We descend the beautiful Georgian staircase to breakfast in the rather exuberant marble dining room. We're sat by the window and it feels warm in the sun, though outside it is only 10 degrees. The hotel cannot provide a packed lunch and they suggest taking something from the breakfast buffet, so we stock up on banana bread on the way out.
As we leave Luton Hoo, the wind starts up and it's more like October than August. We can at least see the planes today. We walk gently downhill as we leave the hotel grounds and cross the A1081. We then follow the road for about half a mile to take a bridge across the M1 and walk up into the hamlet of Pepperstock. There is a food shop and cafe here but it's still early and not yet opened. I gaze at it ruefully as we walk past sans lunch.
We now head on a path downhill into what Rich tells me is a dry valley. There may be no river here but, after yesterday's deluge, dry it is not. We are now in the heart of the Chilterns and it's a constant up and down. We take Margaret's Bridge over the A5183. This used to be the A5 until it was detrunked, and before that it was Watling Street, the ancient road from Dover to Wales, paved by the Romans.
Markyate has a One-stop shop, so we can at last buy lunch. Cheered by this, we leave Markyate and head for Roe End, then the village of Studham. There are lots of people out today; dog-walkers, rambling clubs, even a group of middle-aged trail bikers who stop politely by the side of the muddy path to let us pass.
We have decided to wait for a break until we reach Studham in the hope that there will be a bench as the ground is still sodden from yesterday. In fact, Studham has five benches: four around a large football pitch on the green and one at the bus stop. We sit on the first one we come to, erected in memory of Alan S. Butler, who was 89 when he died. Thank-you to whoever put it there.
We cross the green to enter a copse with a maze of footpaths and Rich almost collides with a rather surprised muntjac as we struggle to find our way. Eventually, we cross a wheat field and reach the road and a height of 200m.
We are now back on the Chiltern Way descending deeply into another dry valley, picking up the Icknield Way Trail and climbing up the other side. As we ascend, the air is thick with red kites. It's hard to believe they were extinct in England and Scotland for over a hundred years.
Red kites were so common on the UK in tudor times that, in Coriolanus, Shakespeare described London as 'the city of kites and crows'. They were protected by royal decree as they are carrion feeders and kept the streets clean. By 1871, however, they had been persecuted to extinction as vermin. In the 1990s, a major conservation project reintroduced red kites from Spain into the Chilterns. From there, they have spread out across southern and eastern England. Norfolk's plentiful red kites are descendants of the Spanish Chiltern birds.
We reach the top of this hill and arrive at Bridgewater, where we stop at a pub to buy a drink and eat our packed lunch. We could have bought food at the pub, so we needn't have worried about lunch at all. We then head off into Little Gaddesden, traversing a golf course where we see one golfer with his ball somewhat out of bounds (we give him a wide berth as he takes his next shot) and another lofting her shot expertly onto a green.
The path now takes us into the National Trust Ashridge Estate and its glorious beech trees. Rich tells me the Chilterns are famous for the beech trees, but yet again my knowledge is found wanting. The Chiltern beechwoods are a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) of nearly 1,300 hectares.
We skirt the village of Aldbury, now back on the Hertfordshire Way and cross the railway at Tring station to briefly join the Ridgeway. The Ridgeway runs from Overton Hill, near Avebury, to Ivinghoe Beacon and Rich and I walked most of it almost forty years ago, but not this section. We then cross the Grand Union Canal, an amalgamation of several canals opened in its present form in 1929 to compete unsuccessfully against road and rail.
We ultimately arrive at Pendley Manor, an ancient estate whose house was rebuilt in Victorian neo-Jacobean style in 1872. The last private owner was Dorian Williams, the BBC show-jumping commentator, who created two open air theatres here and inaugurated a Shakespeare festival in 1949 that continues to this day. We have dinner in the hotel's Shakespeare bar, watching peacocks strutting across the lawn.
Total distance: 144 miles
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