Harlaston, Staffordshire

Monday 19th October 2009
Time for a decent walk as John's dodgy knee is feeling a bit better. We drove to Harlaston which is just into Staffordshire. The small village was quite pretty, although there had been a lot of new building in the area. The church was unusual (although I forgot to take a picture). It had a black and white tower, and dated from Saxon times, with medieval and Victorian additions.
We walked along the street and found a footpath which wound alongside several pretty gardens and emerged by a farm. The footpath sign pointed to a pile of rubble and farm equipment blocked off with barriers. Hmmm, no way through there then. The cow barn was open (and empty) so we walked through and reached a field edge. We were walking parallel with the path we should have been on, so followed it until we reached the area where the footpath proper joined the field.
The next part of the walk was over fields with new crops but no signs to show the path, and when we did reach the stile it was broken with no cross step, so we had to carefully climb over the barbed wire. It was lucky I had put the route on the GPS, so we knew where the paths went; when the crops are grown it will be impossible to see the path .
It was warm and sunny and we had good views across the fields and we followed the path over Hogs hill (which was really very flat) and emerged onto Syerscote lane, a gated road which we followed for a while and then sat on a verge to eat our sandwiches and have a cup of coffee.
After lunch we followed a permissive path (rather than the lane) to Twizzle lane. We were surprised to walk around large fields full of elephant grass. I assume it was for biofuel.
After reaching Haunton we used the footpath to walk parallel with the road back to Harlaston. We had found 6 caches on the way round and wanted to do another before we left. We took a footpath near the church and crossed a field which had heifers in. All was well as we crossed the stile but as we found the cache we could hear snorting and puffing. As we went to go back over the stile all the cows had come to see what we were up to. John bravely persuaded them to move away from the stile and we crossed the field with them showing no further interest. Our walk had been 10km.