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Avon and Bath & North East SomersetWalk Details:
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The Walk:Despite having just come from a pleasant walk over the nearby Beacon Batch, Jim and I were feeling a bit fed up and not in the mood for this top. The cold and gloomy weather was starting to get us down; I wanted to get back home to my ill wife; we were both thinking that we’d rather be carrying out our original plan of bagging decent hills in South Wales; and we knew that this top would be a pretty miserable one, not at all appropriate for celebrating the halfway point on our county tops list. Still, it was there and we had to do it, for such is the mentality of us hill-baggers! On a better day we might have turned this into a longer walk. The interestingly-named “Castle of Comfort” pub a couple of kilometres to the west of the county top is surrounded (according to the OS map) by all manner of interesting antiquities. Some “Priddy Circles”, a tumulus, something called the “Devil’s Punch Bowl”, a Roman road and a trig point were all just begging to be explored. In the mood we were in though, we were barely prepared to turn the short distance to the county top into a round walk. A round walk we did though, albeit a short one (and in fact, a square one!). We turned right out of the forestry commission car park and walked half a mile or so back along the road. We turned left on a footpath which rose gently up to the top of Niver Hill, at just over a thousand feet above sea level. Unfortunately this wasn’t the county top we were heading for; in common with the other county tops we’d done today the county boundary actually ran along slopes of the hill a bit lower down. We wondered why this was – surely a hilltop would former a more natural and logical division between counties? But then I guess Avon and it’s successor unitary authorities are not “natural” counties – they were carved out of Somerset and Gloucestershire purely for administrative convenience.
We instead took a left turn slightly over the crest of the hill, and followed an interminably long straight path along the edge of uninteresting fields. Eventually we joined the Monarchs Way long distance path as it followed a track called Greendown Batch down through a pleasant thin strip of woodland. Despite being very muddy underfoot, this was probably the most pleasant part of this walk. Unfortunately we all too soon turned off to the left to take a path across more grassy fields, on the fourth side of our “square” walk. The county top was in the south-eastern corner of the third field this path crossed, and was nothing special at all – even the views across Chew Valley Lake were made to look dull by the grey, miserable weather. We were glad to continue the short distance along the path to reach the road, and then turn right to get back to the car park. Somehow, despite hills that were quite reasonable (especially compared
to many of the tops in the south-east), we were not very happy baggers
today. The miserable, cold overcast weather had not helped, nor had the
fact that we had both developed headaches. Our depression was not helped
by heavy rain and an hour-long traffic jam through Bath on the way home.
I wondered if, after a hundred tops in a year-and-a-bit, we’d lost
our appetite for bagging. Well, time would soon tell – we had an
extensive bagging trip lined up for the following week in Lincolnshire… |
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Despite being over the “magical”
(to us south-easterners) thousand foot, this hill had none of the beautifully
wild-looking heather of Beacon Batch – it was just your bog standard
grassy field. It did contain something which interested Jim the engineer
though – a trailer holding a folded-up portable radio mast. A clever
arrangement of winches and pulleys made it easy to put up in a hurry –
much as we were tempted to set up our own pirate radio station, we left
it as it was!