Walk in the footsteps of Enduring Love

But I was more interested in Joe, the narrator of Enduring Love, who takes his partner Clarissa on a hike in the Chilterns.

My friend Kate Helsby offered to pause her re-reading of Enduring Love and give us a lift to the parking spot near Christmas Common where Clarissa and Joe’s walk begins.

In the book, the couple set off arm in arm through the beech wood, happy to be reunited after Clarissa’s six-week trip abroad. As they stop for a kiss, Joe spots a helium balloon through the leaves, “drifting dreamily across the wooded valley to our west”.

Readers already know about the hot-air balloon. It is there at the dramatic start of McEwan’s novel, suspended above the Chiltern escarpment, carrying a small child. The boy’s father is about to be swept away, clutching a rope, having failed to tether the balloon in the strong wind. Will he fall to his death?

Then we recap on the day’s events. Before the walk begins, Joe has shopped for the ingredients of a picnic at Carluccio’s in Covent Garden and collected Clarissa from Heathrow.

The directions for the walk are clear, as you would expect from a keen hiker like McEwan — he is clearly following the route of the Oxfordshire Way.

“We went through College Wood towards Pishill. This was surely the finest landscape within an hour of central London. I loved the pitch and roll of the fields and their scatterings of chalk and flint, and the paths that dipped across them to sink into the darkness of die beech stands, certain neglected, badly drained valleys where thick iridescent mosses covered the rotting tree trunks and where you occasionally glimpsed a muntjac blundering through the undergrowth.”

Like McEwan’s characters, we talked about how green the trees were, and how many different shades there are, even before the first frost brings out the autumn colours.

This is classic Chilterns, with the folds of the hills hiding dry valleys sculpted by melting glaciers about 450,000 years ago. We were walking on the gently tilting side of the chalk layer, heading for the edge where it ends in a dramatic drop to the Thames Valley.

The balloon accident happens on “one of those broad fingers of land that project westwards from the Chilterns into the rich farmland below”. I had always imagined the drama happening on the nature reserves next to the steep chalk cutting of the M40. But our walk was taking us in the opposite direction.

Heading, as instructed by the author, towards Maidensgrove, we paused to show our friends Kate and Stuart the stained glass window in Pishill Church by the artist John Piper, who lived nearby in Fawley Bottom.

We had only walked a few kilometres, all downhill, but we made use of the tea and coffee-making facilities (and homemade flapjacks) offered in the church porch, in return for a small donation. There are two versions of the name’s history. One is that the titterers are correct: horses and wagons stopped at the Crown Inn, and while the ostlers had an ale the horses would relieve themselves. I prefer the Old English derivation — hill on which peas grow — suggesting that in Anglo-Saxon times the soil was unsuitable for other crops.

Our heroes “stopped to watch the buzzard” approaching Maidensgrove, but they must have been fast walkers. Assuming Carluccio opened at 9am and Joe parked at Heathrow, they couldn’t have got to Christmas Common much before noon, but by early afternoon they were on the Ridgeway Path. We were still miles away.

At Maidensgrove we faced a dilemma. McEwan’s walk follows “the woods that cover the valleys around the nature reserve”.

The Warburg nature reserve is lovely, but would have involved nearly 100m of descent and ascent.

We stayed up on the ridge, bravely resisting the temptations of the Five Horseshoes, a favourite walkers’ pub, whose garden boasts one of the finest views in the Chilterns.

We followed the road to the picturesque hamlet of Russell’s Water, said to have taken its name from the brick-works once owned by the Russell family. The pool of the works is now a duckpond, complete with a modest version of the duck house which featured in the MPs’ expenses scandal.

At Cookley Green we followed the Chiltern Way down to another remote, green valley. There was no time to admire the Norman church at Swyncombe, with its apse decorated with ancient paintings, nor the views towards the Thames at Wallingford. We vowed to return in the New Year for the church’s famous snowdrop display.

But now we wanted lunch, so it was up again along the Ridgeway, walking north towards the balloon accident picnic spot.

McEwan clearly loves the Chilterns. He bought a second home here after moving from Oxford to London, and in Enduring Love his directions are exact. Like Joe and Clarissa, we would “picnic right out on the end where the view was best”.

However, we were so hungry that we sat down as soon as the view opened out. It was a lovely spot, but we certainly could not see the Cotswolds and the Brecon Beacons, as McEwan’s characters apparently could.

The wind was so strong that they retreated to shelter under some turkey oaks.

We peered at a photograph of a leaf on a smartphone, but there were none to be seen in real life.

As we munched our cheddar sandwiches (Joe and Clarissa had mozzarella from an earthenware vat with a wooden claw, black olives, mixed salad, focaccia and a bottle of 1987 Daumas Gassac) we discussed where the various characters had come from to try to rescue the child in the runaway balloon.

Two of them were workers on the Stonor estate, perhaps from a farm we could see below us.

My friends were not convinced, so we walked on towards Swyncombe Down, and a new view opened up. There were the Cotswolds, and what was that blue mist? Could it be the Brecons, or was the whole thing just fiction? There were certainly no oaks on the northern side. Perhaps the master of suspense had made the whole thing up.

One thing was clear. Ian McEwan may be a prodigious writer, but he is also a phenomenal walker. Our quickest way back to Christmas Common was via the Ridgeway and up the back of Watlington Hill. It was still nearly six by the time we got back to the car.

* For a seven-mile circular walk from Watlington to Swyncombe, see www.nationaltrail.co.uk Refreshments: Crown Inn, Pishill, 01491 638364. Five Horseshoes, Maidensgrove, 01491 641282.

*