The Icknield Way left Royston on a straight line, first along a road, then beside one, with busy traffic on the left, hidden by trees, and a large field on my right, ploughed to a rich reddish tilth. Eventually the road curved away and I crossed farmland on a track. I spent some time trying to capture the trail and its surroundings on my camera, however good landscape photographs rely on the weather and the lighting it provides, which is often transitory as clouds briefly reveal the sun, occluding it before I can get my camera out. In the morning, after some light rain, the sky was grey and overcast, then a band of blue developed in the north. Setting the exposure to capture the colours of the sky without the fields in the foreground appearing dark (or vice versa) proved difficult. There were two types of shot I concentrated on. The first type was where the path crossed open fields with no hedges bounding the track, just a change from the rough grass and bare earth of the trail to the cultivated grass or soil of the field. Here the hills were just gentle swellings over which the trail was draped. Steep escarpments of the type I had walked along prior to Ickleford were no longer present, maybe flattened by the moving ice in the last Ice Age. Skylarks sang above me. The second type of trail photo was when the path was bounded by trees. Walking below their branches was especially attractive in the afternoon when the low winter sun broke through the clouds and cast shadows of the trees over the trail.
In my travels I passed through three villages, each with a flint walled church and pub (although cafes and shops were hard to find). The only church I stopped to enter was St Mary the Virgin's church at Strethall, which was not in a village at all, but just by a farm. Inside this simple but handsome church, light from the stained glass coloured the floor of the chancel. On a wall a board listed the rectors responsible since 1322. Apparently it is in the parish of "the Icknield Way villages". It is difficult to see where it gets a congregation from. No doubt once there were plenty of farm labourers living nearby, but now tractors and other machines do the work. The parish's website calls the area "a little bit of heaven beside the M11", and an hour or so later I cross the motorway in this rhyming couplet, followed by an electrified railway. Probably the last of the great arteries of traffic radiating out of London that I shall cross.
My knee had been loose and complaining most of the day but in this final section it settled down as if it knew I was nearly finished for the day. My reward was a cup of coffee and baguette at the bakery in the village of Great Chesterford before a shower and rest in my hotel room. Typical of the area the village is a mixture of orange-red brick, flint walls and rendered houses of various ages with thatched, tiled and slate roofs. Increasingly there are black, wooden clad barns and houses that seem more unique to this part of the country.
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