Walk in the footsteps of Edward Thomas

Generations of schoolchildren have committed Edward Thomas’s lines to memory, but a huge old station sign in a bus shelter at the village crossroads, complete with Great Western Railway bench, provides a poignant reminder to any visitor who might have forgotten one of the nation’s favourite poems.

On June 24, 2014, exactly 100 years after Thomas’s journey, a train will stop there again for a ceremonial reading organised by the Cotswold Line Promotion Group, run by passengers who have helped to preserve and revive a route which crosses some of the most beautiful countryside in England.

Adlestrop — the name itself is a gift to poetry — had its own station until the 1966 Beeching closures but the line itself was saved (perhaps because it was used by some of British Rail’s top executives) and is now packed with commuters at peak times. At other times it is often, understandably, full of walkers and cyclists.

We started our walk from Kingham, an Oxfordshire commuter village where the train still stops fairly frequently. Plenty of people left and plenty came, with two buses waiting to ferry passengers to Chipping Norton and nearby villages.

We walked along the road towards Gloucestershire, crossing the border at a bridge over the Evenlode in the picture postcard village of Bledington.

Our path turned right along the river past some attractively scruffy countryside and a sewage works. I find any signs of life are welcome in an area where house prices have led to an exodus of locals and an in-pouring of second home owners and urban commuters.

Edward Thomas’s train was on its way to Dymock, perhaps representing an early example of this trend.

Thomas’s fellow poets Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were among the poets colonising the tiny Gloucestershire village just south of the Cotswold Line’s Ledbury station. Frost had moved partly because the rent was a fraction of what he had been paying in Beaconsfield and his relationship with Thomas deepened as they took long country walks together.

When Thomas’s train stopped at Adlestrop, the Cotswold villages were true rural backwaters. Bledington only received a mains water supply in 1937, and Adlestrop made do with one tap in the street until the 1950s.

The exodus by poverty-stricken farmworkers would accelerate during and after the First World War, leaving tumbledown cottages and ruins.

The fields around Bledington show signs of ridge and furrow, having been ploughed by villagers for centuries before being turned into pasture for sheep-farming, which needed fewer workers.

The village has a popular pub, the King’s Head, surrounded by a perfect village green, but we pressed on past Bledington Ground Farm, an 18th-century building created by the enclosure of common land at Bledington Heath, which still remains on the map as a small private woodland.

We joined the Cotswold Diamond Way, a route we had completed a few years earlier. Created by the Ramblers' North Cotswold Group to celebrate its 60th jubilee in 1995, it follows relatively quiet paths through villages, with the diamond-shaped route stretching from Northleach in the south to near Chipping Campden in the north, Guiting Power in the west to near Bourton-on-the-Water in the east.

Our path soon joined a lane, winding round to Oddington ‘old church’, home to unique medieval wall paintings which were nearly lost through neglect.

The stained glass windows had been destroyed during the English Civil War, and by the beginning of the 20th century the church was derelict, a new one having been built on higher, drier ground.

The ivy-covered ruins were supposed to have been used by foxes, with a vixen raising her cubs in the richly carved Jacobean pulpit. Had Edward Thomas left his train to visit, the painting would have been obscured by dust and limewash.

Restoration of the church had started in 1912 but the doom painting was not restored until the 1930s. We left the grisly scenes of hell — a body suspended from a gibbet, people being boiled in a cauldron — and lingered in the 14th-century porch, looking at curious markings on the stone bench, where yeomen once sharpened their arrows.

The Fox (was it named after the vixen in the pulpit, or the fox pictured sermonising in the doom painting? ) looked more like a restaurant than a pub, and — more important — looked closed, so we pressed on to Adlestrop, hoping for a snack at the Post Office.

The Diamond Way uses a short stretch of main road here, crossing the Cotswold Line on a road bridge with a good view of the now overgrown site of Adlestrop’s former station.

It is all private land now and the old goods yard seems to be a dump for buses and other vehicles. Today’s railway stations need huge car parks, but in Thomas’s day people would have walked, and there are two direct footpaths to the village.

We followed one beside a fishing lake, with misty views towards what is now Adlestrop House, but was once a rectory inhabited by relatives of Jane Austen, who is said to have used it as the setting for Thornton Lacey in Mansfield Park.

The birds were still singing their dawn chorus as we approached along a willow-lined stream. The modern village hall strikes a jarring note, but a busy noticeboard is evidence that the village is still occupied.

No one came and no one left as we photographed the famous bus shelter (the number V4 bus, one journey on Wednesdays only) but a noisy blackbird followed us along the thatched cottages of Main Street towards the Post Office, which was shut. Luckily we had brought sandwiches and settled on a bench outside the church overlooking Adlestrop House, without a living soul to disturb us.

We continued on the Diamond Way to Daylesford House, owned by Lord and Lady Bamford.

He is the heir to the JCB digger empire, but her business is almost more famous.

She owns the organic farm shop frequented by the Chipping Norton set, where on an earlier visit I had encountered Rebecca Brookes and husband Charlie, having a quiet break from their Old Bailey trial.

Intriguingly, Daylesford House was designed for Warren Hastings, colonial ruler of India, and Adlestrop resident Victoria Huxley, author of Jane Austen’s Adlestrop, believes it is likely the author met the Governor General. Certainly, the characters in Mansfield Park are aware that their wealth derives from the colonies, and one character has disturbing dreams about West Indian slave plantations.

The novel also mentions Humphrey Repton, creator of Adlestrop Park, reflecting Austen’s disapproving attitude to the 18th-century fashion for landscape design.

Daylesford House is on a wooded slope a mile up the hill from the farm shop, and we enjoyed the landscaped park from the public footpath, which winds around the estate on tarmac estate roads. We made our way past the cars of beaters waiting to be paid for a pheasant shoot and reflected on how Lady B’s enterprise must have boosted the rural economy.

Organic production is evidently good for wildlife, since the birds were reaching a crescendo, unbothered by the cars, nor by the fact that it was now nine hours since dawn. We navigated our way across a B-road and through another car park full of rather smarter cars to reach the farm shop.

It is difficult to emerge without spending £10 a head, even for tea and cake, but Daylesford Farm does offer takeaway drinks and a tasteful picnic area.

One great thing about the farm shop is the circular walks, which allowed us to take a short cut joining the track to Kingham without a dangerous walk along the B-road. This track is part of the Thames To The Wye walk, created by the Cotswold Promotion Group, using footpaths to follow the railway line from Oxford to Hereford via Ledbury, the Dymock poets’ station.

We followed a line of Daylesford polytunnels past a field of free-range hens to Kingham, passing another of Lady B’s ventures, the Wild Rabbit restaurant, but after a look at the prices decided we would save it for a major celebration.

We hurried on to catch the 14.56 to Oxford. Outside Hanborough, the train stopped ‘unwontedly’. But instead of blackbird song, all we heard was a tannoy announcing a trespasser on the line.

* The centenary train will stop for 15 minutes at Adlestrop while the poem is read. No one will be allowed to alight. Return tickets, £20, from Brian Clayton, New Haven, Greenway Road, Blockley, GL56 9BQ, using the application form from clpg.org.uk and enclosing SAE.

* The gardens of Daylesford House are open on May 14 (ngs.org.uk). Adlestrop gardens are open on June 15.

* Refreshments: Adlestrop Post Office welcomes groups, tel 01608 659475. For opening times, see adlestrop.org.uk. Daylesford Farm Shop, open every day, daylesford.com.

* A shorter version of this walk (for motorists) appears on the AA website theaa.com, with parking at Adlestrop Village Hall.