Ashdown House and Weathercock Hill

One of the (admittedly few) advantages of spending three months in Covid-19 lockdown, for me at least, has been the gift of so much extra time. There could be only one way to use this extended holiday: to explore the area. Over the last four months Mark and I have seen far more of our corner of the country than I had during my first 20 months living in Swindon, when life was 'normal' and most of us had no idea what was coming.

After those first two tough months of lockdown, when everyone (apart from Dominic Cummings) was confined to their immediate surroundings, being allowed - finally! - to drive a little further afield in the car was almost like being let out of prison. We've been out exploring new paths in the Swindon hinterland four or five times a week since lockdown was relaxed in late May, and discovered enough beautiful places to keep me blogging for a couple of months. After all that, I still don't feel we've even nearly seen all that's worth seeing within a 20-minute drive of home. Swindon, for all it's dodgy reputation, is a pretty amazing place to live.

The beautiful wooded estate of National Trust-owned Ashdown House lies in the countryside north of Lambourn, just across the border in Oxfordshire. It's clearly one of the better-known places we've 'discovered' since lockdown. Just the other day, with Mark's extremely energetic young pup, Bruno, brimming with pent-up energy to walk off (and a break of only an hour or two in the rainy weather), we decided to explore the woods surrounding this handsome 17th century house.

The place was built in the 1660s by William Craven, a local nobleman, as a refuge for himself and his mistress from the Great Plague, which was decimating London's population at the time. As luck would have it the poor lady died before she could move into her safe haven, but Craven's descendants lived on in the house until the 1920s, when it was donated to the NT, and eventually opened to the public. Covid-19 has put paid to any hopes of going inside for the foreseeable future, but hopefully (once we beat this present-day plague) it will open once again.

Meanwhile, the wooded estate (closed during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic) that surrounds the house is open once again, and it's become an extremely popular place for families and dog owners from the surrounding villages and towns to walk their pooches.

This old hunting forest is the perfect place for a walk, with or without the family dog. The woods are criss-crossed with grass-covered paths that are relatively mud-free even in wet weather. The wide, grassy, mile-long avenue bisecting the length of the forest makes it impossible to get lost. Unfortunately during our mid-July visit, excitable pup Bruno found all the doggy company so stimulating he went a little wild. Chasing madly after a black lab at one point, the two dogs were so intent on their game they ploughed straight into me at full speed, knocking me over onto the grass. Concerned Bruno's high spirits and endless energy would pose a similar threat to the small children walking with their families in the woods, we took off round some of the narrower paths through the woods, and happily there were no further spills.

Bruno is as insatiable an explorer as we are, and we'd actually already explored this area on a longer walk in similarly brooding weather just a month ago, tramping over the surrounding hillsides in a fine 2-hour loop hike. Away from the families and dogs, curious Bruno could run and bound unhindered over the grassy hillsides, and we enjoyed the wide-open expanses of the hills while meeting hardly another soul.

Crossing the Ashbury-Lambourn road in front of the car park, we climbed the very steep grassy slopes of Weathercock Hill directly opposite. From the weathercock at the summit (yep, there really is one up there), we veered north, over a stile, and onto a public footpath cutting diagonally across a huge, undulating field of long-whiskered, nearly-mature barley. At the crossroads of paths near the centre of this vast expanse of green, we took a left, climbing back up the gentle slope to enter a long thin band of trees back on the ridgetop above Ashdown House.

The footpath crosses this slender strip in less than a minute, but it was an enchanting place, and we stopped and paused for awhile. The tall and slender trees, planted in neat, regular rows, are reminiscent of the pillars in the nave of a vast, natural cathedral. I'm no fan of plantations, but this one is sublime.

Out the far side of this unexpected highlight of our walk, we followed the footpath gently downhill across another huge field of tall, green wheat stems, recrossed the Ashbury to Lambourn road and took another path directly opposite.

Skirting the northernmost edge of the woods that surround Ashdown House, the path passes the northern end of the impressive forest-lined avenue, with a vista down it all the way to the north facade of the elegant house, over a mile away. The path soon turns south, still skirting the edge of the forest, all the way to Alfred's Castle.

There are no impregnable, crenellated walls, no moats, and no towers at Alfred's Castle, which is instead an Iron Age hill fort (hill forts around here are nearly always called 'castles' for some reason), excavated around the 6th century B.C. This place is worth a quick look, but rather small beer in an area full of large and very impressive Iron Age earthworks like Barbury and Liddington Castles and the astonishing Wansdyke, so we just gave it a brief perusal before climbing the stile nearby, reentering wooded Ashdown estate, and walking the last few hundred meters back to the car.