Quite a pheasant walk.

Many years ago, there used to be a pheasantry in Berkhamsted, although we always referred to it/them in the plural as The Pheasantries. Anyway, Dwight’s Pheasantries, reckoned to be the largest in the UK, occupied a tract of land between Ivy House Lane and Bullbeggars Lane on the northeast side of the valley in which Berkhamsted sits and both lanes run up the side of the valley ,perpendicular to the line of the railway which runs next to the canal and the course of ancient Roman Akeman Street, along the bottom of the valley.

The Pheasantries had been there for some 200 years but by the mid to late 1960’s they had gone. The Dwight family sold them off to a company in Buckinghamshire and the Berkhamsted site was closed and returned to arable farming.

It was in the early 1960’s when I knew of The Pheasantries, my grandfather, Fred, would often take my brother and me on walks for miles out into ‘the countryside’, or so it seemed to our short little legs. One route we would take was to walk along the canal towpath to the bridge on Bullbeggars Lane, up to the top of the lane, which was actually in Potten End, back along a road called The Common which skirted Berkhamsted Common and then down Ivy House Lane back into Berkhamsted, or sometimes we’d go a short distance further and turn into Gravel Path and then down into the town.

It kept us fit I suppose but before hitting the road there was almost always a visit to Barlowes, a small sweetshop and tobacconist on the High Street. We would be taken into the shop and Fred invited us to choose anything we wanted, as long as they were sweets of course, tobacco products were not allowed for children, even back then, unlike today’s more enlightened times when almost every young oik you meet is either pulling on a disposable vape or carelessly casting an expired one aside.

Sometimes, on our walks Fred would mix it up a little, on purpose, depending on how the mood took him. We’d go partway up Bullbeggars Lane and then cut across through The Pheasantries on a farm track until we came out in Ivy House Lane and then we’d either go up to the Common and down Gravel Path or just back down Ivy House Lane. The track through The Pheasantries wasn’t a public footpath but it was open all the way through, and Fred never had any hesitation to take us through that way if he so desired.

A week and a half ago, I took it into my head to go over to Berkhamsted and see if that track was still there. I got the bus over from Chesham and alighted in the High Street near the Rex Cinema and walked back to where Barlowes had been. The building is still there but it’s now occupied by a veterinary surgeon. Crossing the Canal on the concrete bridge that I’ve always called Little Bridge, because as it’s a footbridge it’s small and on the other side of the canal it runs into Little Bridge Road.

After crossing the canal, I walked to the bottom of Ivy House Lane and up to the bridge across the railway, I spent many happy bours on that bridge with my Ian Allan train spotter’s book. On the parapet walls of the railway bridge there were twelve signs, six on each side, warning that there were live wires below. That’s the 25 kV catenary that powers the trains.

These signs were obviously a new addition because they hadn’t been there the last time I visited the bridge, (just for old times sake) sometime last year. I remember when the power lines were put up in the early 1960’s, there weren’t signs then and hadn’t been during the later 1960’s and into the 1970’s. I don’t ever recall seeing any signs on the road side of the bridge parapets, but now there are twelve. I can only conclude that in the intervening sixty odd years people have somehow become more stupid.

From the railway bridge the lane starts to climb the valley side and I set off up the hill looking for any signs of where the farm track may have been. Signs were there none, apart from a newish house where I estimated that the track used to join Ivy House Lane. Newish being a relative term here, I think (I may be wrong) that the house was built in the 1990’s. According to Rightmove it was last sold in 1997 for £288,000. I don’t think you’d get the time of day for that in Berkhamsted these days.

Well, I was here even if the track was not, so I decided to continue on my way up to very top of the lane and come back down Bullbeggars Lane, so I set off again up the hill. After a while there is a dip, so I went down and then up again, just like Jon Anderson (extra points if you understood that reference) and past the site of Gutteridge Farm which is where the Dwight family of Dwight’s Pheasantries lived and farmed. There may still be some farming activity going on there as there is still a large barn visible from the lane, but most of the other buildings seem to have been made into desirable residences with, I am sure, equally desirable price labels.

Passing the dwelling/farm site I walked on until I came to the common and The Common. The former being Berkhamsted common and the latter being the road that leads to Potten End. I turned right and walked along the pavement, having a pavement was a novelty because since I’d started up Ivy House Lane the road had been very narrow and bereft of a footpath. The road here is classified as a C road, without a number but with a 50 miles per hour speed limit as witnessed by the signs proclaiming such and most probably flaunted by the occasional vehicle whizzing past.

There are also triangular signs with a silhouette of a deer on them warning of wild animals. I know for a fact that deer live in the locality on the common which is I think part of Ashridge Estate, a large National Trust property. As I walked towards Potten End I kept looking to my left, into the woods hoping to maybe catch sight of some deer, but I saw none. Before long I was at the junction of Bullbeggars Lane where it joins The Common, so I crossed the road and began my descent back down into Berkhamsted.

Ivy House Lane which I had followed up the hill, takes its name from a large house, now long gone, which was called Ivy House, and which stood near the top of the lane. The lane also rejoiced in the moniker of Dwight’s Lane for reasons which should by now be obvious. Bullbeggars Lane has a much more interesting origin. The word Bullbeggar or Boobeggar as it was apparently, originally pronounced, means a Bugbear, Bugaboo or Hobgoblin. Something nasty to frighten you. There is a small, wooded area halfway down Bullbeggars Lane called Bullbeggars Wood and that is from where the lane gets its name.

As I walked on, the sun came out from behind the clouds where it was hiding. I’d just put my camera back in my jacket pocket after taking a photograph looking along the sunlit road when about 50 metres away four deer, Red Deer I think by the size of them, all stags, walked across the lane in front of me. I hurriedly pulled the camera back out again and snapped away. As I zoomed the camera in for a closer shot, one of the deer turned and looked at me and then they trotted, quite unconcerned, into the woods.

I trotted on, Bullbeggars Lane passes what was once a lodge to a much bigger residence set some way back from the road, wherein stayed the Queen of Tonga for a short while back in the 1953 when she was in the UK to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The big house used to be called Bullbeggars ,after the lane, and the children of the occupiers designed a name sign for the house. The big house has changed hands and been renamed several times and the Bullbeggars sign now stands on the verge outside the old lodge, now itself a house.

I carried on towards a crossroads where Bullbeggars Lane takes a right turn and after about 45 metres on the left there is a large hole in the ground, a sight of special scientific interest no less. This area is called Little Heath and there are a number of “dells” here in the woodland, remains of excavations to dig out sand and gravel to fill sandbags during the first world war, and also to dig out aggregates to be used in roadmaking.

This particular hole though was recently (2012 and that’s very recent with regard to what follows…) re-excavated because it shows two strata of flint gravel and sandwiched between then a layer of sand. The lower gravel is thought to have been laid down at the beginning of the Pleistocene era, 2.6 million years ago, when this whole area was on the shores of the North Sea.

The sand in the middle is somewhat younger, being thought to be intertidal deposits from a time when the shoreline had receded further west, and the top layer of gravel is younger still from about 20,000 years ago during the last ice age when the land hereabouts was frozen tundra. The pit itself is fenced off as it’s quite deep at one end but there is a handy information board erected by the National Trust and the Hertfordshire Geological Society and the different striations are clearly visible.

I continued my journey along the lane which began to bear left and started appreciably to go downhill. The lane was very narrow here so I was on special lookout for motor vehicles which I just knew that if I encountered one it would probably be going far too fast. Luckily, I didn’t encounter any until I got past Bullbeggars Wood, and the lane opened out slightly, not very much admittedly but just a little.

Now I came to a metal gate on the right-hand side which I assumed was where the old farm track came out. I remembered that the track almost immediately turned left to parallel the road for a short distance before heading across the field but there was no sign of a track as such, just the afterimage of one going across the field, but I could make out the course that the track used to take by the hedgerows that were still there dividing the fields a bit further across.

As if to put the tin hat on my thoughts of finding the old farm track I spied a sign on a post in the field, set back a way from the road but on the course of the old track, which informed me that this land was private and that there was no public right of way. Well, I knew that it had never been a public footpath but had the track still been there, I might have been inclined to take it, just for the heck of it. Ah, but then I would have missed out on the deer and the pit.

Soon I was at another railway bridge, crossing the same line as the bridge at Ivy House Lane but further towards London. This bridge was also festooned with signs warning me of the live wires below. The lane wends on through an ‘S’ bend and then crosses the canal and curves down to a junction with Bank Mill Lane and then after about 100 metres, during which it crosses the river Bulbourne, it meets the main road, London Road, the A4251 which runs into Berkhamsted High Street.

Did I mention the River Bulbourne earlier? No, I didn’t because where I crossed the canal on the Little Bridge, the river had some way upstream been diverted into the canal. This happened when the canal was being dug in the 1790’s or thereabouts. A little way downstream of the Little Bridge, the river diverts out of the canal and becomes separate again. From the junction of Bullbeggars Lane and the A4251 it’s a nice straight and level walk of about 1.2 kilometres to the Berkhamsted outlet of the Mad Squirrel Brewery Shop at 104 High Street.

Guess what? That’s exactly where I went, for a small, thirst-quenching libation, before catching the bus back to Chesham.