A Coventry Way
Ice, mud, buzzards, bramble in a Big circle around Coventry.
I’m experimenting with longer-form writing like this, for stories of walks, trips and routes.
60 kilometres. Well, that’s a pretty big circle.
Recently, I wrote about my first ever run around Coventry, tracing the smallest circumference around the city centre possible. Coventry, like York, like Chester, is a concentric city. As it grows, its outer reaches turn from urban to increasingly rural, bucolic; the inner ring of Corporation, Warwick and Fairfax Streets grow into the famous Ring Road, droning around the city centre, and then into increasingly vague and fuzzy circles of roads, long-distance footpaths and muddy back-lanes. With distance, what passes for a CV postcode is barely recognisable as Coventry anymore. Barely.
Ever since that first run, I’ve been stretching my notional border of the city - walking, running and riding bicycles until the spires of Coventry Cathedral are lost in the skyline behind me. Where did the city end? Well, it turns out, A Coventry Way association has a say. In the 1970s, long-distance runners Cyril Bean and Fred Dowell were trying to train for the Karrimor Mountain Marathon (now the Original Mountain Marathon, OMM) races. These were hard-as-nails orienteering challenges, based in the Lake District, in Cumbria, the rugged North.
Cyril and Fred, and now Varun, must’ve asked - “How do we train for an off-road marathon…in Coventry?”
It turns out, by doing exactly what I sought - create a Really big, fuzzy circle of footpaths, bridleways, back-lanes going all around the city. They called it the Coventry Way, and in the 90s the association formalised it and have been championing and maintaining it ever since.
It was a bright, crisp, clear, cold, perfect January morning. The sun danced through my bedroom window, warming homes, cars and streets where it fell; but just below the steep southeasterly sunrise of January, everything was ice. Bluish, crystalline ice. Perfect. I munched some porridge, reheated a burrito I’d made earlier, poured myself a flask of hot water, packed a teabag and a mince pie and after some is-it-isn’t-it-too-cold faff with clothing, stepped out into the sunshine.
A Coventry Way was designed to be an accessible loop of the city; so, none of it is further than 5 miles (or 8 kilometres) from the city centre. Thus there are numerous convenient entry points from which to start the route, but the nominal start and finish is in the village of Meriden, the first biggish village between Coventry and Birmingham. I took the fast X1 bus to the start. I love buses - sitting on the upper deck, I felt an air of paternalistic grandeur, surveying familiar roads and neighbourhoods as they swept below me, the urban landscape melding seamlessly into sub-rural as we left Coventry for the weird limbo where the arc of Birmingham intersected.
Within 20 minutes, the bus had pulled in just outside of Meriden, and saying my thanks, I marched a short distance up the road, looking for a familiar ‘Public Footpath’ sign. Shaded by the tall conifers and hedgerows to my right, it felt cold. The world was stained a brilliant icy blue, with shards of warm yellows and greens just piercing through gaps in the vegetation.
Suddenly, there it was! Still new, its lettering cut into sharp relief against the warm timber, and two startingly bright circlets of plastic nailed to the back, proudly conferring the sign: ‘Heart of England Way’ and ‘A Coventry Way.’ A pause for a photo, then through the kissing gate, a short shaded gap in the hedgerow and the path began.
***
My plan today was to walk from Meriden to Kenilworth, a distance of around 13 km. This route split into two identifiable sections. As I walked out from Meriden towards the village of Berkswell, the first section was largely comprised of long-distance footpath; along with the pre-existing Heart of England way, parts of the Millenium Way and other well-signposted paths made up the first hour of walking. Consequently, it made for leisurely walking. I switched my mind off, focusing simply on putting one muddy footstep after another, confident in the knowledge that the next gate a few hundred meters away would signpost me in the right direction.
This first bit is also largely off-road: I skirted along the edge of empty fields, passing nothing more than the odd distant farmhouse, the occasional little churchyard, but largely just open landscape on one side fenced in by a tall hedgerow on the other. Below me, the warming earth faded from gentle frost and shards of icy puddles to soft, well-trodden muddy footmarks. Walk to the next gate, repeat.
There were two small roads to be crossed as I passed Four Oaks and approached Berskwell to the south; despite it being a Thursday morning, these were eerily empty. Even on electric poles on either side of the road as I crossed, I spotted the bright green circlet pointing me in the right direction, leaving my mind occupied with taking more photographs before I rejoined the trail again.
This was turning into a slightly hypnotising experience; approaching midday, the sun was now firmly ensconced in front of me as I headed south and a combination of its blinding brightness and uncomfortable warmth meant that I kept my head down, loosening zips and attempting to manifest some of the frosty ground to my benefit. The continuous stream of path, gate, path, repeat was beginning to dull my senses. And then…
…raptor!
It swept across the tree-tops, low enough that I could see it despite the glare. Dark browney-grey body, pale wings with dark tips. A buzzard? I watched it make moody sweeping arcs over the field, recording a very inadequate video on my phone and wishing I owned any binoculars. A solemn lap, alighting on one of the trees, then off again as some neighbouring jackdaws harried it with insistent shrieks, yak-yak yak-yak. I watched it fly off over the brush, smiled to myself, and set off again.
Walking past Berskwell, the route intersects with the Glasgow-London train line and other nods to civilisation. Thoroughly awakened by the new-found obstacle course of slippery bridges, stretches of narrow doubletrack roads and the occasional farm with an ‘adventurous’ approach to re-routing a public footpath (read: electric fencing), I proceeded cautiously on. Four trains passed by in quick succession minutes after I crossed the rail bridge, lending their powerful hum to the other surrounding white noise, and the gentle crunch-squelch-rustle of my boots over the changeable terrain.
That I could walk here at all is testament to the drive and motivation of groups like A Coventry Way association. This is contested land, fraught with public and private ownership issues. Just to the south, the much-maligned HS2 network has claimed vast swathes to build a grand station complex near Burton Green. Throw in the electric fencing and other infringements by unconcerned land owners and the knock-on effect is that paths grow harder, then more inaccessible, and then through disuse, overgrown and eventually lost to the public.
It’s telling how much work walking associations do to maintain these paths that the only real obstruction I encountered was the smallest cordon of thick bramble, densely tucked in a gap between the brush and a gate. It was a minute’s work to carefully push these aside and creep past, but if only I’d brought a machete! Would subsequent users clear this path, or avoid it altogether? You snooze, you lose (your right to walk in this countryside).
A gentle lull was creeping over me now; hunger, but also an unwillingness to stop and the lack of adequate seating meant this was now my third hour of the walk. This mellowness found its way out through my eyes, my lungs, the pores of my skin, and seeped into the landscape without. The late afternoon sun grew lazy; the shadows, longer and a deeper, richer navy. A previously absent breeze picked up and rustled the browning leaves, percolating in through my many layers. I shivered.
The path looked oddly familiar. Abrupt, jarring. There were more fences now, more signs with the demand to ‘Keep Out.’ Everywhere, a sense of completion, of ending, a demand from the surroundings to stop now!
I said, ok.
A gap in the trail, and before I realised it, I was looking down on an old friend: the HS2 works, and the convoluted path that it carved enroute to the Kenilworth Greenway and my morning commute route. My trudging grew purposeful, and I found myself retracing the same narrow lanes, giving way to people on bicycles, negotiating the same gates and then, standing by a bench that I rode past every working day. It was magnetic. I sat, opened the burrito, poured the tea, un-peeled the mince pie from its casing.
The sun was washing over the treetops; there was, perhaps, another hour of light left. I let my hot enamel mug warm my fingers, flexed my ankles, stretched my back. The burrito was still flavourful. I felt good.
13 km of the Coventry Way route was behind me, but another 7 ahead of me on the way home. This was all familiar, worn deep into the recesses of my brain from years of tired commuting. Easy, comfortable.
Cyril, like Fred, and now Varun, would have asked, “Well, why not?” and, just like them, I strapped their backpack on, dusted my shoes off, and walked off down the path heading home.
