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SwindonWalk Details: Top details: The Walk: |
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It was just a short drive from our previous top (Whitehorse Hill in Oxfordshire) to Liddington village where we were due to meet our Dad to ascend our thirtieth top. From the village the three of us headed on a footpath south past the churchyard towards the M4. Before we reached the motorway the path meandered lazily into a coombe-like valley, which could have been beautiful if it were not for the scrubby vegetation and the backdrop of the M4. Someone had been clay pigeon shooting, and we amused ourselves for a while by trying to find whole flourescent orange "pigeons" amongst the shards. There were quite a view - they obviously weren't great shots. Going under the motorway was absolutely evil. It was an unsurfaced path, and the farmer clearly used it to bring in his cows for milking. The path had turned into a deep mire of what a restaurant might describe as fragrant cowpats delicately presented in a mud jus. Inside the tunnel we were able to make our way along a narrow concrete ledge, but once out the other side we just gave up and tramped our way through in our walking boots (cleaning them that evening was no joke!). Our Dad was wearing shoes rather than boots, and balanced his way precariously along a barbed-wire covered fence. We heard occasional comments under his breath along the lines of "b***er me" and "f*** my boots"! The field we now entered into was a continuation of the coombe on the other side of the motorway - it must have been truly beautiful before the motorway cut through. It was still tough going, being very soft underfoot, but eventually we emerged onto a minor road where we turned right. This road followed the route of the original Ridgeway (as opposed to the modern long distance path. Being so straight it seemed to be a long way before we could turn off and ascend the hill - in fact it was less than a mile. We were briefly amused by a couple of guys unsuccessfully attempting to paraglide from the side of the hill above us. One of the annoying things about Liddington Hill is that there are no footpaths ascending it from either the north or west side. In order to reach the top (and make a circular walk of it) we had to circle right around the western flanks of the hill and ascend from the south, joining the Ridgeway via a switchback around a field. This diversion bought another stream of imaginative vitriol from our Dad and caused him to take a "short" cut - going around the inside of the field boundary rather than the official route round the outside, a saving of, ooh, metres! He seemed quite smug afterwards, despite us lecturing him about trespassing.
There was a field to our right absolutely chock full of horses - strange because you only normally see three or four per field. We wondered if it was a horse rescue centre or something of that ilk, and were briefly amused by something that looked like Doctor Dolittle's Pushmi-Pullyu creature but turned out to consist of one horse standing behind another. On the crest of the hill was an even more impressive sight - three large red deer, antlers & all, clearly outlined against the skyline. Having spotted us, they moved uneasily about for a while before eventually disappearing over the crest of the hill. After a gentle slope, we too came to the crest of the hill. As the Ridgeway curved away to the right, we saw the iron age fort of Liddington Castle across the field to our left, complete with prominent trig point. We had imagined that there would be some sort of permissive path leading to it, but there was nothing. Fortunately the field had already been harvested, so we did not feel guilty about walking across it (notwithstanding our earlier hypocritical comments to our Dad about trespassing!). The "castle" was sealed off with some fairly impassable fencing, and we circled clockwise around the enclosure until we found a locked gate that we could clamber over. On arriving at the trig point we were perturbed to discover it all dressed up like a tourist attraction, with both the trig itself and a nearby inexplicable lump of rock surrounded by an expensive-looking viewing platform. This did not sit very easily with the trouble we'd had accessing it! Feeling slightly uneasy, we took the usual photos and returned from whence we came. The views would have been excellent by the way, that is if they hadn't contained Swindon. Rejoining the Ridgeway we started to return to the car, this time descending off the eastern side of the hill (the only other access route). After only a couple of hundred metres, we came across a well marked permissive path leading to the opposite side of the hill fort to that from which we had entered it. Boy did we feel foolish… if the farmer is reading this, we're truly sorry.
Inside the village a very pleasant little path followed a stream through rhododendrons back to the pub - a good end to a nice walk. We'd completed just two tops today, but had walked and ascended much further than in doing eight tops in the West Midlands the previous weekend. And you know what? It felt good!
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It was the second section of the Ridgeway we'd
walked today, and once again it was nice easy walking, not at all the
horrific trench full of mud that we knew and avoided as kids. Either someone
had done something to reduce the 4x4 and quad bike usage, or we'd just
picked the wrong sections before.
The Ridgeway quickly lead us down to the B4192,
a busy road which made for an unpleasant hike back to the village. Our
Dad disliked it so much that he sprinted much of the way, & then when
we caught up and he berated us for being slower and more unfit than him.