The text and routes in these mapping apps are based on content in my blog where you can find the updated versions of the routes and notes on the landscape, history and things to watch out for. Link www.pootler.co.uk.
Rothschildshire is not a name I made up. It is often used to describe the Aylesbury Vale. The paw marks of the extended banking dynasty are all over it and this is a tour around the fabulous mansions they built here. You pass 7 in all! Starting from Wendover, it heads north across the River Thame and through Eyethrope Park to Waddesdon, the greatest pile of all. Think, the Adams Family win the Lottery. Then it heads west, going through lovely Quainton en route to Wing where it turns south past crumbling Mentmore before returning to Wendover via Tring along roads between the Chilterns Scarp and the Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal.
It is mostly flat and on-road with a few undemanding climbs. The exception is at Eythrope See ‘Route Tips’ below.
Zooming In
Highlights are:
-
The Rothschild Mansions. 7 of them! Eyethrope, Waddesdon, Ascott, Mentmore, Tring, Aston Clinton & Halton.
-
Tring Natural History Museum. Old school & none the worse for it.
-
The Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. Rail geek heaven.
-
Quainton a lovely and interesting stop. The George & Dragon is a great pub AND cafe!
-
The site of the Great Train Robbery in 1963. A good story.
-
A WW2 secret weapons lab.
-
A site once seriously (but ludicrously) mooted for a 3rd London Airport.
-
The usual assortments of oddities.
NB. Of the mansions, Waddesdon charges for entry, Ascott is National Trust, Tring is now an offshoot of the Natural History Museum, you can get close to Halton & Mentmore with some judicious trespassing, Eyethrope isn’t public and Aston Clinton is just a memory. Legend has it that the mansions at Waddesdon, Tring and Mentmore were sited so that they could be seen by each other. .
There are detailed notes on waypoints and things to see which I hope will be more entertaining than the links to dry Wikipedia articles dredged up as POI’s by the mapping apps’ software robots. If your mapping app has not imported these, use this link to go directly to the blog post of the route. This cannot give you the exact location for each waypoint but it many cases you won’t need it and at least the information will be up to date!
Link : Pootler Route
Zooming Out
Much of the route is across the flat, clay landscape of the Aylesbury Vale. The exceptions are the rocky outcrops around Waddesdon and Quainton which are capped with limestone Basically, all sedimentary rocks and deposits, but laid down under different conditions.
The Aylesbury Vale is the valley of the River Thame. You might wonder how such a small river cut such a wide valley. The answer is thought by some to be that this was one of the routes of the ancestral Thames, before Ice Age glaciation diverted it through the Goring Gap to its present course. The clay is its legacy. For a long time, light ploughs meant that clay wasn’t easy to far, so the heart of the vale wasn’t a densely populated area. It still isn’t even though mechanisation has solved the problems. Compared with now, much more land was once devoted to sheep rearing.
In contrast the land adjacent to the river offered loamy soil and meadowland; and the land below the Chilterns scarp was rich and fertile, blessed with streams and access to the higher ground of the Chilterns for grazing. As a result it was densely populated with a string of towns villages. Tring and Wendover are examples. But while the local agricultural economy in most places did well in the centuries immediately after the Norman Conquest, it went sharply into reverse later in the 1300’s as the climate cooled, soils were exhausted and crop failures were followed by the Black Death at a time when England was almost constantly at war.
Recovery took a century or more during which labour shortages led to rising incomes and a shift towards less labour-intensive pastoral farming, with an even greater emphasis on sheep, the profitability of can be seen in places in the quality of the Churches. And people started investing in the their property. Many of the oldest houses that you see today were the result of this ‘Great Rebuilding’.
Those enclosures were the next major event in the landscape. Early on, they were locally organised. Later, they could be enforced by an Act of Parliament and the process continued into Victorian times. The impact was most marked in the Vale, where the old system of open fields was gradually eradicated and replaced by a ‘rationalised’ layout, with straight access routes and field boundaries. The early story was a bit more complicated on the high ground around Quainton, which had been part of the woodland patchwork of the Bernwood Forest, but even there the field pattern on the south and western slopes is very regular.
The result of the troubled 1300’s, the need to adapt to the changed economic and social circumstances that followed it, and enclosures, meant that many marginal hamlets and villages shrank or disappeared and some were simply and intentionally obliterated. The sites of several near the route are marked on the 1:25000 OS maps.
The Rothschilds are the legendary Jewish uber-financiers, the Rockefeller's of the Victorian era, accused by both left and right wing conspiracy theorists of manipulating markets and even fomenting wars for personal gain. Some still believe that they secretly control the global economy, presumably from rural Buckinghamshire where many of the family lived (and several still live). Do they deserve their reputation? To my mind, while they were undoubtedly unscrupulous capitalists, there is more than a whiff of antisemitism in all this. Check the (much more detailed!) Waypoint notes and admire the philanthropy tenacity and eccentricity that decorates their uber-capitalist reputations.
On the blog you will also find posts on the rich and complicated human and topographical history of the area as a whole, ranging from the early occupation, the changing agricultural landscape, the geomorphology of the chalk country, the buildings and anything else that moves me.
At Link: Pootler / Other Stuff
Route Tips
If your app provides notes on the road surfaces etc. keep in mind that they are automatically generated and only as good as the underlying mapping.
The estate road at Eyethrope Park has been blocked, supposedly on a temporary basis. You might need to use one of two adjacent ‘right of way’ footpaths for a few hundred metres. Check you map. One is gated, the other longer.. When I am aware that this has changed, I will update the waypoint note on the blog. Also, check online for information on roads temporarily closed to facilitate HS2 works.
