Dreary With A Hint Of Witchcraft

Meon Hill

Ambit walk to Oxford -
Day 1 - Stratford-upon-Avon to Lower Quinton
(Ambit was a durational performance and artwork that I was commissioned to make for Neither Use Nor Ornament (NUNO) exhibition at OVADA in Oxford)

Originally, Ambit had been planned to include several walks, but illness, life and work got in the way of that original plan. The final walk, linking my studio in Solihull with the gallery in Oxford did go ahead. I carried in my rucksack the knitted artwork that I had been working on all through the winter; a 15 foot long, hand-knitted object that represented both the 'white road,' and the physical distance between the artists involved in NUNO.

I had previously walked from Solihull to Stratford-upon-Avon along the Stratford canal, so I 
re-started the Ambit walk from Stratford, getting the train from Solihull very early in the morning.
Some of this walk was quite nice, heading out of Stratford along the Greenway, which is a dismantled railway line converted into an activity space for runners, walkers and cyclists, linking Stratford with the village of Long Marston. There are sections where it skirts the river that are quite pretty and I imagine in the spring and summer, when the blossom and wildflowers are out, it's quite pretty. But on a misty, early spring day it eventually became a bit boring. There's only so much even I can take of a long, straight, mostly view-less track.

The landscape around this part of Warwickshire is very flat, so that the first true Cotswold hill, Meon, stands out in the landscape like a beacon.

There was a fairly grim bit of the walk from Long Marston to Lower Quinton, skirting Long Marston airfield. There was a great deal of flytipping rubbish and great heaps of lager cans in the bushes and hedges. The flat landscape and the rubbish gave the walk a dour, dreary aspect here.

I was feeling pretty fit and thought that I might carry on to Illmington, so I walked up to Meon hill and began traversing the side of it. I lived in Lower Quinton as a kid so there were a lot of memories for me about walking on Meon alone or with my family. Meon hill has quite a sinister reputation in the area; it was the scene of a brutal murder and local people used to believe that it had connections to the darker aspects of witchcraft.

I always had a conflicted relationship with Meon hill. I loved parts of it for it's solitude and beauty, especially up on the top of the hill, but some parts of the hill always made me feel inexplicably uncomfortable. So it was this time. You cannot walk onto the top of the hill any more, so I took the footpath that ran along the side of the hill. I stopped for a brief rest and had a very uncomfortable, unexplainable feeling of dread, so much so that I retraced my steps and walked back to Upper Quinton to wait for the bus home. (The next day I restarted the walk at Lower Quinton, but this time took a longer detour via the roads to avoid going on the hill again. An odd experience).

River Avon in early morning

Following the Greenway out of Stratford

The Greenway was originally a railway track 




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