Walking in the gutter

Sunday 7 October: a walk from Stokesay to Aldon Gutter. There are valleys, dales, hollows and batches (and beaches – same thing) in this county. And gutters! They’re all valleys, one way or another; the only difference is perhaps their scale, and if that’s the case, then a gutter must be at the lower end – a fairly minor feature of our varied landscape. Today we’re walking from Stokesay to Aldon Gutter, for no better reason than (a) we’ve never been there before, and (b) it looked inviting on the OS map. It’s a very pleasant, and very quiet walk. The only people we see are the farmers at Aldon, moving their heifers indoors for the coming winter. Aldon Gutter (what a lovely place!) is thickly populated – with pheasants. There are hundreds of them, blissfully ignorant of their ultimate fate in the hands of so-called sportsmen – if, that is, they don’t stray onto the roads nearby.

Only one problem faces us. As we descend towards the Onny, with just a mile to go, the path fades to nothing (dense undergrowth in the woods). There’s no obvious way over the fence… Tricky! (We made it, of course, but a stile would have been good)