Power Walking...

Now that summer is here (!) it seemed like a good idea to get out in the sun and enjoy the great outdoors a bit. With our friends, the Solloways, we decided to go for an adventurous circular walk. Our chosen walk (see guide) took us on a 4 1/2 mile circuit from the medieval Thornborough Bridge across the fields and back again.

It is interesting to note how different these walks are in different parts of the country. In tourist country (Dorset, etc...) you can usually expect fairly good paths and often encounter other walkers. Even in South Bucks you feel that there is a path to follow. When we go for a walk up here in North Bucks we often suspect we are the only people to do the route this year.

This walk had such a feel. The paths were overgrown. The fields had bulls in them. We passed some anglers on a river who looked suprised to see us.

Having said this, the path was well marked, so we headed off into the wilds of North Bucks (about five miles from where we live) to explore...

It struck me that energy use could be seen throughout our walk. Twice we passed beneath huge pylons which hummed with the electrical energy now feeding Milton Keynes. This energy is, of course, largely dependent on our oil based economy, but we saw signes of earlier ages...

The Buckingham Branch of the Grand Union Canal cuts through this land and we spent some time walking along its former route. The greatest monument to this is the remains of an old lock which is being restored - although presumably not for actual use.

The creation of the canal network enabled more ecomomical transport of goods and fuel across Britain, powering the industrial revelution and driving the development of modern society.

The Buckingham Branch was opened in 1801 but was already in decline by the 1850s as the railways began to take over. The last comercial traffic was in 1932 and it was abandoned in 1964.

Here in a little-known corner of Buckinghamsire stands a monument to our industrial past. Canals were superseded by railways, which were superseded by roads as we become more effecient in the way we used our fossil fuels...

But this walk also gave us a chance to see relics of an even earlier age.

Long before the canals and the railways helped kick-start the industrial revolution the country was littered with windmills. There were thousands of them, pumping water or grinding grain - using the "free" power of wind.

We saw at least one old windmill on this walk, but there would probably have been many more at one point - not that long ago. It seems strange that there are so many objections to the "view pollution" caused by modern windmills given how common they once were...

The reality, of course, is that we are rapidly coming full circle as the cheap energy of the industrial revolution rapidly disappears. It will not be long before we are forced to depend on sustainable sources of power whether we like it or not - and this will cause a change in our society as dramatic as the industrial revolution was in the nineteenth century.

So it was good to see that Thornborough Mill (mentioned in the Doomesday Book) is slowly being brought back into service. It's now turning nicely and the owners hope to use it to power four local properties.

Although this walk seemed to take us off the beaten track it actually took us through the development of western society over the past two centuries. We could see human resourcefulness and our use of energy past, present and future. I wonder what relics people will spot in fifty years time...

And here's a couple of photos to show that our walk also involved the history of transport: