Maps 163 to 166: Bourton-on-the-Water to Ware. Where? Yes, Ware.

Bourton-on-the-Water is undeniably a pretty place. The wonderfully named River Windrush glides alongside the main street and there are a handful of small, arched stone bridges that cross it between the buildings on either side, as well as a ford. On either bank are achingly pretty Cotswold stone buildings, including a generous supply of pubs and fancy restaurants. You would be quite hard pressed to come up with a more suitable scene for a jigsaw puzzle. Predictably enough, it is a very touristy place. There is a model village that you can visit to see a replica of the town in miniature. Presumably within that there is an even smaller model of the model village, and so on. I didn’t find out because I had another long day of cycling ahead of me and a superb day of sunshine and blue skies to maximise, so after breakfast it was up and out.

After a stiff climb to blow off the cobwebs, I was treated to an hour of deserted Cotswold lanes and villages, passing the odd horse rider, but not much else. It was like this most of the time until I reached the small and very pretty Cotswold town of Charlbury. This somehow seems to have managed to avoid becoming a tourist honeypot and felt like a real place where real people lead ordinary lives. Albeit privileged ones, for the most part. I joined in for morning tea at the deli, which was buzzing with groups of walkers and “ladies who lunch”. It was all very pleasant and distinctly English. In a good way.

Moving on, I enjoyed more quiet lanes and pretty scenery for the rest of the morning. I found myself staring through the fancy wrought iron gates at the back entrance to Blenheim Palace. The main pile was just visible at the end of a very long drive, which also included an obelisk in the mid-distance. These treasure houses and their estates are on scale difficult to imagine. It is hard to believe they are actually someone’s home; but they are. I know a bit about this mainly through dealings with Chatsworth House and gardens, which is a 20 minute drive from where I live. My wife, Jenni, is a regular garden volunteer and, as such, part of the Chatsworth “family”. As her other half I have enjoyed some of the benefits that brings, and you get a window into this other world. There is much to like about it; but at its core are the Duke and Duchess who are there through inheritance, and who do indeed occupy some of the rooms inside the palatial house. The present incumbent does a good job of giving back to those who invest themselves in his estate, and it seems to find a healthy balance in which class now plays a much diminished role. I can’t speak for or about Blenheim; but I’m willing to bet the respective Dukes share royal friends. It is another world. So I took a picture from my side of the gates, and moved on.

The Oxford northern bypass was cleverly avoided by the signposted cycle route, which used bits of the old main road, and for a time I was visibly moving more quickly than the huge volumes of traffic using it. Every time I come into contact with these seemingly never ending corridors of vehicles and people, rushing (if they can) to wherever they are going, I feel further detached from that world than ever. I know I have done my fair share of it, and probably will again; but at the moment, from the saddle of a bike, nothing seems less desirable to me. I have done a pretty good job of avoiding crowds, and especially heavy traffic, for several months; but it is never very far away.

Indeed, the next place I arrived, Bicester, had plenty of opportunities to rejoin the modern world if I wanted it. It lies close to the M40 and has rail links to London, and seems to be in an area of modern expansion. But I headed in to the older part of the town centre, missing out by choice on the shopping “village” and other more recent development, and instead enjoyed a bench in the sunny pedestrianised high street, where I hungrily demolished an enormous breakfast sandwich from a van. A steady stream of passers by stopped to have conversations with the men selling food from the van window, and it was clear that they were a regular fixture in the town and in each others’ lives. They discussed doctor’s appointments and job interviews and wished each other well. A lot has been said about the demise of the British high street, probably with justification; but today Bicester felt like a town centre I wanted to be in.

Except I had to keep moving. On the edge of town, I crossed over a huge engineering site that turned out to be the the new East-West railway, which I believe is planned to join Cambridge directly to Oxford. I hadn’t heard too much about this; but I can report that the section I saw looked close to completion. Track has been laid. On my journey of multiple West to East lines, it is reassuring to see something new and efficient linking places together outside London. That said, a few miles further on there were more men and machines and this time it was HS2. I suppose the 2 new lines will cross somewhere around here.

I rode along more miles of quiet but largely unmemorable lanes until I came unexpectedly upon a scene from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Quainton, a village that had offered nothing special, suddenly opened out into a wide green with a lovely pub, pretty houses and, at the top of the green slope, a tall four sailed windmill overlooking the red tile roofs, its top shining white in the sun, and its smaller rear sails painted in red and white barber shop stripes against the bright blue sky. I expected to see Truly Scrumptious and Dick van Dyke waving from the window; but instead found myself surrounded by school kids and their parents making the walk home from the local primary school in the sun.

And so I continued. Whitchurch was surprisingly pretty and full of old half timbered buildings. Mentmore was almost Chatsworth-like and led to a long straight avenue of mature autumnal trees. I reached and rode up and over Ivinghoe Beacon, where the ancient Ridgeway path begins its journey south west. You could see for miles to the north. But the roads had once again become busy and the traffic detracted from my appreciation of the landscape. I escaped into quieter roads closer to Whipsnade and enjoyed this rather hilly section much more after that. As the light began to fade, I crossed the M1 and reached Welwyn, from where it was a straight run into Hertford, a fine and well proportioned riverside county town that looked like it had a vibrant town centre and lots of dining options. A couple of miles further on and I reached its twin town of Ware (where?) and found the pub that was to be my home for the night. My room had the feel of a converted lean-to on the side of the building, accessed from the car park. But it was cheap and warm and it did the job. The bike joined me in the room for the night, where I think it felt quite at home. In the pub, I watched a match take place in the local darts league. It was all very friendly. The players didn’t all look like professional darts players do on telly… but most of them did. For my part, Strava said I had cycled 99.9 hilly miles today. I am sure I must have forgotten to switch it on first thing though, because I always do.