Beech Hill (Mystery Walking)

St Mary's Beech Hill

The Ramblers are running a project in which members are asked to walk two miles of path in a given grid square and then rate the walk along a number of dimensions. The walk has to stay within a single Highway Authority area, and clearly once enough ratings are available a national picture will emerge about the state of paths which will highlight differences between local authorities. This all seemed a good idea, so I volunteered and was allocated a grid square quite near home.

The first challenge was to construct the walk. I know that I am not very good at this, tending to rely on walk books rather than make up my own walks, and I have realised that one of the obstacles is that I am poor at assessing distances on the OS Explorer maps. This is pretty pathetic of course and so I thought I would use my experience of Mystery Walking to address this weakness.

The grid square in question only has one real path and it can only be accessed from two points. Secondly, the grid square is right on the extreme edge of West Berkshire District, so only one direction of walk was possible. I decided to park in Beech Hill, opposite the beautiful church of St Mary (William Butterfield, 1867). I walked towards Spencers Wood to join a path through Beech Hill coverts to join my target path right at the top of my grid square.

The path was in fact a Byway and wound through trees to briefly become a road and pass Beech Hill House, an imposing Georgian mansion of 1720.

The path resumed shortly after and continued through woodland on the same south-westerly line.

It ended at a road, like many paths in this area, and I followed two short sections of road to join the Devil's Highway - a one-time Roman Road heading towards Silchester (Roman Calleva Atrebatum). I have waled in the other direction along this section on a walk from Stratfield Mortimer to Beech Hill. It is a very pleasant green lane, with glimpses of fields on both sides.

When the Devil's Highway ended, there was the option of completing the early walk in reverse, but time was running out. The price of not doing so was two and half miles back along the road. Still, I was lucky enough to be get a good look at a kestrel sitting on a telegraph wire - the sound of my approach was presumably drowned out by the traffic noise.

Conditions: warm, but cooling as evening arrived.

Distance: about 7 miles.

Map: Explorer 159 (Reading, Wokingham and Pangbourne).

Rating: two and half stars. Too much road!

Reflections on Mystery Walking

The Mystery Walker rating process was quite straightforward and it was quite interesting to focus on the quality of the paths, rather than the countryside, nature and buildings as I usually do. Ratings were required for (man-made) Obstructions, Signposting & Waymarking, Surface, Overgrowth, Level of "Welcome" and Enjoyment. All of these were rated on a five point scale from Excellent to Terrible, with each point defined in words, which should help to reduce the inevitable element of subjectivity.

I think it is an interesting initiative and it will be interesting to see the results.

My only concern was that the "Satisfactory" point on the scales seemed to be pitched too low. Consider the rating scale for Obstructions (examples of obstructions were "dangerous stiles; paths which have been ploughed or cropped without reinstatement of the route; missing bridges; unopenable gates; strategically-placed muck-heaps"):

Excellent there were no obstructions on the walk

Very good there were a few minor obstructions on the walk

Satisfactory there were some obstructions on the walk but they did not interfere with the walk as a whole

Not very good some parts of the walk were virtually impassable due to the nature of the obstructions faced 

Terrible the walk was almost impossible to carry out due to the obstructions faced

Given the definition of obstructions, I can't see how having some (i.e. more than one of them on a walk could be seen as satisfactory). It is also clear that there are two dimensions at play here: the number of obstructions and their severity.

In general for social survey questions (which is something I am involved in professionally), I am very keen on five point rating scales balanced about a midpoint, but here I rather think a four point scale would work better. Here is my offer:

Excellent there were no obstructions on the walk

Satisfactory there were only minor obstructions on the walk, but they did not interfere with the walk as a whole

Not very good there were frequent or serious obstructions, but it was still possible to complete the walk

Terrible the walk was impossible to carry out due to the obstructions faced

Reflections on map reading

I noted down times and step counts as I did different sections of the walk and compared them with the map when I finished. This helped to fix a greater sense of map distances as translated into walking time distance in the moment.

At home I finally gave the Explorer map scale a careful study. It is 1:25,000 scale so 4 cm represents 1 km, or 2.5 inches (6.5 cm) represents 1 mile.

Or, perhaps more practically, one grid square is 1 km or .62 miles; 2.5 squares is 1.5 miles.

I think I have got it at last. What was difficult about that? Of course the next challenge is to factor in the effect of climbs and descents - what the French call dénivelisation (change of levels).