Pagans, Pilgrimage and Putley: Adventures on the OS Map Around Home

I needed a new place to visit on the OS map centred on my house and I had a weekend to go out mooching when my wife was away with our daughter Molly. I guess most blokes in early parenthood with a weekend on their own probably wouldn't be planning on spending it walking through thick mud in the woods, but I was genuinely getting a bit of a buzz from these shenanigans. 

I studied the map and decided that Putley would be a good place to visit this time. We got married in Putley because it has a lovely little church. I'm not remotely religious so I had some minor hypocrisy issues with a church wedding, but after attending a mandatory couple of Sunday services I actually quite liked it. The people were nice and I took the messages as being metaphors for being a good person rather than historical facts. Whilst I found the offers of entering conker tournaments a bit weird, I said I wouldn't mind going back there regularly after we got married. It's now over 13 years since our wedding and I'd never been back to Putley Church. 

Looking around the area on my map, there were plenty of public footpaths through the nearby fields and woods. I could park in Putley Green and do a circular walk incorporating the church at the end. It would be sort of like a pilgrimage. Perfect. 

I took my dogs again for this walk. For some reason, young Wilf had decided to go a bit feral and it was like skijoring through the muddy fields being towed by a rabid dingo, swerving all the cow pats. When I managed to calm him down and have a proper look around I was happy with my choice of walk. Another corker of place.

After walking through the boggy fields north of Putley Green I then had a plod along some nice country lanes. I took a few photos that I might share on the Country Lane Appreciation Society on Facebook. I then realised that if a 20 year old me travelled into the future and met up with me there, he'd be like "Mate. Is this really what I end up doing in my spare time? Taking photos of lanes?"

Those lovely lanes would take me to Commanders Wood. Probably 90% of that wood is private with signs up all over it warning people to stay out. There's a footpath through one side of it with a gate to it that was pretty much blocked by a local resident's car, but I managed to get through. It's a beautiful wood and I wandered off the footpath for a proper look because, whilst I respect the right to private gardens and protected farm land, I'm not particularly fond of someone stopping the rest of us entering ancient woodland or other wild spaces because of ownership. The stars are for everyone, not just people with money and inherited bits of paper.

From Commanders Wood I walked up the lane and into Lady's Wood. I went in the wrong direction coming out of a clearing in the wood and ended up finding a sort of waterfall formed over a tree root and I thought it was amazing. If the 20 year old time travelling version of me had continued on the walk, he would have probably shaken his head once more when he saw how impressed I was with this little trickle of water over a half dead tree. I realised that as I'd grown older I'd become more appreciative of the natural world around me and more irritated by most other things. Finding a tiny waterfall had made me really happy, yet someone not indicating on a roundabout or failing to acknowledge me if I held a door open for them were things that had made me properly irritated. 20 year old me wouldn't have given a toss about any of those things. 

After looking back at the map and working out where I'd gone off track, I found the gate back into the wood and continued through it to the fields on the other side. Leaving the wood, I was greeted with a superb view of the Malvern Hills. After my recent daft scramble up the side of a quarry in the Conigree wood with the prize of a crap view of the Malverns, I'd found something way better and completely unexpected. I was clearly a novice at judging contour lines on maps. Not the end of the world to be fair.

I went down the side of the fields towards Putley Church for my first visit since our wedding in October 2011. It's a corker of a church. Small and historic (built circa 1100 AD) with a large pond out the front. The last time I was here I was certainly looking a lot smarter and more clean and tidy than I was now. I had arrived at my wedding in a nice car, rather than being dragged there through cow shit by a dog. I thought I'd sit on a bench in the churchyard for a while and eat some of the Mini Babybels I brought along. Unfortunately a dog from the nearby farm decided he fancied a bit of that. Its owner was nowhere to be seen and my dogs aren't exactly friendly with others of their kind, so by the time I'd got the red wrapper off a single little circle of mild cheese I had to leave. Not quite as exciting and emotional as my last visit to this church, but it was nice to be back there. 

It was a short walk back to the car from the church. I'd ticked off more grid squares on the local map and had another walk that was much better than I was expecting. I'd found strange, quirky things and got more joy from mooching about the countryside. I'd go back to the map to find another place for us all to visit the following weekend. 

When checking the map again for some new grid squares to visit, I realised that we hadn't walked on all of the peaks of the Malvern Hills. I'd walked Ledbury to Malvern a few times via Eastnor and we'd gone on the hills south of Eastnor to Whiteleaved Oak, but not further south over Chase End Hill to the start of the Malverns near the village of Bromsberrow. That seemed like a good plan. 

We parked up in Bromsberrow and walked through the Bromsberrow Estate which had a couple of footpaths through the grounds leading to where the hills start. What an incredible place, with lakes and amazing views out to May Hill to the south. If it hadn't been for a cow staring me out and looking like it was ready to have a pop, we'd have been keen to hang around for a bit. I didn't fancy a scrap with a cow with a baby attached to me in a carrier. Not that I would normally fight with cows when I'm out on my own. 

We moved on up the banks and through some woods to the start of the Malvern Hills and a path up to Chase End Hill. The only "peak" of the Malverns we had never walked to and the first one for young Molly. Although I don't think being carried up a hill really counts, but she is 4 months old so we'll let her off. 

The Gloucestershire and Worcestershire border runs down the middle of Chase End Hill. Below it is the hamlet of Whiteleaved Oak which is the meeting point of the Three Counties. There was a sacred oak tree there which was sadly destroyed by fire in 2020. The tree is/was the centre of a pagan alignment called the Perpetual Choirs Decagon, with sites such as Glastonbury and Stonehenge surrounding it. When we visited the remains of the oak in 2021 there was still a sense that it remained a sacred site, with lots of strange things hanging from the surrounding trees. There are also some wooden stocks in the hamlet on which are written various famous names including Tony Blair and Jimmy Savile. I wanted to go back to Whiteleaved Oak on this walk because it's quirky and I got positive vibes from the tree, but it turns out that the path down from Chase End Hill is so steep it can't be far off officially being a cliff. I'd have gone down it on my own, but with a baby strapped to my chest it would have been irresponsible and stupid. It was mentally steep.

Wilf (white), Dottie (black)

We spent some time dossing on the hill while I found a different route on my map from Chase End Hill down some lanes and back into another part of the Bromsberrow Estate. Thankfully that part didn't contain any angry looking cattle so it was a nice stroll back to Bromsberrow to the car. 

This had been a relatively short walk at 2.8 miles, but it was a beauty and it was lovely to take Molly for her first of many visits to the Malvern Hills. Trying to visit different places in my local area had been superb so far. You will struggle to find someone more proud of this neck of the woods than me, but my sense of pride still grew. I had essentially been picking parts of the map that looked like they should be great though, so the real challenge would be to find the interesting and/or beautiful in the not so interesting or beautiful looking parts of my map. I might need to start mixing it up a bit before the pickings became slim.