Greensand, Gravel & Great Ouse

 

Route GPX File  Greensand, Gravel & Great Ouse

This is a route across a variety of country landscapes which only involves about 200m climbing overall but does include some off road paths. It is configured to start at Sandy Rail Station but could be equally well started at Bedford or Flitwick. It follows the Greensand Ridge and Marston Vale before visiting Bedford and following the Great Ouse river back towards Sandy. Most of it is on minor roads but the stretch of the National Cycle Route network is on cycle paths.

Zooming in:

Highlights:

Olde villages. Ickwell Green, Ampthill etc.

Shuttleworth Aerodrome

The countryside of the Greensand Ridge

The NCR cycle path along the Great Ouse.

Bedford. The riverside cycle route.

The usual ghosts, ghouls and absurdities

Route Tips

I suspect that the cycle path alongside the Great Ouse might suffer after heavy rain. There are more trains stopping at Bedford than Sandy and Flitwick Station is 2 miles off the route. 

Zooming Out

The ride goes through contrasting landscapes with the higher ground founded on sandstones and the lower mudstones and clay. The sandstone of the ‘Greensand Ridge’ (also known as Woburn Sands) and the brick clays of Marston Vale originated as sediments at the bottom of seas in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when dinosaurs inhabited a warmer, wetter England. Marston Vale in the west is now dotted with lakes formed from the pits where some clay was extracted for brick making. In contrast, the clay mud deposited in the valley of the Great Ouse River was laid down after the Ice Ages, when an ice-cap up to 2000m thick covered the area leaving in its wake much of the present top layer of gravel, sand and clay. If you have been yearning to find out about the various flavours of mud, see my blog post at: www.pootler.co.uk/2023/04/the-rocks-beneath.html but if you have a more general interest in local geology, this is the place to go:  Link: Bedfordshire Geology Group

Before the Romans arrived, this was the territory of the Catuvellauni, a tribe who came to dominate South East England until the invasion. You won't see anything of them on this route. Later, it became part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia whose best-known king, Offa of Dyke fame, appears to have spent a lot of time hereabout. Later the Danes arrived, presumably enjoying the river access and until the Norman Conquest the area sat on the border between them and the Saxons. 

In the centuries that followed, its fairly central location meant that it was regularly caught in the turbulence of English history. The story of Bedford Castle illustrates this. But the lives of local people were probably most affected by plague and enrichment and pauperisation that followed the effective privatisation of what were once open fields in the ‘enclosures’ movement. You will find a brief story of the changing landscape in the region in my blogpost here:

Now, you see a wide variety of land uses, partly reflecting industrialisation and an increase in population and also because neither the badly drained clays nor the thin sandy soils of the ridge are easy to farm but fine for some undemanding commercial woodland and recreational uses from golf courses to parklands.

A. Sandy

It's a convenient starting place but there's not a lot to see here unless you count a memorial to a bloke famed in the Crimean War for throwing back the live shells aimed at him by Russian soldiers. Note the crossing of the A1. A mapped cycle route takes you onto the road, but I felt safer using the pedestrian bridge nearby.

E. Northill & Ickwell Green

Both have some old and even cottages. If you want some idea on how to tell the difference, check my blog posts here: Link Olde Worlde Cottages

Of the two, Ickwell takes the biscuit. The green sports a tall maypole that catches the eye. Apparently, they celebrate ‘May Day’ in what they fondly imagine is a traditional style going back to the 1500s, starting with Morris Dancers in the pub car park and ending with girls in costume dancing around the pole. The cricket matches on the Green are less hamstrung by tradition; the game I saw was played in coloured kit rather than whites. Is nothing sacred? The whole rustic shebang delightful or ‘Icky’. It’s up to you.

Ickwell Green May Day 

F & G   Old Warden & Shuttleworth Aerodrome.

Old Warden is a stately pile. The estate originated in the 1600s but the present house was built in the 1800s for a merchant called Shuttleworth, who owned a large engineering company. The gardens and whatnot are open to the public. The attraction for me is the collection of old aircraft and vehicles alongside a good cafe with lots of seating inside and out. Also lots of events, some quite weird. Check their website. Shuttleworth Collection

WW2  RAF Lysander 

The village of Old warden is another mile up the road and comprises an authentic church (12c -16c without too much later alteration) set just off the road and few rather inauthentic 'estate' cottages. Apparently the romantic Lord Ongley, who owned the place at the time wanted a fashionably faux estate village and capped it by insisting that local women spirted tall hats and long cloaks. The swiss garden in the park was his idea as well. 

You are now climbing the unimposing Greensand Ridge, an extended island of friable sandstone in a sea of clay. The rock, when you can see it, only occasionally shows traces of the green 'glauconite', a legacy of its organic origins in shallow water at a time when the county looked and felt more like the Bahamas or the Philippines. In fact, the surrounding area is a lasagne of different varieties of what are now known as ‘Woburn’ sands, laid down in the era of the dinosaurs over 100m years ago. The sandy soils are well drained but in most places thin and unrewarding for farmers but a good place for landscaped parkland or woods. 

Greensand. Not very green. 

H. Southill 

Southill Park on your right was the home and the church is now the burial place of Admiral John Byng who in 1756 failed to relieve a French blockade of Majorca. Folks were peeved so by popular acclaim he was arrested by his own brother-in-law and shot on the quarterdeck of his ship. Voltaire wrote ironically "the English find it pays to shoot an Admiral from time to time to encourage the others" .....from which we get our saying. 

'Pour encourager les autres'. 

I. Ireland 

This is just so that you can say that you cycled to Ireland. And apparently the Black Horse pub is 'award-winning'.

J. Chicksands / Rowney Warren Wood

This is a dirt bike park created on a hillside of pine and spruce trees. Is your bike sturdy? Do you fancy a gravity-assisted slalom, pump track, mulch jump or snake run? £10 will buy you the chance to try. All, of course, strictly at your own risk and they helpfully refer to it as 'carrying a significant risk of injury including death'. So all good fun then.

K. Haynes Park.

For those wishing to surf a more spiritual wave. This grand pile was built in the early 1700s for Lord Carteret, a generally unexciting figure mainly useful but feared because he could speak to the Hanoverian King George 1^st in German. Now it is owned by part of the Hindu ‘Radha Soami’ movement. They are into their guru, meditation and morals, not beef, booze or the caste system.

Haynes Park : Radha Soami  

L. Clophill

Another lovely village, this one with some gruesome stories to tell. 

Satanists among you might care to visit Old St Mary's Church which sits on higher ground some 800 yards to the north side of High Street. Look for the logically named 'Old Church Path' a few hundred yards east of the route's turn into the village and opposite a thatched cottage. Churches are supposed to face heaven, which apparently is in the east. This one doesn’t, so it is said to have ‘turned its face away from God and its doors opened towards hell’. The outcome has been satanic mischief and 'orrible hauntings. The worst of this followed a graveyard desecration some fifty-odd years ago when the earthly remains of a young woman who died 250 years ago were disinterred and spread over the floor. 

Old St Mary's Clophill

The church has since been abandoned for a replacement in a more convenient location in the town. The devil-worshippers at English Heritage funded its preservation. A shorter trip to Youtube will give you plenty of options including what somebody claims is a live sighting! 

The oldest among you might recall the trial and hanging in Bedford gaol, of James Hanratty, troubled criminal nutcase. In 1962 he murdered Michael Gregsten and raped his girlfriend, leaving her for dead, in a lay-by on Deadman's Hill (an unconnected name) just north of the A6 junction here. A fifty year effort to clear his name concluded with his exhumation to provide DNA evidence which confirmed the verdict. 

Henratty 

M. Ampthill

Ampthill has expanded over the years but the old town is still attractive with narrow streets. It had a brush with serious Tudor history. There was a huge medieval castle in what is now the Park to the west of the road as you leave the town. It was funded by ransoming French knights after the battle of Agincourt. Henry 8^th loved hunting there and used it as a holding pen for the disgruntled Catherine Of Aragon while he transferred his attentions to Anne Boleyn. 

Henry & Catherine

The parkland was later designed for a subsequent and also now demolished grand house by Capability Brown. All that is left of all this now is an obelisk memorial to Catherine, which became famous as the location for the fantastically popular treasure hunt for a 'Golden Hare' inspired by a book by artist Kit Williams. The outcome is a tale in itself. If you want the story: Link: The Hunt for the Golden Hare

The Golden Hare 

Signposted on the left-hand side of the road and worth a quick detour are the photogenic ruins of Houghton House. It was built in the 1600s and was allegedly a design by Inigo Jones and the inspiration for the 'Palace Beautiful' in John Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress'. 

Houghton Hall 

Bunyan was a recalcitrant God-botherer and another one-time inmate of Bedford gaol, where he spent twelve years for refusing to cease his illegal preaching. The book is a Christian allegory of the journey from sin to heaven, written while he was locked up. He & I wouldn’t have got along well, but it has been in print ever since so some people must like it.

Pilgrim's Progress 1678

Both the old church and Deadman's Hill site were designated by the local Council as picnic sites. It makes you wonder.......

N. Marston Vale: Pits & Lakes

Between Ampthill and Bedford, the land to the east might have been the land that Bunyan used to inspire his vision of a ‘slough of despond’. It is an interesting but not pretty archipelago of sand and gravel extraction operations, some current and some not. The clay here is good for brickmaking but the industry really took off as the towns grew and the manufacturing process became mechanised. The London Brick Company gobbled up competitors to become the world’s largest brick maker, employing over 2,000 people and by the 1930s. This is where 'flettons' came from and there was once it was a forest of chimneys to be seen. Most of it has now gone.

Marston Vale : As Was.

The BBC will tell you all you could want to know and more:  Link: Marston Vale

And in the unlikely event that you are as geeky about bricks as I am: Link  Bricks

O. Bedford

Look, it isn’t paradise, but the cycle route follows paths along the river bank for much of the way and there is stuff to see and good places to stop. King Offa was reputedly buried near the river here. After you pass under the Town Bridge which carries the A600 into the town, you pass on the opposite bank the ‘motte’ mound which is all that is left of a much fought-over medieval castle which suffered in the Civil War before finally being put to the sword by the siege of urbanisation. There is a potted history of it here: Bedford Castle

Central Bedford Cycle Route 

Bedford : Fenlake Meadows

Bedford was hopelessly entangled in the religious disputes that followed the Civil War and was the home of aformentioned John Bunyan. But if you fancy something a tad more esoteric, divert across the river to visit 11 Newnham Road, home of the gorgeously nutty Panacea Society who believed that Bedford was the site of the actual Garden of Eden. The inspiration for this was Joanna Southcote, a self-declared seer in the early 1800s who at one point declared that she was pregnant with a new messiah. The (non believing) owners have a lttile museum there whose prize possession is the box which reputedly contained Joanna’s prophecies. Do you want to know what was in the box? Visit Panacea Museum

Joanna Southcott

Her Box! 

P. The Great Ouse River

The Great Ouse is the 5^th longest river in the UK and flows into the Wash. The path here is part of National Cycle Route 51 and much of the surface is gravel or hard earth. While a lot of the path offers pleasant views of the river through the trees lining it, you cannot miss the commercial gravel extraction pits being worked for a far wider range of purposes than laying the path! If you are concerned about surfaces off road, check this video. It shows the whole route to Sandy in 7 mins probably filmes from a helmet camera. . Link: YouTube: NCR 51 Bedford to Sandy

Great Ouse gravel pits

R. Route. 

The route follows the narrow & rough NCR track for the next mile. If you don't fancy that, turn left here and take a trip to admire the 15c bridge at Great Barford. You then follow Barford Road east. After a mile take the right turbing which takes you back to the route and into Sandy.