Distance: 7 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

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

Countryside walk across western Warwickshire from Henley-in-Arden Railway Station to Coughton Court, ancient seat of the Throckmorton family, and famously connected to 1605’s Gunpower Plot and other Early Modern era intrigues.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Gunpower, Treason and Plot

In essence Coughton Court is a fairly small, not especially distinctive, country house midway between the small western Warwickshire towns of Studley and Alcester, just south of Redditch.

Not unlike Boscobel House, due north west of the West Midlands conurbation, Coughton Court’s importance lies in the British, or at least English national mythos.

This is because Coughton Court was a key location in perhaps the most famous (thwarted) plot in national history. That plot being 1605’s Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I, his ministers, the overwhelming majority of the aristocracy and the diverse array of worthies and tribunes for various communities and special interests that comprised the House of Commons, by blowing up the Palace of Westminster during the state opening of parliament.

The Coughton Estate has been in the hands of the Throckmorton family since the early 15th Century. During the mid-16th Century when much of the English and Welsh aristocracy and gentry, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, converted to Protestantism the Throckmortons, like many of their peers in the West Midlands counties of Staffordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire remained definitely Roman Catholic.

During the Early Modern era these counties were heavily wooded, fairly sparsely populated, economically quite marginal, backwaters. People from all stratums of society were more likely here, as was the case in other isolated westerly counties such as Lancashire, to persist in allegiance to their ancestral catholicism.

This alongside other economic and political grievances led sections of the gentry and minor nobility in Warwickshire and the neighbouring counties towards dreams of overthrowing the Protestant monarchy and established order in favour of reintroducing catholicism.

One of these was Robert Catesby, a big landowner with holdings across southern Warwickshire and western Northamptonshire. He hailed from Lapworth, A small place then and now, situated not far from Baddesley Clinton, a little moated manor house in mid-Warwickshire home to one of the largest arrays of priest holes in the English Midlands. He was related to the Throckmorton family through ties of marriage. He was also a staunch and increasingly stringent Catholic, from a family that had long resisted the English state’s attempts to enforce religious uniformity.

He had paid the price for this. His involvement in the Earl of Essex’s rebellion in 1601 had seen him injured, imprisoned, and fined the equivalent of around eight million pounds in 2020s money. Wealthy though he was, Catesby struggled to pay this debt, further embittering him and hardening his resolve to overthrow Britain’s Protestant establishment in favour of a Roman Catholic new order.

Catesby’s alienation of malcontentment can only have been further fueled when he became one of the prominent dissenters detained without trial in a form of preventive custody following the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. The queen had reigned for nearly half a century, meaning that only the oldest people could remember life under a monarch before her, with hardly anybody remembering the last time that England had had an adult king (Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII who had died in 1547). This state of affairs combined with unsettling social and economic changes and challenges made those in power, and those who wished to challenge them, jittery alike.

It was in this climate after his imprisonment had ended, that Catesby began to plot. He eventually drew in around a dozen other discontented Catholics, many of them members of the gentry and land owning class who had fallen on straightened times like himself. In several instances they were related to him by ties of blood and kinship. Whilst others like the soldier Guy Fawkes who came from far humbler backgrounds but who – like a malcontented talented but unpreferred commoner in a baroque play – had come to prominence through their skill, guile, commitment to the cause and intelligence.

Together over the course of more than a year in 1604 and 1605 they developed Catesby’s fabulous idea of blowing up the Palace of Westminster whilst Parliament was in session and the government, led by King James was in attendance. Ahead of the state opening of parliament they had succeeded in renting a cellar, secreting the gunpowder and placing Guy Fawkes the explosives expert ready to light the fuse that would ignite the power. It was then, just before parliament was due to sit on the 5th November 1605 that the palace guards discovered the power and Guy Fawkes with his blasting kit in the cellar beneath the main hall.

James I had reason to be unusually attuned to the threat of being blown up. His father Henry Darnley had fallen victim to a bomb attack the night he was murdered, during the tumultuous decade that followed the Scottish reformation. So it is perhaps not surprising that with rumours circulating about the plot in some quarters that the palace guard’s had been dispatched to make a thorough sweep of the cellars. A ritual which in truly farcical form continues to be performed ahead of the state opening of Parliament – now in a totally different building – to this day.

With the plot blown, Catesby and co’s hopes of starting an insurrection in the south west Midlands were dashed. The plotters high tailed to Warwickshire, where they raided Warwick Castle for armaments. A message was dispatched to priests in hiding at Coughton Court seeking advice and support. The priests, seeing that the plot had evidently failed to catch alight, saw which way the wind was blowing and beseeched Catesby and his followers to desist from their “wicked actions”.

Plotting was not new to the building. Back in 1583 it had been the hub for the Throckmorton Plot, an unsuccessful attempt upon the life of Elizabeth I. Nor was it the end of the building being caught up in the maelstrom of the Early Modern political storm. More than a generation after the Gunpowder Plot in 1651 during the future Charles II’s hasty and spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to retake the throne by force via a march on London via Worcestershire (which ended in him hiding in the Boscobel oak tree), Parliamentary soldiers burnt down a chunk of the house, which is why to this day it’s quad only has three sides.

Fleeing Warwickshire, having evidently failed to secure the support of mainstream English Catholic opinion, the surviving plotters made a final stand at Holbeach House in the Worcestershire, Staffordshire borderlands. Today the building is an old people’s home in Kingswinford just north west of Dudley, in West Midlands county. In 1605 it was a fortified manor house.

Here the plotters prepared for their final stand against the local militia by attempting to dry the gunpowder they had stolen from Warwick Castle above the kitchen fire. The power had got wet during their autumnal flight along what today is the M42/M5 corridor. In one of the more ironic parts of the tale this action caused the power to ignite triggering an explosion. Many of the plotters preparing to hold off the large number of law enforcement agents bearing down upon them were injured, some critically. It was to prove the only gunpowder explosion in the story of the plot.

On the morning of 8th November the Sheriff of Worcestershire and a party of 200 men surrounded Holbeach House. The injured and defeated plotters attempted to resist them. Four including Catesby were killed, the rest were captured and taken to London where they soon met a grisly fate.

The gunpowder plot and the key Midlands locations in the story such as Coughton Court passed into national mythology. To this day the story is a staple of popular culture and the school history curriculum ensuring that it is one of the episodes from Early Modern history that most British (or at least English) people know about. The event is still marked in bonfire and firework displays across the country around about the 5th November. Although the festival’s popularity has waned somewhat in recent decades following the re-importation of the endlessly less xenophobic Halloween from the United States in the 1990s and 2000s. Perhaps tellingly the ancient custom of Halloween with its connections to a Roman Catholic feast day was always most strongly celebrated (at least prior to the 1990s) in the parts of the country which historically held out the most against the Protestant ascendancy.

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.

This walk to Coughton Court begins from Henley-in-Arden Railway Station on the Shakespeare Line between Birmingham and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Once on the station platform turn left and head up onto the footbridge.

Up on the footbridge turn left and cross the bridge heading for the steps on the far side.

At the bottom of the steps follow the path down the middle of a set of allotments.

On the far side of the allotments head through a metal gate onto a tangled green lane.

Having passed through the green lane you reach the bottom of a meadow.

Walk a short distance straight ahead towards a hedgerow at the end of the meadow.

Here there is a wooden post.

Upon reaching the wooden post turn left following the line of trees and bushes at the bottom of the meadow.

Presently on your right there is a sturdy metal bridge.

Cross over this bridge and walk along the path uphill through a copse on the other side.

At the top of the slope there is a stile. Cross over it, climbing a few wooden steps into a field.

Once in the field, walk straight across the field.

On the far side you come to another stile which leads onto the side of a road.

Opposite where you come out, next to a house, and a little up its driveway another stile is visible.

Head up the path and climb the stile. 

Once over the stile head across a driveway and then across another stile leading into a grassy narrow orchard.

At the bottom of the orchard you head out into a field. Cross the field and climb the stile set into a fence.

Once in the next field take a left turn and head downhill across the field heading for a copse at the bottom.

Here there is a stile which you climb heading down into a shallow dell with a steam at the bottom.

On the other side of the dell keep walking through the trees crossing another sturdy metal bridge.

This leads out into a field which you cross.

Keep walking straight across the fields, climbing stiles as you go.

Presently you enter a field – which was recently ploughed when I walked the route in late October – here there is a tree in the far right corner.

When you see this tree head right walking towards it. Just behind the tree there is a gap, which you can easily squeeze through.

Once through the hedge keep walking straight across the field beyond, passing through another hedge.

Having crossed the next field you come to a gap in the hedge leading out onto a quiet country lane.

More or less immediately opposite where you come out there is a metal gate leading into a narrow stand of trees.

Once through the trees keep walking straight ahead. This leads to a short, but steep, uphill section.

Near the top of the hill you take a slight right turn across a hedgerow into a grassy meadow.

On clambering into the meadow turn left walking towards woodland at the top of the hill.

Pass through a metal gate and follow the path through the woods.

Keep on walking through the trees for some distance. The path heads steady to the left. Initially the path is quite narrow, then it becomes steadily a lot wider.

Presently you pass a farm on your left reaching a metal gate which leads out onto a country lane.

Once on the lane turn left and follow it downhill for a short distance.

This leads into a small hamlet clustered around a farm called Greenhill.

Here on your left next to a black painted metal gateway there is a footgate leading off the lane.

Turn off the lane left through this gate. Then turn right into a paddock.

Head downhill across the paddock towards woodland at the bottom of the slope.

Cross a wooden bridge across a brook at the bottom of the slope. 

Then head uphill through the woodland.

Having passed through the woodland follow the path around the edge of a field, then straight across a wider field.

On the far side of the field there is a farm track and a gateway. Turn right and head through this gateway.

Immediately after walking through the gateway turn left following the line of the hedgerow.

On the far side there is more woodland behind a hedgerow.

Here head through a metal gate and turn right.

Having passed through the gate turn right and begin walking along the edge of the hedgerow in the direction of the tall and distinctive Round Hill.

Before you reach the base of Round Hill the hedgerow curves to the left. Here turn to the left and keep following the hedgerow around.

Presently you reach a metal gate leading into a meadow.

Once in the meadow head in the general direction of a house on the far side.

To the left adjacent to the house there is a gateway leading through a thicket out onto a road.

Once on the lane turn right.

After a short distance there is a metal gate on the left visible in a hedgerow. Turn left, cross the grass verge and head through the gate.

Once in the field, cross the field.

On the far side there is a metal gate leading into woodland.

Having passed through the gate into the woodland, turn sharply right.

Keep heading to the right following blue bridleway waymarks, leading through ranks of tall saplings.

This presently leads uphill into woodland consisting of more mature trees.

Out of the trees turn left and begin walking downhill between two hedgerows towards a house visible to your right.

This leads out onto a driveway with spectacular views out into the hilly landscape of northern Worcestershire off to the west.

Once on the driveway turn right and follow the track downhill.

After some distance the driveway emerges onto a main road.

Here, turn right and walk a very short distance.

Soon off to the left there is a track.

Turn down the track and begin walking.

Follow the track for some considerable distance. It leads right to the edge of the Coughton Court grounds. Presently the track merges with a lane. Here to the right there is a ford.

The ford is too deep for someone to walk across in most conditions, however, there is a footbridge just next to it. Turn right and walk across the bridge.

On the other side head to the left following the lane a little distance further.

Soon there is another track running off the right across parkland.

Turn right here and enter the Coughton Court grounds.

Passing a couple of chapel buildings you soon reach the front of the main house.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

The nearest bus stop to Coughton Court is beside the Throckmorton Arms pub, slightly over five minutes walk on the main road away from the main house. In October 2022 when this walk was written up there were buses from near the Throckmorton Arms running to both Redditch and Stratford-upon-Avon approximately once every one or two hours throughout the day into the evening. Both Redditch and Stratford-upon-Avon have mainline railway stations with trains running north towards Birmingham and the wider West Midlands. They are also major hubs for local buses serving Warwickshire, Worcestershire and beyond.