I haven’t done A Single Map in a while – well, not on the blog. I’ve done walks on my map most weeks in real life. We met a lot of cows on this most recent walk! We were using the Sturminster Newton walks again – the last of the five long ones – but we adapted it. Instead of parking in the paid car park in the town centre, we parked in the free car park at Fiddleford Manor, since the walk goes straight past it but other than that, we followed the route.
Download the GPS track on Wikiloc here
First, we went through the farm and out onto the system of bridges, locks, weirs and submarine architecture that is Fiddleford Mill, over the narrow bridge beyond and then across the fields to the farm at the end of Penny Street at the west end of Sturminster Newton. We’ve done this a couple of times now but instead of going through the gate straight ahead and into town, we turned right, followed a path across a couple of fields and went north to the Trailway. We’ve done this a couple of times too but not today. Today we went underneath the Trailway, which we didn’t know was a thing. We’ve stood on the Trailway above – there’s a gate in the corner of the field to the north and on two separate occasions a large fluffy dog has ambled around near the gate and refused to come and walk on the Trailway, but we’ve never been through that gate. We went up another lane past a farm and emerged on the B3091, exactly where Rixon Hill becomes Manston Road. I’m looking wistfully at a house in the Rixon area – it’s absolutely derelict but it’s in my price range and it has three bedrooms. Trouble is, I can afford to buy it or I can afford to renovate it over 5-10 years but not both. It’s even got a big garden, underneath all the overgrowth and rubble. Never mind.
The track is right on the corner where the road bends so if you do this walk, don’t cross the road when you first arrive on it, otherwise you’re going to have to cross it again at the blindest point. From here, it’s more or less a straight line for the next 2-3km which Dad interpreted as “this bit’s going to be really boring which is why I’ve left this walk until last”. It was anything but. Two or three minutes later we crossed the river at a footbridge and now we had to “keep straight on” and not take the path to the left. That’s easier on the map than in real life as it’s a grassy field with no obvious paths at all. A signpost pointed us in the direction of the path to the left, so I took a bearing on my map and walked vaguely in the direction of the north end of Hambledon Hill. This was incorrect! So incorrect!
(For reference, I’ve just measured it on my proper OS map and it’s a bearing of about 076, just shy of due east.)
We ambled around that field for far longer than we should have done. The only clue we could see from the map was that our way into the next field was in the middle of a roundish bulge in the field boundary and eventually we got close enough to the various boundaries at the far end of the field to be able to take a look at them and see if any of them bulged. Yes, one did. It seemed to be in totally the wrong direction according to my compass but the position of various buildings and farms on the horizon suggested that it might not be totally wrong according to the map. The trouble was an entire herd of cattle basking in the sun around it.
I like cows. I don’t generally feel much fear in a field of cows. I will approach a cow with my hand out in the hope of getting to pat its nose. I also speak fluent cow and so I understand when a cow says “no, go away, leave me alone” and so it’s rare I actually get to pat a nose. But if there’s no need to approach a herd, I won’t. If you’ve got a large empty field and a lot of cows in one corner, it’s usually a good idea to avoid that corner, leave them in peace. Now I had to walk right up and among them in the hope we were in the right place.
We were! The cows – well, teenage bullocks but it’s easier to say cows, even if it’s inaccurate – got up and stepped back as we approached and the one lying across the gate also moved. We went through the gate and then, with a solid piece of metalwork between us and the cows, we stopped to chat to them. They’re about the age and size of a small herd that used to live in the back field when I went out to work and my experience of bullocks that age is that they’re both curious and friendly. And indeed they were. The entire herd gathered to stare at us, the bolder ones coming forward to have a closer look. I introduced Dad to my favourite cow game – get everyone’s attention, then slowly crouch. The cows will all bow to keep staring at you. Then you slowly get up and they all look up together. We played that a couple of times, we took some photos with the moos and then we waved and departed, across a narrow bridge hiding in the woods that separated the two fields. The cows kept staring through the gap until we were well away.
The next field was easy and had deer in it – keep the boundary on the right, walk down to the bottom and cross to the third field and then the path goes onto the main road at Manston. The trouble was that half this field was split by an electric fence enclosing a herd of cows – actual cows, “well-laden” ladies with large udders. The map suggested you keep close to the river but the electric fence went all the way down to the river and unless we wanted to swim, that wasn’t the way. We couldn’t cross the river and walk along on the other side, not without swimming, and we couldn’t get along the other edge of the field. Well, the footpath signs said to go this way and so we crawled under the electric fence and walked reasonably briskly.
This field wouldn’t normally bother me either. Most of the ladies either stared at us from a comfy position chewing on the ground or strolled out of our path but there was one in the top corner who watched us crawl under the fence and then approached at an alarming speed. Not a gallop but a surprisingly brisk pace for a good solid lady of placid disposition. If I stopped and looked at her and held out my hand she stopped too and looked away but as soon as I carried on walking, she trotted along behind and that was unsettling. Granny’s footsteps is fun at Brownies but I’d rather not play it with a fully-grown cow.
Eventually she got bored and we nodded politely and respectfully to the rest of the ladies and then climbed gladly over the stile and out of the field. Now we were in the farm and a minute or two later we were on another blind bend of the B3091.
We weren’t sure where the path went but the sign pointed vaguely in the direction of Manston Church, so we went to look at it. There’s a huge private mansion behind the church and they have three dogs who’ll bark extremely threateningly at anyone walking down to said church. They couldn’t get at us, thanks to hedges and fences but between the dog and the fact that the path came to an abrupt end in the churchyard, we didn’t actually spare the church a glance. You see, we had more entertainment.
At the top of the church’s drive was a field and in that field was a herd of cows. Five months old and fluffy. They saw us coming through the gate onto the drive and the whole lot galloped over at once. This lot were just young enough that some of them didn’t mind having their noses patted and some of them saw we were distracted and tried to lick trousers and jumpers lower down the fence when we weren’t looking. They were like a herd of giant fluffy puppies and they were gorgeous! As we walked down the drive, they followed and we had another pat at the gate at the bottom and when we had to return, they walked back up with us.
Well, if our route didn’t go down to the church, it must go across the top of the field and then down the other side. So we let ourselves through the system of awkward and stiff gates while the cows followed us across the top and as we were doing that, the road gate opened again and their farmer came in. The cows went crazy! So far we hadn’t had a single moo out of three herds but this lot set up a racket at the sight of him. He drove into their field, parked and opened the far gate, where we were by this point, and they danced around and licked the car’s mirrors and mooed at the top of their voices, which are surprisingly deep for five-month-olds.
The farmer was moving them into the next field and since he was there, he explained that the path went diagonally across the field, despite the “private” signs on the gate and the stile was halfway along the fence at the bottom. If we’d keep back while he got the cows into the next field, we could just walk down the now-empty field. Now, this was entertaining. Two thirds of the cows galloped through the open gate and took off but the rest were a bit too dim to figure this out. They mooed across the hedge at their mates and then took off at a gallop around their old field while the farmer’s sons, boys of somewhere between eight and twelve, tried to round them up and for five minutes we just stood and watched this mad merry-go-round of boys and cows running round in circles. Once they were well out of the way, the farmer sighed and said “You may as well go now”. We weren’t going to get stampeded by overexcited calves, we weren’t going to accidentally herd them the wrong way any more than they already were, so we headed south and by the time we got to the stile, the entire herd was finally in the next field and the gate closed behind them.
The next field for us felt like a neglected bit of formal gardens belonging to the big mansion, with trees laid out in a more deliberate way than you’d usually find in a cow field. It looks even more obvious on Google Maps, two straight lines of trees continuing a kind of tree-lined walk in the part of the garden not crossed by a public footpath. Over another stile, across another ordinary field and we were back on the road.
This was a quieter road and a straight stretch. Hambledon Hill was in front of us and there were seven or eight paragliders drifting around its north end. In front of us, a handful of cows were frolicking in a field and the river had cut a miniature canyon with crumbling sides. Apparently this bit of road is very prone to flooding in bad weather but the river was low and pretty today.
We walked along the road and into Hammoon for lunch. We always find “a convenient bench” for lunch and this one was outside the church. Well, it was in the churchyard. The one outside the church wall was teeming with flies. There’s a Google review saying that there’s a list of vicars going back to 1239AD which sounds a bit surprised that it’s “not a new church”. A lot of grey stone country churches date back a bit. Some are Victorian and some are Victorian restorations of old churches but when William the Conqueror started his cathedral-building project in the 11th century, a lot of small ordinary churches got built as well. They haven’t all stood the test of time but I wouldn’t be surprised exactly to find a 900 year old church out in the sticks.
It’s always nice to eat a picnic out in the countryside. We watched a line of children on ponies walk slowly past, we watched a man painting a cottage, we got pestered by a large bee and we watched the birds. And I was glad I’d put suncream on my face that morning as we sat in the sunshine eating cheese sandwiches.
The rest of the walk was indeed a bit boring. We walked down the road from the church until we came across the bridleway which runs parallel to the road on the inside edge of the fields and followed that until we reached the Trailway, which has lost some of its interest since we’ve done it all.
We did have a last bit of entertainment before we reached Fiddleford, though. A man came along with three dogs, one of them an overexcited black beastie shaped a bit like a chunky Labrador, which shot along the trail, turned right into a large field, past a group of ladies picnicking at the field’s edge and vanished. The poor owner stood at the field entrance yelling for the dog for at least five minutes and as we walked, we eventually caught a glimpse of it galloping around the field having the best day of its life.
The route took us back to Fiddleford via one of the perpendicular lanes but we picked a slightly different route. There’s a bridge over the river, the remains of one of the old railway bridges, or more likely a replacement. On the far side of it is a path that runs alongside the river back to Fiddleford Mill. Every time we’ve been along here before it’s been under water. The gate that goes from the bottom of the bridge into the field has been barely visible. So we took advantage of the warm dry weather and the path being passable to use it. It emerges at the far end of the mill complex, where we watched two golden retrievers enjoying the artificial pond before we strolled back through the farm and to the car.
It didn’t look particularly exciting on the map but I got to meet three herds of cows and a farmer, see two ancient churches and watch three nice dogs. I mean, that’s pandemic levels of excitement but as country walks go, that was a pretty good one.