Magical mystery tour

It is also where Christie lived with her husband, Sir Max Mallowan, during the last years of her life.

My walk in her footsteps started in Wallingford, but — in the great tradition of crime writers — I left the denouement until the end and started walking in the opposite direction.

The X40 bus from Oxford stops outside the Corn Exchange, now the home of the Sinodun Players theatre group, of which Agatha Christie was president.

Like Wallingford, Miss Marple’s fictional village of St Mary Mead has a solicitor and hairdresser, but there the resemblance ends.

While St Mary had three or four butchers, dairies, bakers, a fish shop, chemist, grocery shops and even a basket-weavers, Wallingford town centre is struggling, with more than its share of charity shops and empty units.

St Mary Mead has a tiny railway station, which featured in the first Miss Marple, The Murder at the Vicarage.

Wallingford also has a railway — known as ‘the Bunk’, for reasons now forgotten. It is now run by volunteers, and a train was due in half-an-hour.

I walked to the station across the Kinecroft, a grassed area (Kine is an old name for cattle) surrounded by the earthen ramparts of the old Saxon and medieval town.

Wallingford has lots more history, including some wonderful castle ruins, but we had a train to catch. The branch line to Wallingford was open to passengers until 1959, and her books are full of railways (Murder on the Orient Express and Mystery of the Blue Train).

The first clue comes in The 4.50 from Paddington, published in 1957. Miss Marple compares the facts of the murder with the train timetable and the local geography, leading to the grounds of Rutherford Hall as the only possible location: it is shielded from the surrounding community, the railway abuts the grounds.

But everyone seems to agree that Rutherford Hall is modelled on the home of Christie’s sister, Abney Hall in Cheadle. And by the time she bought Winterbrook, Christie was already a celebrity so may have preferred to ‘motor’ from London.

However, the Bunk trains would be perfect for a Poirot story, with window blinds and corridors — plus 1950s leather suitcases on the luggage racks. Could there be body parts inside? And the branch line does run almost parallel to the mainline at Cholsey, so it is easy to imagine seeing a murder happen in another train, like Miss Marple’s friend Elspeth.

The Bunk ends at Cholsey and we directed some fellow Christie fans to her grave at St Mary’s Church, heading off, once more, in the opposite direction.

Christie bought Winterbrook because her second husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist and wanted to be near Oxford. She was already a keen amateur archaeologist, but the marriage took her to exotic locations which inspired stories such as Death on the Nile.

I was in search of the site of the Roman temple at Lowbury Hill, just a few miles from their home. More than 700 Roman coins were discovered in the early 20th century along with oyster shells brought by the Romans from Essex.

I followed a section of the Roman Way, a 174-mile walk created by Oxfordshire rambler Elaine Steane, past Lollington Farm, with its timber granary raised on cast-iron staddle stones, wrought-iron door hinges and 3D weather vane.

In summer, these hedgerows are alive with butterflies and we were followed by long-tailed tits, keeping an eye on their harvest of cherries, blackberries and crab apples, to be followed by hips and haws, elderberries and sloes.

Elaine Steane’s book The Roman Way describes how to date a hedge by counting the number of species. She believes this one must have been an ancient boundary as it includes elm, elder, black poplar, ash, hawthorn, spindleberry, guilder rose, hazel, wayfaring tree, dogwood, ivy, rose and blackthorn.

I was still counting species as we took a short cut, avoiding Aston Tirrold to go uphill across the busy A417 along the narrow Chalk Hill. Somehow I missed the right-of- way turn-off and twice got slightly lost, following downland farm tracks instead of the path.

Lowbury Hill is a perfect spot on a sunny day, with 360 degree views of the Marlborough Downs, the Cotswolds, Chilterns and the Thames Valley. At 186m, it is one of the highest spots on the Downs and can be bleak and windy in bad weather.

As Elaine Steane says, it is easy to imagine the Romans here, worshipping their gods, Mercury and Mars.

We don’t know if Christie ever came here, but she should have. When she died, her notes included “suggested tours” along the lanes over the Downs.

Her interest in religious temples, shown in The Idol House of Astarte, was strengthened by time spent in the Middle East surrounded by the spiritual history of the towns and cities they were excavating in Mallowan’s archaeological work.

Lowbury Hill itself is an area of open access, but it’s a there-and-back walk. I left the Roman Way and returned to Aston Tirrold via the magnificent chalk grassland of Aston Upthorpe Downs, designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) for its butterflies and wildflowers such as burnt-tip orchid and pasqueflower.

Fortunately, we had eaten our picnic up on the downs, since Aston Tirrold’s pub, the Sweet Olive, was closed. We pressed on along a flat causeway path towards Cholsey, which takes a sharp left to follow a drainage ditch. Cholsey is an island in the marsh — Ceol’s means dry ground and ‘eye’ is the Anglo Saxon for island.

St Mary’s Church tower was peeping above the fields as I crossed the mainline on a farm track bridge. At Manor Farm, with its brick-built half-hipped granaries and brick-and-flint wagon stores, we took the field footpath right to the churchyard.

Agatha Christie’s grave is against the wall, under her married name of Mallowan, next to a plaque dedicated on the author’s centenary. Dating from Norman times, the church was built before the railway and is some distance from the rest of the village.

From the church we followed a path alongside the railway to Winterbrook Lane, crossing the ring road and arriving almost opposite Winterbrook House.

The blue plaque, unveiled in 2010, says she lived here from 1934–76, but in the early years, according to her biographers, she spent six months in Devon and six months in London, which didn’t leave much time for Wallingford.

Campaigners against a plan for new housing in Winterbrook recently promoted the idea that this could be the model for Danemead. As always with Christie, the evidence is confusing.

We are told Miss Marple’s ‘cottage’ is in a “little nest of Queen Anne and Georgian houses” but it is sometimes referred to as an old-world cottage, containing an old room with broad black beams across the ceiling, a staircase of the old-fashioned kind which turned in a sharp corner in the middle.

Winterbrook House is certainly Queen Anne or Georgian, but seems a little too grand for Miss Marple. It is difficult to see from the road, and certainly not “admirably placed to see all that was going on”.

Furthermore, a map in Murder at the Vicarage shows Danesmead next door to the vicarage, while Winterbrook House’s parish church is more than a mile away, at Cholsey. Christie was in poor health when she finally settled at Winterbrook, and could not take a Miss Marple role at the centre of community life, recipient of every bit of gossip.

She “refused to open fetes and sign books”, according to biographer Janet Morgan. The Sinodun Players were the only group she agreed to be patron of, despite hundreds of similar requests.

It is a tribute to her skill and professionalism that today, more than 30 years after her death, her novels continue to sell about 600,000 copies a year.