Summer on the Stour

BUT WHICH STOUR? Five rivers in England take the name, although how you say it varies – rhyming with tower, tour or mower depending where you are. Three of them have official long-distance routes mapped along their banks, perfect for a summertime trek. The Stour Valley Path treads 60 miles through Suffolk and Essex, passing Dedham Vale where John Constable famously painted the hay wain. The Stour Valley Way tracks 61 miles through Dorset, where local author Thomas Hardy wrote of moorhens ‘planing up shavings of crystal spray’. Then there’s the Stour Valley Walk, pictured here, in Kent. From the source near Lenham to the sea near the Cinque Port of Sandwich, its 51 miles take you by orchard and hop garden, wood and marsh, across the beautiful Wye Downs and through the pilgrim city of Canterbury. The other two Stours may not have named trails, but they can still be walked. In Warwickshire, the river is a guidestar for 18 miles of Shakespeare’s Way, from Stourton to its union with the Avon at William’s Stratford hometown. That leaves the Worcestershire Stour – here you’ll have to link together your own 25-mile route from its start in the Clent Hills to the Severn at Stourport, its banks dotted with mills from its industrial past, its course often paralleled by canal.