Ridgeway - July 23 and 24

Whew, there's a lot to catch up on. I am in a pub The Anchor in Tring, settling in for a laptop session after a decent Ridgeway walk section from Wendover with my friend Anita today. Yesterday was an epic (33,000 step) walk from Chinnor to Wendover, one of the best of the walk so far, although we were shattered by the end. I have 3 days left in this part of the country before I head off to Chester on Monday and the remaining days are starting to fill up fast. 

The walk yesterday took us up three main hills - Lodge Hill (an SSSI), Whiteleaf Hill (with an excellent chalk figure of a cross), and Coombe Hill above Wendover, where one of the ancient beacons used to stand. 

I've included photos of various views of all of that, and the views and associated woodlands were quite amazing, but hard to capture in a photo. In fact, the best part of the walk turned out to be something I hadn't known about at all. The Ridgeway goes past a pub called The Plough at Cadsden, and then runs through the grounds of Chequers, which is the British Prime Minster's house when he isn't in London. Parliament has broken up last week, and school holidays are on us, so we happen to know that the PM is in Chequers now, receiving the Indian Prime Minister, today. There have been cops all over Wendover, weird cell phone blackouts, too. The whole are near Chequers is 2G only, which made navigating tough for Anita. 

First of all, the Plough at Cadsden. It's ancient and very traditional and surprisingly cheap. There are photos up everywhere of David Cameron meeting the Chinese leader, and the Chinese now own it, and have removed photos of other visiting dignitaries. The barman told us that Chinese tourists flock there to have their photo taken with the photo of Cameron meeting Xi Jinping. He also told us that Boris Johnson came here so often he had a special beer-glass reserved for him behind the bar. And then it came out...THIS was the pub where Johnson and his mates partied on during COVID, while people were dying alone and untreated in their beds. THIS was the pub where he shot the Conservatives in the foot at the next election. This pub, immediately, became my favourite pub in Britain. We drank some excellent Hawkstone cider and had to pretend its manufacture hadn't been sponsored by Jeremy Clarkson. Wasps chased us from table to table, lured by the smell of it. As a parting gift, the barman told us that once, a PM had been here with his family, and then he and his wife had both gone back to Chequers in seperate cars, each one thinking that the other had taken their daughter. It was only when they got back to their huge estate they realised she was still at the pub. When they got back the found her helping with the dishes. I am inclined to believe this story, for no reason other than that I want to believe it. 

It got stranger. The Ridgeway detoured around the Chequers estate for some distance and it looked very much as though it would bypass the entire thing, which would have made sense given the repeated signs warning us not to trespass on the grounds, and warning us that we were under surveillance. Then, unexpectedly, the path ran RIGHT THROUGH the estate, behind the protected gates. Signs warning us not to leave the path were even more frequent, and security cameras followed us we passed inside the gates and across the field through which the PM must drive every time he comes here. 

Later that day, as exhaustion was coming on, we had to make a large detour around the path of the HR2, a high speed rail project which I have head a lot about. Anita tells me it will cut about half an hour of the train travel time from London to Birmingham, which must surely be for the benefit of the people wishing to leave Birmingham because presumably no one would want to get there any faster. It's creating a huge scar in the landscape, everyone hates it, it's massively over budget, and it won't stop anywhere on the way. So, a pretty normal government cockup. 

It is so uniquely British that the 'ancient right of way' was overruled for a rail corridor, but not for entry into one of the most high security places in the country. I had a wonderful day. I hope the photos capture it. 

Today was a more sedate affair - a 3.5 hour Ridgeway-adjacent walk through Wendover Woods and Dancer's Edge, into Tring. I saw my third deer species, another Iron Age hill-fort called Boddington, and, we found some Chicken of the Woods, a type of edible fungus. Anita picked some. I'l let you know how it tastes.