I bet you think that the Jurassic Way is in Dorset? Well no, it actually starts in Oxfordshire. The only connection to the Jurassic Coast, famed for fossils and romantic heroines, is the rocks that form one of the backbones of England.

You don't have to travel to the South Coast to unravel the story, which starts more than 100 million years ago, at the beginning of the Jurassic Period, when the UK was underwater. The shells of dead creatures formed sediment, which turned into the rocks which now stretch from the Cleveland Hills of Yorkshire to Dorset — and also from Banbury to Stamford.

The 88-mile footpath called the Jurassic Way follows the line of these rocks, and is waymarked with a fossil called Kallirhynchia sharpi. As in the Cotswolds, you can see the stone in cottages, houses and walls along the way. But unlike in the Cotswolds, you will be lucky to see even one or two other people in the course of a day's walk, even on Bank Holiday weekends.

For me, it was a journey through Middle England — not in the political sense; in fact, quite the opposite. These villages are not full of narrow-minded property owners, or second homes for film stars.

The inhabitants we met were real, friendly people travelling by bus to work in factories or nursing homes, or to shop in cheap supermarkets, not glitzy country stores.

Yes, the scenery is not as jaw-dropping as the Cotswolds, but it can still make your heart stop. Here are the rolling hills, fields and trees and villages of old England, unchanged for 200 years or more.

As with all the best journeys, you must cross the Slough of Despond, as well as the Hill of Difficulty, to reach the Delectable Mountains. If you want a picture-postcard perfect experience, look elsewhere. This is the heart of England's transport network, as well as its metaphorical heart.

At one point, the path goes under the M1, and at the end, before the spectacular view from the water meadows of Georgian Stamford (the finest stone town in England), you must cross the nightmare of pylons, motorways and railway lines that surround The Great North Road.

It is a dream for industrial archaeologists, crossing the Catesby Viaduct, built with 30 million bricks to take the Great Central Railway across the River Leam. There is also the Watford Gap, where the notorious motorway service station could be a million miles away from the quiet footpath which crosses the Grand Junction canal at an impressive staircase flight of seven locks.

The path was created by Northamptonshire County Council and follows a route first suggested by archaeologists in the 1930s and 1940s as having been a prehistoric trackway. Historians have since cast doubt on the idea of a single route from Bristol to the Humber, but the idea is appealing.

And the names — Elkington, Selby, Honey Hill and Little Oxendon, Hemplow Hills and Sibbertoft — are enough to send the least poetic walker into a rapture. One of the first you meet is Warkworth, from an Anglo-Saxon name 'spider's clearing'.

The church's altar tomb is cut from a dense chalk called 'clunch' which walkers can also encounter further south on the Ridgeway and (old Berkshire) Downs.

On the first day, as the leaves of the Cherwell Valley glinted in the autumn sun, we left Banbury along the Oxford Canal and soon crossed into Northamptonshire. But even at lunchtime we did not feel far from Oxford, looking at the stained-glass window of Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and comrades in Middleton Cheney.

Another echo of Oxfordshire comes later at Edgecote House, where in the18th century the lord of the manor demolished the old village to create his landscaped park — the same story as at Nuneham Courtenay, where the deserted village was the subject of a poem by Oliver Goldsmith (though some claim he used too much poetic licence when describing the plight of the villagers who were probably quite pleased to have their old-fashioned homes knocked down and rebuilt elsewhere).

At Edgecote, as at Nuneham Courtenay, you can see new farms and cottages rebuilt outside the now beautiful park, while the church and rectory stand isolated, in their original position.

Also in the park is a sad memorial to five airmen who lost their lives in a wartime training crash when a Wellington Bomber overshot Chipping Warden airfield.

As we caught the bus from Chipping Warden back to Banbury from our first day's walk, we passed the time devising our own long-distance path, to be called 'The four Chippings' — a triangular route from Chipping Warden to Chippings Norton, Campden, and perhaps Sodbury. We thought it was bound to be a hit.

And we had the next section to look forward to. Like real explorers, we would be finding the source of the River Cherwell, hidden in a cellar at the aptly-named Charwelton.

Stamford is a long way from Oxfordshire, and we walked the final sections over the course of two long weekends, rather than weaving through public transport networks back to Oxford.

The only jungles to tackle may have been concrete ones, but this 88-mile journey still felt like an achievement.