Lambourn Valley and Wessex Downs

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. My routes appear on several different platforms each with different requirements, It takes time to play games with their algorithms, and life is too short. So I am not participating in Route You's scoring system.

This ride takes you from Newbury into the green valley of the River Lambourn, a classic chalk stream, which starts near Lambourn village and joins the Kennet in Newbury. At Great Shefford it turns north and climbs towards the open, arable, upland of the North Wessex Downs. You then have a 7 mile roller coaster ride along the hilltops with great views, before returning downhill back to Newbury, passing through villages set in the more wooded terrain of the lower lower eastern slopes.

This peaceful countryside has been settled for millennia and vestiges of the inhabitants and their farming, from the bronze age through medieval times to the Victorians, can still be found. It is all on roads which, outside of busy Newbury, are small and quiet.

Zooming In

Highlights are:

The watermills and (probably!) medieval water meadows of the Lambourn, a classic chalk country stream. Creating and maintaining these is more complicated than you might imagine.

The exhilarating ride over the hilltops which have been farmed since the stone age, with the unique features of chalk landscapes such as the dry valleys and open grasslands

A wonderful variety of English vernacular buildings going back over 600 years.

One of the best cafes on any of my routes, the ‘Community Cafe’ at Hampstead Norreys

Plus the usual bunch of oddities.

On the blog 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 app has not imported these, use this link below 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

Most of the bedrock hereabouts is chalk, which comes to the surface near the scarp, Chalk is porous so you won’t see many rivers on the high ground. The empty valleys that you can see there, were cut by streams during the ice ages, when the ground was frozen so the water couldn’t percolate away.

Sometimes you also get winterbournes which are streams that only usually flow in winter. Springs appear when the water table coincides with the surface so, in a dry summer, when the level of water table falls they only appear lower down the valley. There is one, conveniently called the Winterbourne, flowing into the Lambourn at Bagnor, just outside Newbury.

Even though the soils on the higher ground are thin, much of it is now devoted to growing crops such as wheat, barley and rape. In the past, even in the Stone Age, you would have seen more livestock and in particular sheep. The banked enclosures are a legacy of their occupation and although we call them hillforts, many of the smaller ones in particular might have simply been seasonal settlements. Maybe the weather was wetter then, but now the opportunities for grazing are limited by a lack of water and trees don’t tend to thrive on the alkaline, chalky soils.

Further down the dip slope, the soils, while still thin, cover flinty clay, which adds bit of acid to the mix and suits them better. In the early stone age, there was probably a lot more woodland but much of this was cleared by early farmers, exposing the soils to erosion and degradation. The original and probably thin tree cover here would have been among the earliest to be cleared in England. Later, it might have been scrubland.

Sheep farming in particular continued throughout, until the need for more food during the World Wars led to a conversion of a lot of land to arable use. The grassy character of some of the grazing is, Since the myxomatosis outbreak some fifty years ago, some of it is now reverting to scrub. On the hillside, the area around Hampstead Norreys is blessed with both water and fertile, non-acid soils. If it looks prosperous that is because it is and always been! Lots of Roman litter has been found around here.

Moving down the slope, the valleys provided shelter and access to fresh water. (You can sink a well on the hills, but it isn’t easy). Around the rivers, the alluvial and gravely soils and gravels are quite fertile so this was where settlement has been concentrated since Roman times, although they did have a Temple and graveyard on Roden Down, north of Compton.

For more, check the waypoint notes.

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 road surfaces on this trip are OK but watch out for any potholes of you are hurtling down the slopes!