talking at cross purposes

A few things of note from our camping trip to Buckinghamshire last week. Firstly, yes, all right, I am forced to concede that Buckinghamshire clearly does actually exist, despite my suggestions here that it doesn't. Secondly, we stayed at Home Farm, near Radnage, about five miles north-west of High Wycombe. 

You might ask at this point: of all the marvellous places to go in this glorious country, why would you go camping in the vicinity of High Wycombe, with all due respect to the fine people who live there? Well, mainly because it is roughly equidistant between where we live and where our friends live up near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. Wait a minute there, you'll be saying, a straight line between South Wales and Leicestershire doesn't go through the Chilterns, you crazy mofo. Well, yes, you're right, halfway on a direct line would put us somewhere in the vicinity of Bromsgrove. But - and no disrespect intended to Bromsgrove - who wants to go on holiday in Bromsgrove? I mean, apart from those with an overriding historical interest in the nail-making industry, of course. So we pulled the line south-east a bit and ended up in the Chilterns, a place I know very slightly, mainly because I know a few people who grew up there, rather than because I've been there many times.

One of the things I do know about the Chilterns, and was reminded of on looking at some maps of the area surrounding Radnage, is that there are a few chalk hill figures in the vicinity, most notably the Whiteleaf Cross in the vicinity of Princes Risborough and the Watlington White Mark near, erm, Watlington. I know these things because I grew up in (among many other places) Newbury and went a few times to see the White Horse of Uffington, about 20 miles away to the north-west, often combined with a look at the nearby Uffington Castle hillfort and maybe even a stroll of a mile or so along the Ridgeway to Wayland's Smithy. Hang on, you'll be saying, that's away from the Chilterns, and moreover, away from, I'd venture to suggest, the point. Well, the point, if you'll allow me, is that my parents had a book called White Horses And Other Hill Figures by a chap called Morris Marples which had a very interesting chapter in it about the Uffington horse, but also many other chapters describing other horses, the vast majority of them concentrated into a fairly small area in Wiltshire. It's not just horses, either - there are a couple of giant human figures at Wilmington and Cerne Abbas, and various other things of different shapes and sizes including the figures at Whiteleaf and Watlington as mentioned above, and another which we'll come to in a minute.

Anyway, my parents seem to have lost or got rid of their copy of the Marples book - which was first published in 1949 but was still in print into the 1980s - but fortunately the internet exists and I was able to get hold of quite a handy second-hand copy from the excellent people at World of Books for a very reasonable six quid. The reason I did this, just to finally get to the point after several paragraphs of discursive waffle, is that I'd spotted the village of Bledlow very close to Radnage and had remembered that there was another cross listed in the Marples book on a nearby hill, generally known as the Bledlow Cross.

If you look at a present-day OS map of the area you'll see that the Bledlow Cross is still marked. The map on the right here is the current one; the one on the left is earlier (1960s at the latest) and has an actual cross marked in roughly the right orientation. 

I was going to go on to say: good luck finding it via Google Maps' aerial photography, though, because there's absolutely fuck all evidence of it and it's all just trees. I would have said this despite my knowledge of some clearing work having been done in the last couple of years (more on this later), having examined the aerial views before we went on holiday (I mean, I am not an idiot). Having just this minute looked again, though, I can see a clearing and a faint cross. It's not exactly clear (the green-on-green colour scheme doesn't help) but it's definitely there. I can only assume the satellite imagery has been updated at some point in the last few weeks. 

Anyway, intrigued by its apparent disappearance I put "Bledlow Cross" into YouTube to see if I could find anything and came across this rather splendid video of these two tweedy chaps going on a quest to find it. They do mention that some clearance work (presumably including felling some trees) was done as recently as February 2024 and when they eventually find the cross it is reasonably free of vegetation, though not particularly white. 

Time for a photo gallery before we get to the bit where we go on an actual quest to find it ourselves. Here's a picture from probably the first couple of decades of the 20th century showing the cross on a tree-free hillside, a photo from the Marples book which is probably from the 1940s, a photo from Mark Hows' splendid website which I would guess is maybe 1980s, a still from the video mentioned above and a drone shot resulting from the scouting expedition described here. 

So, anyway, the upshot of all this is that I persuaded all nine people in our party that we should go for a walk in the general area, including a couple of sections of the Ridgeway and the Icknield Way and a bit of geocaching, but also incorporating a quick bit of off-path scrambling about to see if we could find the cross. The couple of rope swings (one of which features in the video) were very handy here both as a navigational aid and also a distraction for those less inclined than the hardcore adventurers (me, Jim and Nia) to plough through brambles and nettles to get to what's basically a couple of medium-sized ditches. 

Anyway, the update I can give you from August 9th 2024, which is the date we visited, is that a substantial amount of regrowth has happened since the clearance work and the initial rush of YouTubers visiting to make videos. It's only grass and general weeds but it does substantially obscure the cross, and if the people involved don't want their excellent work to be in vain then a more regular programme of clearance looks like it'll be essential. Here's a few photos - Jim at the cross's lower extremity, a view looking up to the top of the cross and Nia at the cross's rough midpoint with its eastern side-arm behind her.

The map below shows the (anticlockwise) route of the walk; almost exactly six kilometres in total, although that includes some aimless thrashing about trying to find the cross and later a couple of seemingly non-existent geocaches. If you just did the walk like a sensible human being it's probably not much more than five. 

A quick footnote: the other major site of interest we visited was the Hellfire Caves in West Wycombe, which are well worth a look, and whose creator (he didn't do the actual digging, he got some plebs in to do that) Sir Francis Dashwood seems to have been a hell of a guy. We also did the walk up the hill to see his mausoleum and the church which he had a giant golden ball built on top of just so he and his mates could sit in it drinking port and chewing the fat.

We also did a bit of parkrun tourism at Wycombe Rye on Saturday and had an unexpected celebrity encounter with Vernon Kay, though we disappointingly didn't manage to sneak into any of the photographs (I think we're somewhere behind his head in the first one). We then went to the lido at the start/finish line afterwards for a dip. Swimming pools in general aren't really my thing, let alone outdoor ones on a slightly overcast day, and I haven't been in an outdoor pool in Britain since occasional visits to the one at the Northcroft Centre in Newbury as a child. That one seems to have had a substantial spruce-up and refurbishment lately; it's safe to say the Wycombe Rye one has not and could perhaps do with one. 

So, did we have a nice week? Yes we did. Am I going to prioritise a return trip for another holiday? Eh, probably not, although I am going to keep an eye on further developments with the Bledlow Cross to see if anything exciting happens. If it disappears beneath a sea of grass and bracken again then I'm going to be a bit - no, wait for it - cross.