Orton in old English means ridge top settlement, and a glance at the OS map’s contour lines confirm that Northamptonshire’s Orton does indeed straddle a ridge top. Land falls away steeply to the North down to the Slade Brook, and much more shallowly to the South, towards an unnamed brook. All this geography was academic at the time I cycled along the wet and puddled lane to Orton from Foxhall. There were no views to enjoy due to the misty conditions and general gloom. The general atmosphere drew my consciousness in to things up close. The sound of tyres on wet tarmac and gravel, the squelching through mud, the splashing through the temporary fords, the bare may hedges, uniformly straight and level after hedge clipping, and the colourless sky, so low that it put a muffling lid on sound.

As I entered Orton on this cold midwinter’s day, my thoughts turned to the bone numbing cold of the recluse hamlets and farms a few generations ago, when winter sleet tore through the miry clay valleys and the remote ridge tops. How bleak and hazardous life was when crops from the fields of ridge and furrow, the common fields scraped out of the forest brambles and clay, had to be eked out through the iron months of frost.

Today under the thatch are fridge and freezer. Supermarket delivery vans scurry about the little wet lanes, whilst handymen in white vans, piled high with ladders, maintain ancient cottages that have never looked better, whilst villagers take holidays.

At a nearby school which began life as a grammar school for boys, endowed by the local lord of the manor, mothers turn up in four by fours to collect their kids, who turn out aglow, running and laughing.

We can look with thankfulness upon the less arduous life in the countryside.What was once a place to flee for a wage, slate roof and coal fire in the city, has become a haven of escape in which to retire. Online cottage dwellers scrape from the internet images from around the world whilst cosy warm in front of their blazing woodburners. What they see and hear gnaws at the illusion of escape at every moment. How long before the tsunami of globalisation hits? The isolation of the recluse hamlets has in all senses gone. You can run (or cycle), but you can’t hide.

© John Dunn.

You may also like to see my YouTube Channel, called Highways and Byways.

https://www.youtube.com/@drjohndunn2898

I cycled across the expanse of flat low-lying land, which stretches without a field hedge to be seen, between the lane gates at Beck Dairy and Badge Lodge. Ahead of me, the cluster of buildings of Glebe Farm and the start of a steep climb, which leads the eye to the commanding position of Brixham’s great Saxon church at the top, the largest building north of the Alps when first constructed under the Mercian kings.

I came upon first one in isolation, then two together, then clusters of horse boxes and trailers. Then I heard the tell-tale and evocative country sound of the fox hunting horn. Hounds emerged on to the lane ahead of me, followed by the red-coated Huntsman and Whipper-in. Then the hunt as a whole followed, trotting along the lane for a short while, before bursting into the field on my left, released to gallop behind the howling-barking hound pack in pursuit of their quarry. This is Pytchley Hunt Country, and what I saw that day was as traditional a country scene as anyone has witnessed in the last two to three hundred years hereabouts.

I cycled on through Brixham, Scaldwell and Old, to find sanctuary by a field gate on Mill Lane, near Kite’s Hall Farm for my picnic lunch. From the moment I unpacked the saddlebag, I was entertained by a swirling flock of linnets, whilst my bird-call app informed me that fieldfare and redwings were about too, sadly not to be seen from my sunken gateway, yet comforting to know that they were nearby all the same. They will be around for two or three months yet, and I will be back to see them.

© John Dunn.

You may also like to see my YouTube Channel, called Highways and Byways.

https://www.youtube.com/@drjohndunn2898

I cycled southwards, along Sulby Road. An ancient Road, which centuries ago was chosen as the county boundary between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, taking up the role temporarily abandoned by the rivers Welland and Avon. Sulby Road in fact crosses the watershed between the two. At the time of the embryonic Saxon shires, or shares of land, the Midlands were an area of dense and near-impenetrable woodland. Boat travel along rivers was the principal and often only means of transport across country. Travel West-East at this point would have meant hauling a boat out of the Avon and dragging it on sleds and rollers over the watershed and into the Welland. Sulby Road, then a track in the woodland, may have witnessed the tortuously slow progress of such boat-haulings. Did Offa and the other Mercian kings pass this way as they traversed their Saxon realm.

Having passed through Welford, I headed towards South Kilworth, dropping down the steep contours of Downtown Hill from 554 feet at the roadside trig point, to 52 feet in the Avon Valley below. After first crossing the Grand Union Canal, the next bridge is over the River Avon. Were the Saxon’s boats dropped back into the water here after the long haul from the Welland, or did they manage the feat higher up at Welford? What does remain of the Saxons here is the county boundary between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, a duty falling upon the Avon, as fulfilled by the Welland over the other side of the watershed.

To the left of the bridge over the Avon, the river has been dammed back as Stanford reservoir, named after the nearby village.The reservoir was built in 1928 and, as the Leicestershire & Rutland Ornithological Society
tells us on its website, lies on an imaginary line drawn between the Wash and the Severn, a proven ‘flyway’ for migrating birds across the centre of England.

That proven flyway follows the same trajectory as the proven waterway followed by the Saxons, the Welland flowing from the Wash in the East, the Avon flowing to the Severn in the West, but with this arduous overland connection up and over the watershed.

© John Dunn.

You may also like to see my YouTube Channel, called Highways and Byways.

https://www.youtube.com/@drjohndunn2898