12/06/26 - On the Trail of..... Penda's Fen

Play for Today

Always on the lookout for new walking inspiration, I was intrigued when The Dispatch newspaper drew my attention to Penda's Fen. Alan Clarke's 1974 Play for Today—the same director who later made Scum and The Firm—is remarkable for more than just its storyline. In less than ninety minutes it tackles Christianity and paganism, sexuality, nuclear annihilation, working-class identity and the nature of England itself. The hyperlink provides a summary of the plot and its ongoing impact quite nicely.

More extraordinary still, it was broadcast on BBC1 at 9.30pm. At a time when there were only three television channels, the British public effectively had a choice: watch Penda's Fen or go to bed early.

Penda was the seventh-century Mercian ruler remembered as England's last great pagan king. The drama is set in Pinvin, near Pershore - a village whose name in Old English is Penda's Fen - although filming took place in Chaceley, across the River Severn from Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire.

The only walk I have in the area is from an old Country Walking Magazine. This, and some internet-based sleuthing to determine filming locations and a day out for exercise, followed the previous day on the sofa watching the DVD.

I start in the nearby village of Forthampton. In the play, The Vicar visits a parishioner on his death-bed to perform the last rites. I have my first location - an external shot of an impressive house opposite the church.

The last rites were shunned - the dying man happy that he had lived his life on earth

Forthampton Church is "doors open" and I am distracted before taking a step.

Forthampton Church

A Saxon Devil's Head above the front door - Other treasures include a rare stone altar and medieval pews

I'm off and away. The play's eeriness matched by an unchanged for centuries agricultural landscape, with many ancient dead and dying oaks hosting roosting corvids, which take cacophonous flight as I disturb them on approach. I am aiming for the weir at Upper Lode, with constant views of Tewkesbury Abbey on the opposite side of the River Severn.

Dead oaks and Tewkesbury Abbey in the far distance

The weir at Upper Lode

A long stretch of riverside walking passing a couple of pubs. I am too early for the Lower Lode Hotel and Yew Tree Inn, which marks the return inland. A road leads to Chaceley, the site of many of the filming locations.

The main characters family home at the Old Vicarage

The home of the TV scriptwriter

Chaceley Church features prominently - the main protagonist plays the organ there and during his crisis of faith, has a vision when the floor cracks and a voice is heard imploring "free me". It's "doors open" - with a sign saying to close the door behind otherwise birds will get in. There are already three ravens inside.

Chaceley Church

Church Organ

Another devil's head - in the keystone of the arch

Green lanes take me back to Forthhampton. I've been too early for the pubs found on route and nothing is to be found here. A remote good beer guide tick is available at the Railway Inn, Ripple. A 15-minute drive away.

Walk Details

Distance - 8 miles

Geocaches - 0

Walk Inspiration - The Dispatch Newspaper and Country Walking Magazine, January 1995 Walk 12

10/06/26 - Madresfield Court

Brideshead Visited

Convoluted inspiration for today's trip. A 2 mile jaunt across the plains below the Malvern Hills can hardly be described as a walk. 

Today's Walking

The inspiration? I thought the Pevsner Guide to Worcestershire would help with my understanding of the county. As Jonathan Meades stated in an associated BBC documentary - Pevsner is really just a book of lists.  

Madresfield Court piqued my interest. I have walked on the footpaths surrounding it many times but never visited. The documentary told me the house, and the family, was the inspiration for the Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited. I've unsuccessfully read Waugh before but gave the 1980s TV show and the 2008 film a watch. 10 hours vs. 2 hours but both entertaining enough.

Madresfield Court

The house is in private ownership - and has been for centuries - but they do have open days in the summer. £17 invested and a further £6 in takeaway cake. I am signed up for my latest early-retirement attempt at entertainment. Visiting Stately Homes.

Who would have predicted it?

It's a 90 minute tour of a house packed to the rafters with better quality tat than I have amassed over the years. They have gorilla skeletons, skinned tigers and tortoiseshell sideboards. I have the world's finest collection of walking books and Windows 6.1 Mobile phones. 

Of all the rooms, it is the chapel that is most impressive. Access via the library (smelled wonderful), it is quite the spectacle of art and god's glory.

We can compare Waugh's description, delivered as Charles Ryder is shown around by the dipsomaniac, doomed homosexual, teddy-bear-carrying Sebastian Flyte, with Pevsner's characteristically matter-of-fact inventory;

One of these was the chapel. We entered it by the public porch (another door led direct to the house); Sebastian dipped his fingers in the water stoup, crossed himself, and genuflected; I copied him. ‘Why do you do that?’ he asked crossly.

‘Just good manners.’

‘Well, you needn’t on my account. You wanted to do sightseeing; how about this?’

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.

‘Golly,’ I said.

Pevsner;

"An exceptionally complete piece of Arts and Crafts decoration of 1902.

The paintings are by A. Payne. The stained glass is by him and others. The triptych is by Charles Gere. The small crucifix and the candlesticks are by A. J. Gaskin... C. R. Ashbee's guild also did woodwork."

Sebastian was based on Hugo Lygon, represented as a child in the chapel. All that money and opportunity and he died at 36, falling off a kerb in Germany. The Lygons seem fully aware of the chance that fate plays in life. There is a huge portrait of the distant commoner from the Black Country, William Jennens. He died in his nineties, with a will that left all his money to his mother. The Lygons, after a court trial recorded by Charles Dickens, were the recipients of a third of his money due one married-in family member being a distant cousin. £800m in today's money.

Hugo, pulling the heads off flowers.

Since retirement, I have been posting a daily tweet of what I have enjoyed that day. Day 712 announced my upcoming visit and the watching of the film. 

I think my followers want me to get back to documenting the rough pubs of Cannock.

pic.twitter.com/b63rxdXTuN

— Cooking Lager is feeling divisive (@CarpeZytha) June 9, 2026

08/06/26 - On the Trail of.... George Eliot

No Access

Considering I have never read any of her books, it seems strange that this is the second George Eliot themed walk I have completed. With Middlemarch coming in as the second-best book of all time - as voted by Guardian readers over the weekend - maybe this is something to be addressed.

Previously, I've traipsed around South London looking out for where she lived. Today, it's Nuneaton, her birthplace. Apart from being the most populated town in Warwickshire, they don't appear to have much else to shout about. The hospital and a pub named after her. The pub possibly responsible for putting people in the hospital. Strangely open - but with pumping music, so it cannot be a 'spoons - at 10am on a Tuesday.

Random St George's flags replacing a flat roof (with dog on) as a warning sign

The route is from a 1951 guide book. The maps, and associated descriptions, have always presented a challenge to decipher. The theme is where George (Mary Ann Evans) was raised and some of the real locations that became fictional places in her works.

The lass herself

She was born at South Farm on the Arbury Estate - which in the 1950s was open to the public. The map cuts through this estate and even discusses an obelisk next to the farm in celebration. Public access is no longer available, so I have to adapt the route significantly. I do manage to track down the aforementioned obelisk, moved to the one nice part of town, the riverside park.

Previously next to South Farm

Griff House was her childhood home. I would have visited this too, but the public footpaths I need take me away from what is now a Beefeater/Premier Inn. Progress, hey.

Closest I get to Arbury Park - inspiration for Cheverel Manor in "Scenes from a Clerical Life"

My (replanned) route takes me around the northern side of the estate. "Private" signs are in abundance in case I get any ideas. Dull road walking along Astley Road to a proper, ruined castle with connections to Henry VIII.

A first glimpse across a pool

Up close - maybe too close, as you will find out.

Astley Castle, near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, was originally a 13th-century fortified manor house and later the seat of the Grey family. It is closely linked to Lady Jane Grey, the “Nine Days’ Queen”, who was the great-niece of Henry VIII through his sister Mary Tudor. Following Jane Grey’s failed claim to the throne in 1553 and her subsequent execution, the Grey family’s influence declined and the estate eventually passed out of their hands. The castle also has a literary link to George Eliot: it is generally identified as the inspiration for Knebley Abbey in George Eliot’s novella Mr Gilfil's Love Story, part of Scenes of Clerical Life.

There are plentiful information boards, direction arrows and even a sign saying "please respect the residents' privacy". Which leads me to think I can investigate the ruins in a little bit more detail. I get as far as identifying that a modern conversion is housed inside the ruins and it doesn't take long before I am hollered at as to what I am doing. The cleaners are in. This is now a holiday let owned by the Landmark Trust.

And can't cleaners shout when they spy middle-aged ramblers approaching their patch.

I apologise and try to explain the misleading signage that suggests it's open for public access. I am still not entirely sure it isn't.

I beat a hasty retreat to the church next door, having done my research into alabaster effigies and medieval misericord paintings of the apostles.

It's "doors locked".

Back to the walking. The guidebook wants me to head south to Corley and ultimately Allesley. There is little in the way of interest and a lot of it is lane walking. This might have been pleasant in the fifties but a look on Google Maps shows no verge and a lot of traffic.

I can escape North-West, through a damp wheat field with a narrow path (hello wet trousers and socks) and a golf course.

A revisit to a quite bonkers nautically themed pub - the Lord Nelson - which is almost as far as you can get from the sea in England.

Gah! I had just dried out

Bass in the Lord Nelson - Good Beer Guide Regular

"Get it at sea, take a ship / I'd christen her 'Victory', she'd make it."

Walk Details

Distance - 8.25 miles

Geocaches - 8

Walk Inspiration - Fifty Weekend Walks Round Birmingham - Walk 5

   

06/06/26 - The Three Good Beer Guide Ticks in Cannock

A Spoons and Two Micros

An oddly dull walk from Walsall brought me to Cannock, a previously unexplored town. If you ask AI what there is to see and do in Cannock, it tells you to look for a dogs grave, Freda, on Cannock Chase.

Which is probably not bad advice.

The Wetherspoons, Linford Arms, is where all the life is. A twin gabled town house, where nearly every single table was occupied. Thank God for their ruthlessly efficient app. An all day breakfast and a pint of Moorhouse Pendle Witches brew, whilst I guarded the last available single seater table.

Stand further back to get both gable ends in

The New Hall Arms is just a short walk away, opposite a shabby looking shopping centre. It's a bigger than usual micro, concentrating on cask rather than more esoteric international offerings. Bass was on, but in a move that showed a lack of care and attention, it was stuffed into a craft Vocation pint pot. Covered in art.  Give my boring brown beer in a boring nonic.

New Hall Arms

On the way back to the station is the final part of the trilogy, The Arcade. A quirky little micro pub, which appears to share its space with a music shop. People enter carrying guitars. An interesting collection of keg and cask on, I went for a previously untried Feld Helles lager from Ampersand Brewery.

Cannock, greened.