Walk in footsteps of Geoffrey Household

But the survivors of the Second World War also found their thoughts returning to the landscape of the country they were fighting to save.

After the Holocaust, no-one could rest safe in a rural idyll, and in Geoffrey Household’s thriller Watcher in the Shadows, the countryside of Midsommer Morton and St Mary Mead was the backdrop to a blood-soaked manhunt, then a fight to the death, involving events at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Household, who served in military intelligence during the war, is now virtually unknown except for his book Rogue Male, turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

Born in 1900, he graduated from Oxford in 1922 with a first-class English degree, and spent most of the rest of his life abroad. He retired to live the life of a country gentleman near Aylesbury and died in Banbury in 1988.

His novels have found new fans recently, partly because of the interest of Cambridge English don and nature writer Robert Macfarlane, who attempted (in vain) to track down the sunken lane in Devon where the hero of Rogue Male evaded his terrifying pursuers.

I set out to find Household’s fictional Cotswold village of Chipping Marton, with no more success.

Watcher in the Shadows starts in a London street, with a postman blown in half by a letter-bomb, then moves to the Oxfordshire-Buckinghamshire border, where an ambush (in a badger set) goes wrong and a dog is poisoned after eating the veal chops destined for our hero’s dinner.

There’s a chilling moment when the hero, Dennim, realizes that a missing spade has been taken to dig his grave, then he escapes to the cosy village of Chipping Marton, near Stow-on-the-Wold, but soon realises, after meeting some suspiciously tame red squirrels, that his enemy is still stalking him.

The fight to the death, which lasts for several dozen pages, takes place around a hill-top barn ‘south of the Stow to Tewkesbury road’ and about three to six miles from Stow. It is clear from the map that there is no village anywhere there, but there is a track, named Ryknild Street, a Roman road similar to the green lane staked out by Dennim.

Stow is probably at its best on a damp winter morning, with only two coachloads of visitors. On top of a 800ft hill, it should be a perfect start for a circular walk, and is the meeting point of several long-distance trails — the Gloucestershire Way, Heart of England Way, the Macmillan Way, the Monarch’s Way and the Donnington Way.

The latter, a 62-mile route taking in 15 pubs serving Donnington beer in typical Cotswolds inns — starts and finishes in Stow. However, there are no actual footpaths to or from the town, and all these routes involve a section of road walking.

So I followed the busy Fosse Way south (you can escape the traffic noise by walking in the cemetery, taking the second exit gate), crossing the road to a track with a good footpath sign next to Quarwood Cottage.

On the right is Nether Swell Manor Farm, where a grand house has been converted into a gated development, and pretty views soon open up over the Dickler valley.

Crossing the bridge at Hyde Mill, I walked north above the river to the village of Lower Swell, where old stone cottages nestle in a picture-postcard setting.

Could this be Chipping Marton? Probably not, since that village has a butcher, baker and candlestick maker. Lower Swell does have a lovely pub called the Golden Ball, so if you are trying to encourage a recalcitrant teenager on a walk, the silly names might be an inducement. The pub, which has rooms, welcomes walkers and serves Donnington Ales.

Taking a minor road west, I walked uphill to reach the crossroads of what I had identified as Household’s track. Called Condicote Lane, it is also Ryknild Street, the Roman road leading from Bourton-on-the-Water to Yorkshire.

This section seems perfect for a shoot-out. Unlike the hollow way of Rogue Male, it is a prominent feature in the landscape, stretching for miles in either direction.

The path undulates gently across two low hilltops, the highest points for miles. This means there is very little cover.

Household has a hunter’s eye for ‘cover’ and sums up every bit of countryside for its potential for deadly hide-and-seek. Gorse bushes, sandy areas where rabbits burrow, stone walls — all are assessed in terms of their usefulness for prey. Looking cautiously along Ryknild Street, I noticed a small belt of trees, like the one where Dennim tries to throw off his pursuer.

Macfarlane points out that Household uses description of landscape to mimic his characters’ emotions, so that hidden traumas are unveiled by digging into the Jurassic soil of Devon. If so, the hero of Watcher in the Shadows must have been seeking to expose his hidden pursuer to the open skies.

The lane is a ridge walk, with views in every direction. It runs in almost a straight line to the village of Condicote and its 2,000-year-old foundations make it solid and compact underfoot — a great benefit when most of the Thames Valley is under water. It is easy to imagine Roman legionnaires tramping along the solid road, although the neat drystone-walled landscape rolling away on either side would be unrecognisable to them.

I paused at the ‘trig point’ — a 20th-century concrete post used by Ordnance Survey mapmakers in the days before satnav, but now redundant.

For anyone who knows the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, it is a fine panorama, with familiar landmarks seen from the opposite direction.

Working from the back of the radio mast visible from the Oxfordshire Way as you descend to Kingham Station, I gradually found my bearings, seeing the ridge between the Evenlode and Windrush from a new point of view.

The lane ends at Condicote, which I dismissed as too small to be Chipping Marton. It was a delightful walk, but Household, like most writers, had evidently conflated several places into one. Admitting defeat, I joined the Gloucestershire Way, heading towards Stow along a pleasant, quiet lane.

It was then that I realised the worldwide fame of Donnington Ales, meeting an Australian visitor who was staying in the brewery’s former manager’s house, now rented to holidaymakers. It must surely be the most picturesque brewery in the country, housed in traditional Cotswold stone buildings set in the Dikler valley alongside a duck pond.

In fact, the black swans were imported from Australia by Claude, the grandson of founder Richard Arkell, who started brewing in 1865. The building itself dates back to 1291 when it was one of the mills of Broadway Manor.

Until the mid-1960s, the brewery grew its own barley and malted it on a special malting floor which is still in there. Today hops come from Herefordshire and Worcestershire and the water is from a spring beside the millpond. Only the sugar is imported.

The Bobby mill is still used in the brewing process and an internal water wheel drives belts for mashing and pumps for the copper.

The brewery is now run by Peter and James Arkell, who also run Arkell’s Brewery, which coincidentally supplies my local, the Rusty Bicycle in Magdalen Road, East Oxford, run by Chris Manners and Alex Arkell.

With the light fading, I pressed on to Upper Swell, where there were plenty of Arkell’s buried in the churchyard and the layout of Norman church and grand manor, complete with stabling, seemed very like Chipping Marton manor, where Dennim hoped to conceal himself.

While the manor itself looks light and airy, the church is almost hidden by yew trees and the graveyard could send a shiver down the spine of imaginative survivors of wartime atrocities.

Written a decade after VE Day, Watcher in the Shadows reminds us that we can never escape the world’s terrors, even in the most quintessentially English of settings.

The final stretch to Stow is along the busy B4068, but walkers have trampled a good path in the wide grass verge, and there were plenty of carefree families and dog-owners to dispel the gloom.

* Refreshments: . (01451) 833886 www.thegoldenballinn.com. Numerous tearooms in Stow-on-the-Wold, including Huffkins of Burford and Witney.

Map: OS Outdoor Leisure 45 Cotswolds. The Donnington Way by Colin Handy is published by Reardon, £4.99.