London LOOP Section 4 – West Wickham to Hamsey Green 28th March 2011

When you live in Romford, it is something of a dilemma whether or not to take the train to places at some considerable distance across London.  Hayes can be reached by car from Romford in about 50 minutes.  Taking the train, via Liverpool Street and London Bridge is probably slower and more expensive.  However, one has to consider how easy it is to get from the end of your walk, back to the start, in order to collect your car.  This car collection malarkey can be a real headache in some instances.  It then becomes a toss-up whether to travel by car or let the train take the strain.  It all depends on where you live I suppose. 

 In the case of the Hayes to Hamsey Green leg (section 4) we decide to try the train.  This adds a mile to the day’s walking, since we have to walk into Romford to catch the train.  We also have to take a bus from Liverpool Street to London Bridge, adding a further 30 minutes travel.  As ever, waiting for train connections adds time, but at least at London Bridge we are able to view the progress of The Shard, soon to be Europe’s tallest building. 

I’m sure the views will be great from the top, once finished, but I’d sooner be walking through than looking at, the London scenery.

Unlike the previous week, when we walked section 3, we leave home with plenty of time to spare, giving us a full day for our latest adventure.

As ever, the walk begins where we left off last time.  Revisiting the previous end point always feels like looking back in time, a brief glimpse into the past.  However, it is always wiser to look to the future, especially on a sunny day at West Wickham.  We quickly press on with our task of finding a small snickett (or whatever the local name for a back alley is) between houses and complete a short walk up a suburban street to Coney Hall Recreation Ground.  Here we pause for lunch, passing a short conversation with a couple who had been walking the Loop for the last 2 years.

I don’t think they had been at it continuously throughout this time, although they did admit they were quite weary!  However, this underlines the beauty of The LOOP.  You can take as long as you like to complete it.  I suspect they were on the latest of several sections spread over the previous 2 years, or perhaps even subsections of Section 4.  You can do as much as you like, when you like and it doesn’t matter how old or fit you are, or for that matter how much weight you are carrying!  The LOOP is infinitely customisable.

Duly fortified with sandwich and fruit we press on up the hill to the church of St John the Baptist.  According to the LOOP directions we cross the Greenwich Meridian, but somehow we miss the marker stone and the great occasion of crossing from the oriental to the occidental hemisphere.   Nevertheless it is a sunny day and we have 10 glorious miles of walking ahead of us, so feel little the worse for our failure.

St John the Baptist looks a characterful church, with a pleasant walk down amongst the grave stones before the view across the valley to Three Halfpenny Woods opens out.  This must have been quite a beautiful area before the acres of suburbia closed in. 

The walk down the hill, through meadowland is pleasant, but we feel we are moving inexorably towards the busy road below.  We miss the entry to the right of the mown parkland area in the valley bottom and have to walk much further alongside the busy road than we might otherwise have chosen to.  It is not an obvious path.  Once in this area of suburban parkland the walking is more pleasant, especially once we walk up the hill towards Three Halfpenny Woods.  Good value for money these.

The route takes us along the ridge, through Spring Woods, before entering Three Halfpenny Woods. 

Once again we fail to find a promised boundary marker, this time between Bromley and Croydon.  Less significant perhaps than the one between west and east hemispheres, but nonetheless a sad indictment of our observational skills.

The ensuing walk through wooded countryside is very pleasant, with some fine big trees, some of which are hollowed enough to swallow a grown adult! 

The woodland gives way to open meadow/parkland.  We enjoy the countryside for the while, but this is soon to be disturbed by a less attractive walk down Shirley Church Road.  This is one of those not uncommon rat-runs frequently encountered around the London fringe.  After half a mile or so, we turn off into the blessed relief of a rough track around a school and into Sandpits Road.

Our walk is further disrupted by a busy road (Upper Shirley Road), but once crossed the rest of the day’s walk is more or less transformed into one of rural tranquillity, with only occasional encounters with suburbia.  Encounters with the internal combustion engine may jar on the ears and be considered an unacceptable intrusion by some walkers, but I find the experience (when mercifully brief) only heightens my appreciation of the quieter, more natural sections.

Crossing Upper Shirley road we encounter a multitude of teenage school children, dressed in a range of uniforms that I suspect none of them likes.  No matter what the school, teenagers can’t wait to get out of their uniforms and into a different kind of uniform, that sets them apart from both adults and younger children.  Even their uniforms are arranged in a style that marks them out as ‘cool’. 

Ever since my years as a teacher in the 1980’s teenagers have worn their ties in an extremely truncated style, with an enormous knot and a long thin piece that must be tucked uncomfortably inside their shirts.  How strange that this trend has remained for 30 years representing a nonconformist conformity.  No matter how much they hate their uniform, they seem to hate kids wearing a different uniform, from other schools, much more.

A short walk down Oaks Road takes us down to a woodland area. 

A stiff walk up the hill here brings us out onto Addington Hills, the largest area of heathland in London.  The view over Croydon here is impressive and it is a surprise that the centre of this aspiring city, with all its high rise buildings, is so close.  The heathland provides a contrasting landscape to walk through, but its diminutive size is a little sad compared to the vast acreages that are to be found further west in Hampshire and Dorset.  You can’t help but feel that it represents the last of the family silver that London is trying hard to hold onto, a sort of last memento to help hold onto a fading memory of past riches.

From the heathland of Addington Hills we pass through woodland, losing our way briefly, before joining yet more school children wending their weary ways back home.  The south London tram system crosses our path and gives pause for thought.  I recall taking trams in my native South Yorkshire in the 1960’s.  My mother used to tell me with no small pride that one of our neighbours “drove the last tram in Sheffield”.  With the rise of the motorcar the government of the day decided trams and their cousins the railways had a limited future and in a rush of blood to the head they axed long swathes of metal lines.  Arguably momentous decisions such as these should not be left to the government of the day, with a referendum required before such short sighted butchery is permitted.  However, the trams are returning, as are new railway lines, although perhaps not without controversy. 

A quarter mile up the A212 we cross into Ballard Way and into the grounds of Heathfield House. 

Heathfield House

The LOOP directions take us on a pleasant ramble down tarmac paths and steps through the formal gardens of a one-time country retreat.  Doubtless some well-to-do landowner or minor member of the gentry lived here in the 18th Century.  Today, like many such properties, this is a location for business conferences and major celebrations such as weddings.  Rather this than they fall into decay, as they often do in more isolated areas of the UK.

We explore the grounds for a while before ascending further steps through the well kept grounds, before finding our way to Bramley Bank Nature Reserve.  As we pass through the reserve I spot evidence of a previous traveller, one Shane Mason.  Shane is evidently a student at one of the local secondary schools.  Perhaps we passed him earlier.  It is a certainty that the report card he probably dropped here several days earlier was not handed in for the required inspection.  It seems Shane has not been at his most studious of late, judging by some of the remarks made by his teachers.  I consider posting the lost report card to his headteacher, trying to imagine what reaction it might cause.  Deciding that my actions will in reality have little consequence, I drop the report card in a nearby waste bin.

Bramley Bank soon gives way to Little Heath Woods, squeezing between two modern housing estates as it does.  Beyond is the A2022 Addington Road, which is quickly crossed before plunging down alleyways that run between the back gardens of a further housing estate.  Were it not for the legal protection afforded to our rights of way, it is highly unlikely that developers would have bothered to retain this access. 

These snickets or twitchells as we used to call them in Rotherham, are the essence of walking in urban areas.  I was once conducted an impromptu survey amongst colleagues at a business dinner.  My colleagues came from all over the UK.  I asked each where they came from and the name they applied to these residual urban pathways.  I must have collected at least 20 different names including jitties, jiggers, twittens, gennals, ginnals, cut-throughs and back alleys.  Our rich heritage is to be found in the most intriguing and unexpected of forms.

As we are walking through one of these twittens, a small Border Collie comes galloping down the lane behind us, followed by his master.  The oversized branch he carries in his mouth smacks me on the calf, causing him to have to pause briefly and make adjustments before continuing on his merry way, his master looking a little shame-faced by the encounter.

Before long the housing estate is behind us, as we enter Selsdon Wood.  A long climb through the woods brings us out onto a rural lane through Puplet Wood.  Here the LOOP takes us away from the suburban charms of Croydon into countryside little changed over the years as we walk through an area designated as an area of great landscape value.  The appearance of spring celendines and the discovery of some strands of badger hair snagged on a piece of barbed wire, serve to reinforce this sudden transformation into one of peripheral London’s other worlds.

Eventually this lane brings us out onto Farleigh Road, by the entrance to yet another LOOP golf course, Farleigh Court Golf Club.  From here a horse path, to enable riders to avoid the threat of speeding cars, takes the LOOP parallel to the road, with the joy of a substantial hedge to shield us from the passing traffic.  In reality we are not supposed to be walking this route, as a hastily erected sign advises us that some conservation group or other is improving the path.  Ignoring the advice we find the route perfectly passable, with no sign of the promised work party.  Although it is plain to see that they have done some sterling work on the track.  Later walkers will doubtless wonder why the LOOP directions refer to it as a “muddy horse path”, but you should be cheered by the progress still being made for all our benefits.

Eventually the track stops and we are instructed to cross Farleigh Road opposite Elm Farm.  The following section, although brief, is one of those that somehow really captures my imagination.  We are walking through pleasant grazing meadows, but soon find ourselves wending our way downhill into a very attractive hidden valley known as Mossyhill Shaw.  This is a topographical feature known as a dry valley, a not uncommon occurrence in limestone and chalk scenery.  This is a dry valley simply because it lacks a stream in its valley bottom.  During glacial times, when ice covered most of Britain north of the Thames, this must have been an area of Tundra.

The naturally porous chalk would have been rendered impermeable by virtue of the frozen subsoil, or permafrost layer.  Every spring, melting snow and ice would have caused a torrent to gush down this valley, carving the steep sided valley we are crossing today.  Should an Ice Age ever return, with fresh permafrost created, each spring a similar torrent would gush downhill to Selsdon, washing away the housing estate where the border collie whacked me around the calves with his stick, then on down to Addington, thundering through the valley between Three Halfpenny Woods and The Church of St John the Baptist, before over-running the station at Hayes, on its way to swell the waters of the mighty Thames.  Exciting stuff, but both the past and potential future of this wonderful patch of English countryside comes alive as we gaze.

The climb up the far side of Mossyhill Shaw is one of the steepest we will encounter on the LOOP and we are both warm and leg weary as we climb over the stile in to the fields beyond the woodland cloaking the steep valley sides.  It is worth considering how the past climate and spring thaw which carved the dry valley out of the chalk, also ensured that woodland has probably been present on this site ever since the ice retreated, the hill slope too steep for cultivation by man.

As we walk the grass verge adjacent to the field of corn stubble, we stumble across evidence that cows have run loose here recently.  Evidently Little Boy Blue has been rather lax in his duties of late.  The evidence is a long sinuous line of solidified cow manure. 

I don’t know what the cow had been eating whilst gadding about this field but it must have erupted in a veritable torrent.  Further, it is evident that the cow was not feeling too well, judging by the erratic course it must have taken as it egested the remains of its earlier repast.  Reconstruction of the past can be amusing, as well as enlightening.     

Shortly we come out onto Kingswood Lane which we follow to its junction with Limpsfield Road.  Awaiting us is the Good Companions pub.  Keen to taste the wares of this promising watering hole, we are sadly informed that food is not served after 5pm.  Undaunted, we assuage our hunger and thirst on crisps and beer, before taking the bus into Croydon where we finish the job, by gorging ourselves at a Pizza Hut.  A little worse for wear, we stagger home much later than we had intended, thankful that we had elected to take public transport rather than the car after all.