Distance: just over 6 miles

Difficulty of the Terrain: medium

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

A walk across the industrial and post industrial landscape of the Black Country between the characterful towns of Oldbury and Netherton via Turner’s Hill in the Rowley Hills, the highest point in West Midlands county.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Getting back via Netherton High Street

Getting Back via the Netherton Tunnel

Spring Heeled Jack’s Old Stomping Ground?

At the heart of the Black Country stands the Rowley Hills. Formed from limestone, super heated, toughened and blackened by prehistoric volcanoes, they form part of the region’s rich geology, the material basis for its industrial prowess.

In comparison to rocky escarpments elsewhere in the West Midlands region such as the Clees, Malverns, or even the Abberley Hills they are relatively low lying. Turner’s Hill at the southern end of the range stands at 271 metres above sea level (according to Ordnance Survey), with the others coming in at around the 270-260 metre mark.

However, they stand out amidst the generally gently hilly landscape of West Midlands county, and Turner’s Hill is the county’s highest point. Not especially tall for a county top, even by midlands standards, but still a prominent local landmark. Something aided by the presence of two tall radio masts near the brow of the hill.

The Rowley Hills are important in other ways as well. The top of the ridge forms part of the boundary between the River Severn and the River Trent watersheds. These are the midlands’ two great rivers, and the boundary between them arguably represents the historical and cultural divide between the urbanised industrial, northern, central and eastern part of the region drained by the Trent, and the more lightly populated agricultural lands of the far western and southern midlands.

Fittingly, the local administrative history of the area is also pretty jumbled. Today the Hills almost entirely fall within the Metropolitan Borough of Sandwell, but the western slopes are closer in many ways to Dudley than they are to any of Sandwell’s town centres. Historically this part of the Black Country was parcelled between Worcestershire and Staffordshire, with the exception of Halesowen and Oldbury, which bizarrely were part of Shropshire. In the 19th Century a modicum of order was brought to the area’s local administration with clear, albeit jagged divisions being created between Staffordshire and Worcestershire and Oldbury and Halesowen being tidied into Worcestershire.

However, in true Black Country fashion something of the locally idiosyncratic, distinctive, perhaps even of the frontier… Remains. Standing either side of the Rowley Hills Oldbury and Netherton, in Sandwell and Dudley respectively, are amongst two of the most distinctive places in a region that is famous for them.

Oldbury serves as Sandwell’s political and administrative capital. Its town centre is split between a fairly well preserved historic core, and a now just about old enough to be interesting, 1980s redevelopment which plonked a hulking civic centre for the Metropolitan Borough of Sandwell, architecturally caught between redbrick modernism and post-modernity, down on a large chunk of it. An equally capacious redbrick Sainsbury’s fringed by a vast car-park forms part of the same redevelopment scheme. Apparently when new the supermarket represented an early importation of the hypermarket concept into the UK.

Netherton is famously where the anchors for the Titanic were forged, though it was into the 20th Century, like nearby Dudley and Halesowen, predominantly a colliery town. Where Tipton on the eastern side of the Rowley Hills had the Slasher (a mid-19th Century champion bare knuckle fighter), so a generation later Netherton to the west had Joe Darby, a world champion spring jumper. Myth has it that he used to practice at night by leaping across local canals wearing a miner’s lamp hat for illumination, and that this used to terrify passersby who thought that they had encountered Spring Heeled Jack.

A key part of the village’s more recent mythology is the Old Swan pub (aka Ma Pardoe’s). For more than half the 20th Century (1931-1984) the pub was managed by Ma Pardoe, a redoubtable figure who kept things much as they always had been, including brewing beer on the premises. In the 1970s when the post-war craze for Victoriana and arcane relics of the vanishing industrial age had built up a full head of steam members of the recently formed traditional beer and pub advocacy group CAMRA was immensely taken with Ma Pardoe’s old school establishment. She was either tolerant or canny enough to go along with this, and upon her death in 1984 the organisation bought the pub to preserve it. This did not work out, however, the pub remains open, still brewing its own beer and being amongst the most traditional of Black Country pubs to this day.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.

Exiting Sandwell and Dudley Station from the northbound platform which is served by trains to Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, mid-Wales and the North West, turn right.

Then upon meeting the main road turn left and begin walking in the direction of Oldbury town centre.

Already right on the horizon you can glimpse Turner’s Hill with its distinctive radio masts. It is the tallest of the Rowley Hills, the highest peak in West Midlands county, and you will be climbing it as part of the walk.

After several minutes walking along the road towards the heart of Oldbury you come to a t-junction.

Here take the left hand fork.

After a short distance you reach Oldbury town centre.

Keep walking straight ahead, passing a row of mostly Victorian buildings on your left and the sprawling mid-1980s vintage offices of Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council on your right.

Sandwell chose central Oldbury as the home for its then relatively new council in the 1980s in large part because it was being regenerated at the time. But Oldbury is also pretty close to being the geographical centre of the Borough, whilst also being distinct from nearby West Bromwich, which as by far the biggest town in the district would probably have been perceived as a hostile takeover by the council area’s smaller constituent settlements.

Keep on walking past the early 1980s former SavaCentre, an early importation of the hypermarket concept into the UK, and the funky blue plastic, late New Labour vintage Jack Judge House which houses the town’s library.

Soon you are out amongst 1970s era single storey council housing and a modern retail park home to a McDonald’s and Sainsbury’s branded filling station.

Here you take a brief left turn and use a set of traffic lights to cross the dual carriageway ringing the town centre.

On the other side head to the right for a short distance.

Then reaching a second dual carriageway turn left once more, approaching a set of traffic lights.

Use these traffic lights to cross the road.

Once on the far side of the dual carriageway turn left again and keep walking past more retail sheds and warehouses.

Presently on your right next to a Kwik Fit garage there is a road stemming off from the dual carriageway.

Turn right and begin walking along the road.

This leads through an industrial estate with Turner’s Hill clearly visible ahead of you in the distance.

Walk along the road for a fair distance. Ahead of you beyond a tall pylon a lone tower block is visible. This is one of the area’s few surviving tower blocks from when it was comprehensively redeveloped in the 1960s. To this day Sandwell retains an unusually large number of properties in council ownership. The block stands near the Lion Farm Estate, documented with great power and emotional warmth by the photographer Rob Clayton as part of two projects, first in the early 1990s, and again in the late 2010s.

Presently you reach the edge of the Wolverhampton Road which slices through the central part of the Black Country.

Take a slight right turn to head up onto the side of the road via a flight of concrete steps.

At the top turn left a short way to reach some traffic lights.

On the far side turn right again and walk in the direction of a filling station, and a distant roadside branch of Premier Inn and a KFC drive thru.

Just past the filling station and before you reach the Premier Inn and KFC, there is a green footpath sign pointing up onto what looks like wasteland.

The track has the feel of crossing a former industrial site, or the home of a now extinct extractive industry. Historically weirdly fragmented between Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and more bizarrely until the 19th Century Shropshire, western West Midland county’s unusual jurisdictional history benefited the growth of extractive industry and metal working. Something that was aided and abetted by the richness of the Black Country’s geology and abundance of resources like readily accessible coal. The Rowley Hills are formed from an unusual, blackened stone called Rowley Rag. Quarried extensively as a road building material in the 19th and 20th Centuries it consists of limestone, melted and reformed by prehistoric volcanoes.

Presently the path levels out, with the tower block visible off to the left and Turner’s Hill visible more or less straight ahead.

At this point follow the path to the left as it straightens out.

After some distance walking along a kind of embankment surrounded by scrubby trees turn right and head down a short slope.

On the other side of the dip there is a track off to the right heading uphill.

Turn right and follow it. Presently you come to a steep section where there are wheel ruts as if made by quad bikes, leading uphill.

Walk uphill along a path lined with scrub until you enter a patch ringed with bushes.

Here off to your right there is a footpath running uphill.

Head off to the right following this path uphill through bushes and thick scrubby woodland for some distance.

Presently it comes out into more cratered grassland.

Keep following the path off slightly to the left.

Soon the tops of houses on the edge of the Grace Mary estate come into view.

Approach these houses.

Just before you reach their back garden fences there is a path leading off to the right.

Follow it a short distance.

Then turn left walking on a downwards sloping path past some trees towards a distant road.

When you come to a break in the trees it is worth looking to your left to see how high you have climbed. To your north and east you can see right across Oldbury, Wednesbury and West Bromwich, right across Walsall and Burntwood as far as Cannock Chase and other distant hills in Staffordshire.

Soon you reach a metal gate, off to the left slightly which leads onto a road running further uphill across the Grace Mary estate.

Once on the road turn left and begin walking uphill along the road.

Keep walking uphill for some distance. I had not realised that there was such dense settlement almost at the top of Turner’s Hill and seemingly right along the Rowley Hills.

After walking for several minutes you approach a cluster of low rise flats constructed in the mid-20th Century.

Look out on the left for a road heading off just past a small cluster of shops and a bus stop.

When you reach it turn left and walk along it.

Soon this road joins another one. Turn left here.

After a very short distance you come out on a road running near the crest of the ridge and along the edge of the housing estate.

Off to the right there is a boarded up disused pub. Judging by the remaining signage it had the rural sounding name of the Wheatsheaf.

Head right towards the boarded up pub.

Immediately before reaching it on the far side of the road there is a lane running off to the right.

Cross over the road and head down this lane.

Passing a metal device intended to stop cars getting through you pass the club house for Dudley Golf Course.

Apparently much of the current playing green was a landfill site in the 1980s and 1990s, and prior to that a quarry for Rowley Rag.

You pass a small cluster of seemingly brand new houses on your right.

A little further on having passed the houses you walk along a paved track between two hedgerows.

Here you near the radio masts off to your left which mark what is approximately the hill’s summit.

Presently there is an opening off to the right.

Head down here a short way and pass through a metal device put in place to stop motorbikes and step onto Dudley Golf Course.

Taking care to avoid anyone teeing off, head left down the path you find yourself on.

This leads steadily downhill across the course.

After some way it veers off to the right.

Then you take the next left to continue your progress downhill.

Presently you reach the end of the path.

Here, mindful that you are on a golf course, take care to hug close to the line of bushes next to the edge of the playing green.

It is worth taking in the view from this vantage point high up Turner’s Hill as well. From where you stand you can see right across the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley out into northern Worcestershire, south west Staffordshire and tall hills in southern Shropshire beyond.

When you reach the bottom of the golf course, to your left there is a path concealed in some bushes.

Head down this path as it weaves through thick woodland and undergrowth.

After some distance it comes out near a stile with houses visible in the distance beyond.

Cross over the stile and look for a path in the grass leading off to the right, close to a hedgerow and fence line.

Follow this path for a short distance.

Then head left and it begins to head downhill in a diagonal direction.

Follow the path as it slopes down across the hillside.

Presently it leads you down near the backs of some garages and a couple of disused sheds which look like they once housed livestock.

Here walk to the left along the backs of the garages.

Ahead of you across a small patch of wasteland there stands a working men’s club.

Walk towards the side of the working men’s club and then turn right walking down their driveway to the road beyond.

Once on the road turn right.

Then more or less immediately cross the road turning left, heading down a slope beside a surviving row of Victorian terraces.

This leads to a footpath running off to the right.

Soon the footpath joins a road.

When you join the road keep on walking downhill across the estate of 1970s vintage houses.

Presently, opposite an small estate of fairly new redbrick houses another road is reached.

Here turn left and begin walking downhill, past an interesting small estate of three storey modernist houses.

At the bottom you reach the Dudley No.2 Canal (which in the form of a walk from Halesowen to Tipton, via Dudley town centre has previously been featured on Walk Midlands). At one time it extended as far as Selly Oak in south Birmingham along the infamous Lapal section.

To reach the canal towpath you have to cross over the single lane road bridge in front of you. It is potentially quite dangerous, as there is nothing to indicate to car drivers whether another vehicle is already trying to cross on the other side. The accepted solution to this appears to be for drivers to proceed at speed repeatedly, sounding their horn, so as to warn other road users they are coming.

On the other side of the bridge, there is a pathway off to the right leading down onto the towpath.

You are now in Sandwell Council’s Warrens Hall Nature Reserve. It sits on the edge of the large village of Netherton in the Borough of Dudley, which is your destination. 

Today there is a wild beauty to the Nature Reserve. However, if you look closely at the tops of the mounds where on sunny days picnickers sit, children sit and sunbathers gather black dirt is visible. This is the spoil from the enormous Windmill End Colliery which worked the site up until 1928. That nearly 100 years later its waste is still visible in the landscape years of mining created, is testimony to the sheer volume of work that went into driving its tunnels 160 metres underground.

In front of the Nature Reserve as you continue along the towpath the remains of wharfs which once enabled boats to dock near the colliery and other industries such as sawmills, foundries and brickworks which once clustered along the banks of the canal in this area.

Today in the tranquil environment of the Nature Reserve with Black Country residents of all ages out relaxing and enjoying themselves by the waterside the area’s heavy industrial past seems very far away. But the entire landscape, that the people enjoy (not least the canal) and the settlements where they live their everyday lives, would not exist without the shadow of this carbon intensive history.

Presently the canal reaches a junction. Here the old meandering line of the Dudley Canal heads off towards the centre of Netherton and a long way round to the 2.9 kilometre long tunnel that takes it beneath Dudley to Tipton and the Birmingham Canal Navigation.

At this point there are two options for continuing the walk. Having reached the edge of Netherton you can head into the village’s centre, have a look around, visit the famous Ma Pardoe’s Old Swan pub, and then catch one of the frequent buses to Dudley or Merry Hill Shopping Centre, for an onwards connection home. Or alternatively, having visited Netherton or not, you can head back to the Stour Valley Railway Line with its trains between Wolverhampton and Birmingham, via the Netherton Tunnel.

This grand piece of mid-Victorian engineering is nearly two miles long and runs right beneath the Rowley Hills. It was cut in the 1850s and was the last tunnel of any substance dug on the UK canal network. Opened in 1858 it provides a short cut underneath the Rowley Hills and the Sandwell village of Tividale to the canal basin at Dudley Port and the Birmingham Canal Navigations. In contrast to the older tunnels cut in the 1790s by the Dudley Canal Company, this tunnel is big. So big that two narrowboats can pass each other going different directions inside and there is space left over for a towpath on either side.

Getting Back

Via Netherton High Street

You reach the junction where the canal splits into the original section from the 1790s which meanders around through Netherton, and then passes beneath Dudley to Tipton through the caverns, and the more direct 1850s link to the Birmingham Canal Navigations which runs through Netherton Tunnel beneath the Rowley Hills.

Here turn left and begin walking along the towpath into the centre of Netherton.

You pass through the Bumble Hole Nature Reserve which is managed by Dudley Council.

Having walked through the nature reserve you arrive at a road bridge.

On the other side of the bridge you cross a concrete paved area lined with small workshops. Canal boats moor up here.

There are good views here back towards Turner’s Hill.

Past this section, beyond another road bridge, the towpath becomes more conventional in appearance again.

Keep walking along the towpath for several minutes, passing by some fairly recently constructed flats, and an incredibly verdant looking canal boat mooring.

Presently after a sharp bend a third road bridge appears.

Approaching it there is a long sloping concrete ramp leading off the towpath. Head up this ramp.

At the top of the ramp you are on the road which runs steadily uphill into the centre of Netherton.

Turn right and begin walking up it.

Via the Netherton Tunnel

You reach the junction where the canal splits into the original section from the 1790s which meanders around through Netherton, and then passes beneath Dudley to Tipton through the caverns, and the more direct 1850s link to the Birmingham Canal Navigations which runs through Netherton Tunnel beneath the Rowley Hills.

Here on the right there is a bridge across the canal.

Use the ramp to the left to get up onto the bridge and cross the canal.

Walk straight ahead along the path in front of you.

Here in front of you, just off to the right you see the locally iconic remains of Cobb’s Engine House. Constructed in the 1830s for nearly 100 years it pumped hundreds of thousands of litres of water each day out of the Windmill End Colliery, and into the canal, keeping both in business.

Before you reach this industrial relic, on your left there is a fairly steep flight of steps down to the canal.

At the bottom of the steps turn right.

Here you see the Netherton Tunnel, all three kilometres of it looming ahead of you. Fascinatingly, the ubiquitous and utterly bonkers Monarch’s Way utilises the tunnel as part of its 650 odd mile long route.

See you on the other side!

Three bumply kilometres later, stepping out blinking into the light, you are near Dudley Port Railway Station on the Birmingham to Wolverhampton Railway Line.

Walk a short way down the towpath towards a bridge. This is an aqueduct carrying another canal over the top of you.

On the far side of the bridge there are some steps cut into the bank on your right.

Head up these steps.

At the top turn right and walk across the aqueduct.

On the far side turn right again and head down a fairly steep ramp to the towpath at the bottom.

Follow the towpath for several hundred metres, past some interesting industrial buildings, to the Birmingham Canal Network mainline canal.

Upon reaching the mainline canal turn left and walk for several hundred metres more.

You will see the railway line embankment and the railway power supply pylons on your right.

Presently on your left, just before an aqueduct across a road; you come to some steps.

Head left down these steps.

At the bottom you are on a major dual carriageway.

Turn right at the bottom of the steps and pass beneath the aqueduct, and the railway bridge just beyond it.

Just after the railway bridge on the left hand side of the road is the access point for Dudley Port Railway Station.

Dudley Port is served by fairly frequent trains in the direction of both Birmingham and Wolverhampton.