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.
The gossamer thin trainspotter rationale of this route is to follow the long-abandoned extension of the Metropolitan Line beyond Aylesbury to its termination at Verney Junction near Buckingham. You will see work on its rather more expensive 21st century substitute as you go. It is an easy ride on a clockwise route on quiet roads from Haddenham & Thame Parkway Station, through pleasant, gently undulating, but generally unremarkable arable and pastoral countryside. There are a couple of ridges to cross in the first few miles and a short but steep climb of 40m or so after you have crossed the A41 at Waddesdon on the return leg. Also the estate road in Eyethrope Park has been temporarily closed, see the Route Notes below.
Zooming In
Highlights Include:
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The home of ‘Spaghetti Trees’.
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Playing detective to spot what remains of the abandoned stations. (Often not much!)
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The Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. Rail geek heaven.
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The home of Henry V111’s favourite saint and inventor of the Jack in a Box.
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Eyethrope – A Rothschilds ‘garden’.
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The usual assortments of oddities.
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! (I know this is a nuisance in relation to the old station sites, but can’t help it!. A bit of sleuthing works).
Link : Pootler Route
Zooming Out
The bedrock around here is all sedimentary rocks, mostly various types of sandstone and Jurassic mudstone on the higher ground and elsewhere rather newer chalky mudstone. The low hills and outcrops are the various concoctions of stones that were more resistant to erosion. Both hills and valleys are often covered with clay of some sort, either finer ground stuff in the river valleys or, in many places, boulder clay, which is basically the muck and rubble left in the wake of the retreating glaciers.
For early man, clay wasn’t easy to plough, and this wasn’t a densely populated area. Compared with now, much more land was devoted to sheep rearing. Thanks is part to better ploughs, the local agricultural economy did better in the centuries immediately after the Norman Conquest, but it went sharply into reverse 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. As the population shrank, marginal villages shrank or disappeared. There are several near the route and marked on OS Maps. (NB. The one at Eyethrope is screened by trees and difficult to see, even from the adjacent footpaths)
Recovery took a century or more during which labour shortages led to rising incomes and a shift towards less labour-intensive pastoral farming, mainly an even greater emphasis on sheep. And people started investing in the their property. Many of the oldest houses that you see today in places like Wichendon and Quainton were the result of this ‘Great Rebuilding’.
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, especially by the Parliamentary enclosures from the 1600’s onwards. This resulted in even more hamlets being abandoned, sometimes forcibly. As you can see the fields are often rectangular, many of the roads are straight, and footpaths lacking. But again the higher ground is an exception and the hills above Quainton look and feel like a world of their own. Some pastures appear to have been entirely spared the plough.
Metroland was a name dreamt up by the Metropolitan Railway for the new suburbs being created on its routes out of London Marylebone, past Wembley and Harrow to Amersham and beyond. This route covers the 'beyond' bit, which stretches beyond London and the Chiltern Hills into rural Buckinghamshire, which the Company painted as the rural idyll within easy reach of its railway.
The creator of the railway was Sir Edward Watkin, the Elon Musk of his day. You will find a short bio on the blog. The name might have been created by an adman, but it was catapulted into a wider audience by John Betjeman, a Poet Laureate with an attachment to the landscape and an entertaining turn of phrase; perhaps best known for the lines "Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough". He wrote a lot about it and even narrated a rather wonderful eponymous BBC documentary in 1973. Like it, he finishes at Verney Junction, which by then was already abandoned, sighing "grass triumphs, and I must say I’m rather glad”.
The construction of HS2 dogs the route and you will probably see some signs protesting against it. The arguments both for and against Watkin’s railway were similar. And the extension turned out to be a white elephant. Are we learning anything here?
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.
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.
