We leave Castle Combe after breakfast. It’s an odd sort of place. It’s been used as a backdrop in multiple films and television productions because it has no cabling or modern accoutrements, but it also has no shop or anywhere to buy our lunch. There is a house that doubles as an outdoor cake shop with an honesty box and a picnic shop which will only supply a set picnic box with clotted cream etc. The picnic shop is currently closed but, even if it wasn’t, I’m not sure how we could safely pack what they offer. Castle Combe seems to be preserved as a mythical corner of England that never really existed. It’s very pretty in the sunshine though.
We cross the river, spotting a grey wagtail, and pick up a path again returning to the Macmillan Way (Coast to Coast for Cancer Care according to the stickers). The path is good and, as we pull up the side of Rack Hill, there is a little fairy house carved into a tree trunk. It’s labelled The Hollow and there’s no other information I can find about it, but it puts a smile on our faces.
We walk on to the village of Ford and, continuing the theme from yesterday, there are several signs with ‘Private’, ‘No Entry’, ‘Don’t….’ and so on. The worst is on a gate to a beautiful meadow which has, among its several admonishments, ‘No Picnics’. We now leave the MacMillan Way to head up Colerne Down towards Thickwood. As we reach the top of a lovely but very steep hill, we enter a field where the footpath is just passable by an electric fence. One slip and we’d certainly get a shock. Fortunately, we navigate it without incident. The landowners in Wiltshire seem sadly misanthropic.
We pass through Thickwood, where a young man with walking his dog is having an in depth conversation with a very elderly lady looking out of her doorway. They clearly know each other well. We can see the Mendip hills in one direction and the high Cotswolds in the other: our recent past and our soon future. We pick up a new path to the village of Colerne passing through a meadow with yet another gate sign. This one, however, is about protecting the nesting skylarks. They have declined 61% in the last 40 years according to the sign, but we can hear several in the skies above us today
As we enter the village of Colerne, there are houses of different ages and sizes and signs about community meetings and activities. There are also two pubs and two shops, so we stop for a break and to buy food. A village on top of a hill with a vibrant community is good to find after the sterile beauty of the last few days. Colerne is, in fact, a very ancient settlement with evidence of an Iron Age hill fort built in 100BC. The village grew substantially though with the opening of a permanent RAF station during World War II. It was specifically equipped as a Blind Landing System airfield and was used as a regroup area during the Battle of Britain. The station closed in 1976 but remained as a barracks for 21 Signal Regiment. The edge of Colerne is also the tripoint of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset.
We leave Colerne by road and initially there is a pavement. Soon, however, there is just a grass verge and, eventually, even that disappears. The road is quite busy and tortuous and the walking is uncomfortable. We meet the Fosse Way again and Rich and I have discussed the route here, but the same description has been interpreted differently. I thought we were going to walk along the way, which here is road but he had intended to turn off back into Gloucestershire. The Fosse Way is a busy road at this point with no accompanying path or verge, so back into Gloucestershire it is. It’s a circuitous route on a road through dank trees around an estate, but it’s preferable to the risky road.
The unclassified road leads us to the Limestone Link path. This is a 38 mile route devised by Cyril Trenfield to link the West Mendip Way at Shipham (Carboniferous limestone) to the Cotswold Way (Jurassic limestone), another legacy of Cyril Trenfield’s. This is not the only Limestone Link path; there is one in South Cumbria too, linking Arndale with Kirkby Lonsdale.
We stop for lunch in a field before we reach the outskirts of Bath. We are now in Somerset. The Limestone Link then takes us through Bath Easton and back to the river Avon. We cross the river, the A4 and the railway to reach Bathampton Meadows.
We continue for a short distance along a road and then pick up the towpath on the Kennet and Avon canal. The idea of an inland waterway connecting Bristol and London was first mooted in Elizabethan times as the carriage of goods around the Channel was hazardous. The route was not commenced, however, until the early 18th century, the English civil war having disrupted the original plans. The canal itself was completed by 1810, but already started to fall into disuse in the late 19th century with the construction of the Great Western Railway. Now the canal is populated by residential narrow boats and pleasure cruisers, and the towpath provides an easy byway for innumerable pedestrians and cyclists.
We continue along the canal into Bathwick, a district of Bath, where we are meeting up with Cathy and Tom for the weekend. On the way, we pass through two canal tunnels, a first for our walking adventures. Two rest days beckon: not a moment too soon.
Total distance: 282 miles
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