head: a novel way to draw coaches to the inn. Geographically it wasn’t a farfetched imagining, though, and nor is viewing the old boundaries of Warwickshire as England’s symbolic heart.
Landlocked Warwickshire borders with seven Midlands counties: Leicestershire and Staffordshire in the north and Gloucestershire and northern Oxfordshire in the south, its feet in the golden Cotswolds. To the east, Northamptonshire, the Rose of the Shires, and in the west, Worcestershire and the West Midlands, where JRR Tolkien’s imagination would take flight to create the rustic Shire of Middle Earth. Warwickshire is the county Henry James described as “mid-most England, unmitigated England”: wooded, undulating, and largely undramatic until met with half-timbered houses and lias-built (lias is a kind of limestone) churches. There it becomes idyllic. This is the home of modern rugby, George Eliot, and a playwright we’ll meet soon.
Of the many villages waiting to catch our eye, Welford-on-Avon is also one of the prettiest. Set in a bend of the River Avon, four miles south-west of Stratford-uponAvon, it has a Norman church perched above timber-framed cottages, which are rendered plump and endearing with whitepainted plaster and bonny thatched heads. Local lore has made the flagstone floors and cosy fireplaces of the 17th-century Bell Inn the scene of our unmentioned writer’s final ‘merry meeting’. Easier to prove is Welford’s other most English of boasts: to have one of the country’s tallest maypoles.
CHIEFS, CARVINGS AND CHAMPIONS
Six miles west of Coventry is a village telling tales that span centuries: Berkswell, whose name may derive from Bercul, a Saxon chieftain, and the spring-fed well in which he was reputedly baptised. The village green still displays stocks, inexplicably five-holed; some say it accommodated an unruly one-legged former soldier and his two drinking companions. In Berkswell’s handsome church of St John the Baptist, take the steps leading down from a boxed pew in the north aisle to find a two-part Norman crypt. The church is full of surprises, including signature mouse carvings by Robert Thompson (1876–1955). Its grounds hold a celebrity from the heart of English sport, for this is the burial place of Maud Watson, the 1884 winner of the first Ladies’ Singles title at Wimbledon.
To see England’s central landscape reclaimed by nature, look to Brandon
Marsh, in the loving care of Warwickshire Wildlife Trust (warwickshirewildlifetrust.
org.uk). More than 220 species of bird have been recorded here; you can view their soaring and hear their song from eight different hides. Take the longest of three footpaths, Kingfisher Trail, to walk alongside willow carr (waterlogged woodland), through trees and grassland, past the Newlands reedbed, which has been cultivated to nurture eels and amphibians. In later spring, the oak and ash shade of New Hare Covert will yield bluebells and foxgloves.
Although appearing wild and old, Brandon Marsh was formed by subsidence and flooding due to nearby coal mining, and sand and gravel workings until the 1980s invited further stretches of open water. The hands of industry have wrought further
“THE VILLAGE GREEN STILL DISPLAYS STOCKS, INEXPLICABLY FIVE-HOLED”
legacies on central England’s landscape through canals, those extraordinary feats of engineering that also foster tranquillity. A place to appreciate both is Hatton, where the Grand Union Canal takes a flight of 21 locks over 4km, raising the water by a remarkable 45 metres. This ‘stairway to heaven’ is blessed with biodiversity: look for darting dragonflies and damselflies in the summer and, all year round, listen for the telltale yaffle of the green woodpecker.
Near where the Stratford-upon-Avon canal meets the River Avon you’re likely to find Shakee’s Ice Cream Boat moored in wait for a new season of bard-watchers. Here is where we realise Warwickshire is not only the heart of England but, when it comes to our unnamed writer, the centre of the universe. “They’re Shakespeare-mad around here, aren’t they?” I heard a bemused visitor say on Bridge Street. Well, yes. But forgivably so.
Stratford and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust properties lie on well-trodden trails, so instead, let’s seek our man four miles east of the town, at Charlecote Park, the 800-year-old home of the Lucy family. Here you can follow footpaths among four shades of fallow deer, imagining a young William Shakespeare poaching a few, and perhaps
some rabbits. A lack of compelling evidence has not hindered this story’s popularity. Shakespeare would at least have known Charlecote’s parkland and been aware of the Lucys, though. Be sure to visit the pristine knights’ tombs in the Lucy Chapel of St Leonard’s Church. Some people think Sir Thomas Lucy (d.1600) was sent up by Shakespeare as Justice Robert Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Woodland assumes significance in several Shakespeare plays, especially As You Like It, where the court moves out into the Forest of Arden, cueing mischief and confusion. Little remains now of the thick old forest, which once stretched from Stratford to Tamworth, swathing the world Shakespeare knew in oak trees. Today, we find the forest’s legacy in place names: Henley-, Tanworth-, Hampton-in-Arden, and the many villages whose names end with the Saxon suffix -ley or -leigh, denoting a woodland clearing. On the corner of Coughton Fields Lane outside Coughton Court near Alcester, a crumbly stone monument marks the supposed spot where travellers prayed for safe passage through the forest.
MIGHTY MEDIEVAL MAJESTY
If we avoid Stratford, then nor should we linger in Leamington Spa, Coventry or Warwick. Looking out from a sandstone bluff over a bend in the River Avon, Warwick Castle must be mentioned, however, for its exhilarating combination of history and majesty. This is one of England’s finest medieval castles, replacing a motteand-bailey fort built by William the Conqueror. The theme park-ish overlay brought by modern-day management from Merlin Entertainments makes a visit fun for anyone, with unwitting absorption of history lessons almost guaranteed through birdsof-prey displays, jousting and the firing of a missile from the world’s biggest working trebuchet. (The projectile is no longer sent flaming, following a 2015 mishap involving a Victorian thatched boathouse.) Even with crowds, 64 acres of Capability Brown landscape provide space to wander, and a home for peacocks both living and topiary.
While Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was in residence at Warwick Castle, his