The Ramsay Walk 17 July 2025 in pictures and Helen

The first thing one notices about Upwood – at least the first thing a person who has  not been there before, is that it is full of trees.  And they rise to the sky.  Rise, rise, rise.

I suppose one might say that the clue is in the names “Upwood” but I have never been one for this sort of Holmsian activity, and as a result everything takes me by surprise. So there they were, lots of trees.

Gallons of trees I said to my companions, but they said I had the wrong measurement which surprised me as I didn’t know that Ramblers had gone all metric.

Anyway, this Upwood place is indeed mysterious since it actually tells you on the signpost who is walking nearby – in this case Heleny and Bentley.  It’s a lovely spot so I am sure they are getting on

well together.  Anyway, as befits a group of Ramblers, staying on the road was never going to be enough, and so we entered fields of something or other.  Being a Londoner I’m never very clear about what’s what, or why the ground has to have such enormous cracks in it, but they had certainly gone to town (or village I suppose one should say) in that case.

Obviously, we soon had enough of all this middle-of-the-road stuff and took ourselves off to the edges of reality (as us science fiction readers like to call it), admiring on the left the corn, and then some corn, and then some corn.  After a while I asked what really it all was but no one was willing to tell me.

And yet curiously and without forewarning the corn infestation came to an end as was replaced by houses of a type that we  have become familiarised with on the sunny beaches of Cambridgeshire.

I had expected to see lots of learned women and men reading things or waving their arms about having discovered a new element, but no that is now how it was.

For no sooner were we through the village and out the other side than we were back in the countryside walking between rows and rows of growing things which were growing.

Naturally, I enquired as to the purpose of all this growing business but my fellow walkers gave me curious looks and hurried on, and I was left none the wiser, which I think was unfair.

Anyway, it was all jolly nice walking in the country without let or hindrance when, without a by or leave we suddenly found ourselves hemmed in, the roadway ahead being blocked.

But now, if you have been on a Peterborough walk you will know that it takes more than a Pole (or a Hungarian come to that) to keep us from our magical quest (that being to find the way back to where we parked the cars) and once more we ventured fourth, if not fifth

into the fields of, well I am not too sure, being a Londoner and all that, but actuually I was tipped off by a fellow walker that they were were turnips.   But you never know because some of these walkers do like to pull one’s leg.  Although, I am sure they would never be so cruel.

Turnips I am sure they were.

Continued anon….

Commentary and pics by Tony A.