Monday 5th April 2021
Despite lockdown being lifted I couldn’t go anywhere for my Easter holiday and everyone was advised to minimise travel so I was forced to look for somewhere in the Midlands to walk, not far from where I live, and I turned my eyes to Cannock Chase. This is a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty containing natural woodland and heathland, but I had never been there before, so this was a perfect opportunity and despite wintry conditions as I left home I drove to Staffordshire and parked at a small car park on Coppice Hill near the village of Brocton. In reading up beforehand I discovered there is a connection between Cannock Chase and J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. I have found various places over the years that claim inspiration for the works of Tolkien such as the Forest of Bowland, which I visited in 2012 and was told was the inspiration for the Shire, despite no evidence to support their claim. A place with a better claim to be the Shire is the area just south of Birmingham where Tolkien spent some years as a child and I did a walk there in 2019 through an area that has now been called The Shire Country Park. Staffordshire’s links to Tolkien go back to the First World War when he was stationed in barracks on the Chase.
The county council has produced a leaflet for a Staffordshire Tolkien Trail with three walks in the area including two that start from Coppice Hill, so I set off following the directions for the Great Haywood Walk through Brockton Coppice. It was very cold and overcast as I set off through terrain that looked pretty lifeless with dead bracken on the ground and leafless trees, but it wasn’t long before the sun started breaking through heralding a day of gorgeously sunny weather. On reaching the bottom of the valley I turned left away from the river through woodland that now looked fabulous with the sun creating stunning scenes through the trees and blue skies overhead as I following the Tolkien Trail around Harts Hill to The Punch Bowl car park. Crossing the road I followed a course not far from the road to pass White Barn Farm and enter the open parkland of the National Trust’s Shugborough Estate, which was already filling up with people, but I was just passing through on my way to the village of Great Haywood.
Tolkien spent some months in this village during the winter of 1916-17 recovering from trench fever contracted following the Battle of the Somme. It is thought that it was here that he first started writing his great epic that became the Silmarillion, the legends of the first age of Middle-Earth that underpins the whole of The Lord of the Rings. In this earliest phase of his writings there was a place on the elvish isle of Tol Eressëa called Tavrobel that didn’t survive into later writings, but has been equated with Great Haywood and the council leaflet eagerly suggests the grand Shugborough Hall is the House of a Hundred Chimneys that is described as standing nigh the Bridge of Tavrobel, which in reality is Essex Bridge. The inspiration of this area on Tolkien’s writings may have been fleeting, but I couldn’t help being inspired myself as I passed over the ancient, narrow bridge near the confluence of the River Sow with the River Trent in this sunny weather and it was easy to see such delightful surroundings being populated by the elves of Tol Eressëa. The village of Great Haywood is beyond the canal and railway line and I had a look around, but aside from some buildings that the Tolkien’s would have stayed in there was nothing of interest to see so I returned to the canal.
There, I had a pleasant walk along a towpath that was decorated with lush, green vegetation that I had not been seen in Cannock Chase including carpets of celandines that covered the area between the canal and the River Trent. There were distant views back to Shugborough Hall and the sun was shining making for a fantastic, blissful walk, but eventually I left the canal and after a short walk beside a road re-entered Cannock Chase at Seven Springs. There now seemed to be many people around, brought out by the sunshine on this Bank Holiday Monday, and this made things tricky for me to maintain social distancing as I continued to follow the Tolkien Trail that took me into the Sherbrook Valley where I crossed the stepping stones and headed upstream. There was now, thankfully, less people around and as I was enjoying the tranquil, unspoilt surroundings of the Sherbrook Valley so much, when I reached the point where the Great Haywood Walk heads back up to the Coppice Hill car park I stayed beside the brook. I thought I’d now follow one of the other Tolkien Trails, the Cannock Chase Walk, but didn’t realise that would also mean climbing out of the valley at this point.
When I realised this I decided to take the path marked as Pepper Slade that took me out of the valley later on and brought me back onto the Tolkien Trail near the site of Rugeley Camp, where Tolkien was first stationed in the area. I now followed the directions through the remains of Rugeley Camp, now a campsite (not open), to a road where I decided I didn’t want to continue on the trail so I turned left and followed signs for the Heart of England Way. This enabled me to cut a corner on the trail and after passing through a conifer plantation took me back down into the Sherbrook Valley where I turned right onto a path that I thought had taken me back onto the trail and was a pleasant walk through heather moorland into the cold, northerly wind. I realised I had gone the wrong way because the path was not taking me out of the valley so eventually I turned left and climbed steeply up the hill. I was now near the site of Brocton Camp where Tolkien was billeted in 1916 before heading off to France in time for the start of the Battle of the Somme. There is, thankfully, little trace of all this now and I wasn’t really looking for any, as I was more interested in the wild scenery, which I prolonged by heading from the Glacial Boulder car park down into the sparsely treed Oldacre Valley.
The Tolkien Trail also visits the Oldacre Valley where there would have been some of the Officer’s Huts that Tolkien used, but the trail immediately comes back out of the valley whereas I kept to the side. I soon realised I was going the wrong way, but I was enjoying the walk too much to mind until eventually I reached the top of Tan Hill overlooking the village of Brocton. Turning around I made my way back across the delightful landscape dragging my now aching legs all the way back to my car. This was an interesting walk, but at times a battle of navigation and my own fatigue. I really enjoyed the first half of the walk to Great Haywood, but once I was back in Cannock Chase I kept getting lost and tired. The problem with walking in a wood is that it is difficult to navigate as you can’t see where you’re going for all the trees so you have to blindly follow the path. On a mountain you usually have clear views of your intended direction making navigation much easier, but Cannock Chase is a maze of paths so I was constantly checking my map, which meant it wasn’t very relaxing. If I lived locally and knew the area well, then I would not have had any problem and would really enjoy walking through the Chase, but I’ve never been to Cannock Chase before so a return visit may be a good idea.
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