Boxford, Groton and Edwardstone walk - with a celebrity

This walk featured in the episode of “Ramblings”, by Clare Balding, which first went out on Radio 4 in October 2024. The programme was really about my daughter, the wonderful Woman With Altitude, who reconstructs the journeys of intrepid historic women travellers who have been overlooked, sometimes for centuries, by the male-dominated narrative surrounding exploration and adventure travel. She celebrates their contributions to the history of travel by following in their extremely difficult footsteps, using only the clothes and equipment which they had available at the time of their journeys. After trekking through the Himalayan mountains as Alexandra David-Neel, the Valleys of the Assassins in Iran as Freya Stark, the Caingorms as Nan Shepherd and climbing French alps in a crinoline as Henriette d'Angeville, a circular stroll around Boxford, Groton and Edwardstone was unlikely to prove much of a challenge. The idea was for Clare to walk in conversation with Woman With Altitude, while I guided the route and tried to keep out of the way of the microphone.

Today, I walked the route again, in similar brilliant sunshine, but with spring licking the trees all around, rather than autumn starting to bite.

I left Boxford on the footpath leading from Cox Hill towards Bower House Tye. Despite the recent dry weather, the path through the trees was still ankle-deep mud in places, so the only viable alternative was the edge of the field, on higher ground to the south of the wood. After going down through the trees, I followed the new path diagonally across the field, through the recent plantation of cricket bat willows, then right and up the long, straight track which leads quite steeply uphill towards a horizon so wide that I always wonder whether one day I will reach the top and find myself on the edge of a cliff, gazing down at a swirling sea. I never do. Instead, I find myself walking to the right of several fields where dark brown cows are usually to be found standing and chewing and doing what cows do - which is standing and chewing. Today, the fields were empty, apart from a pair of buzzards circling overhead.

I turned left at the end of the path, towards Wickerstreet Green. This is an enchanting path, starting off wide and grassy, then narrowing between two lines of trees.

The primroses are at their best now - perfectly lemon coloured, petals glossy and in their prime. They grow in bigger and bigger clumps as the path narrows towards the road at Wickerstreet Green. Here, I crossed and took the path towards a house called Gyp's Piece, then left and along the edge of another large field. The space is largely uncultivated and wild plants have soon crowded in, last year's abandoned stalks still dominating the skyline, while this year's growth is tentatively trying the spring conditions.

I turned right across a field of sugar beet which has a wide view of the landscape from the firs at Hagmore Green to Groton church tower. The soil has clay in it here, sticky underfoot and laced with flints of all colours and sizes. The path follows the edge of the field to the road, which leads to Horner's Green to the left and Groton Wood to the right. I turned briefly left, then took the footpath at the sign-post on the right, past a garden and down a steep hill, Groton church gradually disappearing in the distance on my left.

At the bottom is a muddy slope down to a stream, bubbling away to itself behind the undergrowth. This place always makes me think of the children's book "The little grey men” which I discovered and enjoyed reading with my own children when they were small. It feels the kind of place where little folk could live in secret, flitting out of sight just as the clumping feet of a human hiker come down the sloping path.

I followed the path round to the right, then sharp left and across a footbridge over the stream, then right, past a parade of more cricket bat willows, to the road. I crossed over the road to take the footpath directly opposite, along the lower edge of a sloping, grassy field, then left, up the hill, along the side of another grassy field. Right at the top, I followed the path to a sharp left turn. This area is used mainly for horse riding and ahead is a series of jumps for brave equestrians to try out their and their horses' skills.

The path leads along the other side of the hedge, separating walkers from any chance encounter with a cantering horse. Here there is another wide view towards Hagmore Green. Stoke by Nayland church tower with its cat-like silhouette is tiny on the distant horizon.

Directly ahead is a clump of trees which somehow looks purposeful. I can't say how, but it feels as though it's there for a reason. It is - it hides Pitches Mount, the only remaining structure from a 12th century castle which once stood on this site and dominated the surrounding lands. Today it is just a pile of earth among the trees, covered in the opportunist greenery which so quickly embraces any pile of earth left unattended. Elders, brambles, ash saplings, sycamores in their hundreds jostle for space, yet it is still possible to stand on top of the mound and imagine how it might have looked 800 years ago.

From the mount, I took the footpath on the right over a style and between two beautifully constructed, spanking-new wooden fences. In the field on my left, huge slabs of wood were waiting to be shaped into something useful to humans. The builders of the castle probably laboured away in this same place: sawing, planing, measuring, teaching apprentices, taking an ale break.

I followed the path through an incongruous and forgotten garden gate (Clare was enchanted by this gate-in-the-middle-of-nowhere when we came to this part of the walk) and down some steps towards the road. Here I decided not to follow the path back towards the Spong and Boxford, which we had taken in October because of time constraints, and instead crossed the road and took the path across the field towards Edwardstone.

A ditch half full of water on my left had grown a colourful patina of weeds, the brightest thing in the muted spring landscape. There is a stand of impossibly tall Lombardy poplars here. They may be the remains of a windbreak which once protected the field, but now just serve as a visual highlight to make the scene picturesque. If an artist had ever come to paint here, she would probably have added them, whether they existed or not.

At the at the Edwardstone road, I turned left and followed the road towards Mill Green, then straight on and left at the footpath sign between two houses. This path follows the edge of a field and passes around dark pond. There always seems to be something going about its business in this pond, whatever the time of year. In the summer there are dragonflies zig- zagging through the air and pond-skaters skimming across the surface tension of the totally still water. Today, I couldn't actually see any sign of life, but the occasional bubble plipping somewhere told me that the pond occupants were still there and would soon be out in force once the days lengthened and the sunlight strengthened. Somewhere under the black water, the dragonflies were at their dragon- lava stage, terrorising the deeps with the fiercest jaws a pond can muster, or waiting in their cocoon for the moment when they will haul themselves up a convenient reed, to emerge into a a new world of air and flight.

I took the path diagonally across a cultivated field to a track, then right to the road just before Sherbourne Street. Here I could follow the road back to the centre of Boxford.

(I didn't succeed in keeping out of the way of the microphone, as you will hear if you listen to this edition of "Ramblings"!)

You can find the map of this route on the Ordnance Survey App, if you have access to it. Just search for Boxford and Woman Who Walks in the route section.