Walk from Wolverton to Castlethorpe and back via Cosgrove, 7.3 miles

Sunday 16 August - my birthday! Low-key fun

While walking the well-used path along the Ouse Valley Way between Haversham Road and the Iron Trunk Aqueduct, I’d often noticed a footpath leading off to the right over a footbridge, signposted to Castlethorpe. I’d also found out that Castlethorpe used to have a railway station, closed at the time of the Beeching Axe. Obviously the combination of an unexplored footpath and something disused made a tempting prospect for a low-key expedition.

The Great Ouse from the footbridge at the southern end of the path

The path, looking back; railway embankment on left

The little path leading up to Castlethorpe follows the path of the railway for most of its route. It was very quiet but seems well kept. I passed this rustbucket of a structure, which is marked on the map as a water tower. There's a blog post about it here by the British Water Tower Appreciation Society. Good to know there is one ....

Old water tower near Castlethorpe

Eventually the path comes to a footbridge across the railway, which I crossed and walked into Castlethorpe village. Seems quite attractive. Left the village again at the north end via Station Road (giveaway there), walking towards Cosgrove. Stopped on the bridge over the railway to spot the old platforms – they are indeed there, though the wall’s annoyingly high and I had to stand on tiptoe.

The old platforms, looking south

There’s a detailed page here on the station closure – seemingly the station had only just been modernised when the closure was announced, which caused some annoyance locally. There are some old photos of the station here.

Continued along Station Road out of Castlethorpe, dodging cars, until I came to the bridge over the canal just before a pub called The Navigation. En route, passed over a little river – the Tove, I gathered from the map. Joined the towpath walking south towards Cosgrove.

Walking south along the canal towards Cosgrove

I stopped briefly at Cosgrove and ate a snack bar sitting by the canal. It had started to get hotter by this point.

Grand Union Canal at Cosgrove

Set off again passing the Buckingham Arm of the canal going off to the right. This is the Cosgrove end of the partly restored canal; Ray and I walked along the rewatered bit of the Buckingham end back in January. My friend Matt is a volunteer on the restoration of the Cosgrove end, which from his descriptions seems to involve having a lot of fun with concrete. Got to admire the spirit of the restoration attempt but as the original route was severed both by the A5 and by the A422 Old Stratford Bypass, it faces some severe challenges.

Buckingham Arm going off to the right

After passing the lock the canal continues south east to the Iron Trunk Aqueduct. I didn't photograph this today, but did on a walk in early July with Ray, so here's that picture (bluer sky than today!). 

The Iron Trunk aqueduct

I left the towpath at the aqueduct and followed the path down to the river level, where I made my way home via the Floodplain Forest Nature Reserve and Big Hill Field.

Floodplain Forest nature reserve

Big Hill Field

My route in red below; start and end points in Wolverton at the bottom, Castlethorpe at the top.

Snippets from the before times

Constructive CPD stuff

Our head of unit, Begoña, is – to her credit – very supportive of staff CPD, so with this in mind I put in a request last year to take the SAS certification exam, as I’ve been learning SAS ‘on the job’ since starting at the OU nine years ago. SAS, as hard-core codey types will tell you, is a scripting language used for data analysis, rather than a proper programming language used for actually building things, but still. I did eventually manage to cover all the material in the training manual and (after postponing it two or three times) finally took the exam in February of this year, at a Pearson VUE test centre inside The Point in central Milton Keynes. The exam was quite challenging and I can’t say I got distinction-level marks, but I did pass, and was duly issued with my certificate and with this ‘badge’ from Acclaim, which I’ve added to my LinkedIn profile. Go me.

The SAS UK headquarters are on the Wittington Estate just outside Marlow. I went there for a two-day SAS Enterprise Guide course in 2017. Very nice it all was too.

Wittington House, UK home of the SAS Institute

National Trust membership

Although Ruth questions this every year, I did renew our National Trust membership again for 2020. Perhaps I just feel we’re the kind of people who should be NT members. To kick off this year’s use of it, we went over to The Vyne, near Basingstoke, on a Saturday in January for a low-key wander. We had a walk along one of the trails although, as per the extremely wet winter we had, portions of the path were pretty waterlogged.

The Vyne

Driving back, Google Maps decided it didn’t like the A33 and took us on a winding route through Stratfield Saye and other villages south of Reading. Some quite flooded roads, including one quite large stretch that I did stop at, unsure whether I should drive through it. There was a 4x4 coming through it from the opposite direction and the driver kindly said she’d wait while my Fiesta drove through it in case I ran into any problems. She also added some stuff about how it was all due to the poor infrastructure locally, claiming that her village had only recently got broadband. Seemed a bit unlikely but there you go.

That was actually the only NT place we managed to visit prior to the lockdown; although they’ve opened again now, we haven’t yet mustered the energy to book a timed slot at one. With hindsight, I probably should have cancelled our membership for this year, but haven’t as yet done this.

The Vyne had a Mindfulness Trail going on when we visited, which we scoffed at briefly.

Dinner with colleagues

Back when we were allowed to do such things. A group of us from the former Information Office went to dinner at Murati's pizzeria in Newport Pagnell, the sister restaurant to the Wolverton branch we went to a couple of years ago. On the left, from the front: Rebecca, Claire, Jill. On the right, from the back: Harvey, Chris, me, Sara, Matt. Hai was there too, but must have been taking the picture I think.

Dinner at Murati's

Visits to Wales

With the vague aim of trying to visit Mum and Dad every month to six weeks (an intention subsequently scuppered by the lockdown and the closing of Wales), I went down to Abergavenny for a couple of nights on the last weekend in January. Mum, Hannah and I had lunch at the Art Chapel café on the Saturday and then Dad joined Mum and me for a walk along the River Usk back to their house, from a starting point near Nevill Hall Hospital. Dad pointed out where the recent lively water levels had taken a big chunk out of the bank.

River Usk near Abergavenny

I went down one subsequent time before the lockdown, with Ruth where we did the walk up Skirrid already blogged about here.

Two cultural bits

Ruth and I went up to the V&A on 8 February, just for a London trip out really but Ruth ended up going to the Mary Quant exhibition that Mum and I went to back in October last year. While she was there I had a wander around the cast courts and took this shot of the cast of the Donatello ‘David’:

which is dwarfed by the enormous buttocks of the Michelangelo ‘David’ next to it:

Hannah reminded that me that she's seen the original of the Donatello 'David', in Florence.

On 8 March we went to an exhibition of maps at the Bodleian in Oxford. Discovered there’s a nice café there I hadn’t been to before.

Café at the Bodleian

Ruth and I were aware of thinking Oxford was a bit quieter (and therefore pleasanter) than usual. Start of a COVID-induced staying in, I guess, prior to it being enforced a few weeks later.