Distance: 11.2 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

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

Walk primarily in north west Warwickshire, mostly on canal towpaths, from Water Orton Railway Station to Tamworth town centre.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Mercia’s “Capital”

Tamworth sits at the confluence of the Tame and the unusually named River Anker. The Tame rises in the Rowley Hills slap bang in the middle of the Black Country, right on the watershed between the Trent and Severn catchment areas, before winding its way for nearly sixty miles. It is from the River Tame that Tamworth gets its name.

Its situation, at the confluence of two rivers, not that far from the Trent, has made Tamworth a site of human settlement for millenia. The point in Tamworth’s history that the modern town looks back to most often, its true founding myth, is the Anglo Saxon era. The town was a key settlement for the Midland’s Mercian rulers. Some historians have even referred to Tamworth in the early middle ages as Mercia’s capital.

Mercian monarchs associated with the town include the legendary King Penda, the almost equally storied King Offa (of Offa’s Dyke’s fame), and perhaps most widely remembered in Tamworth today, Queen Æthelflæd who was Mercia’s ruler in the early Tenth Century.

Æthelflæd came to be the ruler of Mercia during a period when viking raiders from Scandinavia had incurred deep into what the Mercian’s considered their territory and began to settle there creating their own polity. As Mercian queen Æthelflæd fortified Tamworth and other key Mercian towns like Wednesbury and Stafford, as well as key sites of Mercian culture to the south west like Worcester. 

Tamworth’s proximity to the key southern viking settlements on the other side of the Trent like Derby and Leicester made it an important forward base for Mercian military attempts to push the kingdom’s frontier with the vikings further east. With Æthelflæd as ruler the Mercian’s fought off a viking attack in 917 and went on to capture Derby, one of the five fortified Danelaw boroughs.

When the first iteration of the modern English county system was established in the early Tenth Century Tamworth, unusually, was split between Warwickshire and Staffordshire with the River Anker serving as the boundary. After the Normans conquered and came to rule England Tamworth, despite still being a major settlement and home to an important castle, was omitted from the Domesday Book. This was probably due to the split between the two counties leading the surveyors to enumerate the different parts of the town separately, even though they remained one settlement.

Throughout the following centuries Tamworth remained an important centre, both strategically, and as a marketplace for north Warwickshire and south Staffordshire. However, while it still possessed a strategically important, prominently sited, castle, its days as a fortified borough and host to royalty was over.

Which does not mean that Tamworth ceased to be a significant place for both the Midlands region and the country more widely. Tamworth Castle, the central tower of which, beside the River Anker, remains prominent on the town’s skyline, next to a thick cluster of mid-Twentieth Century high rise council blocks. Like the Midlands as a whole Tamworth was in the eye of the Seventeenth Century civil wars. The castle switched hands between Royalist and Parliamentary forces, with a fairly major clash taking place towards the end of the war when the section of the King’s army garrisoned at Lichfield sallied forth to attempt to capture Tamworth. 

Later during the first half of the Nineteenth Century Tamworth was part of the political patrimony of the Peel family. They owned the nearby Drayton Manor which is now a theme park. The elder Robert Peel was Tamworth’s MP for thirty years between 1790 and 1820. During this time he was at the forefront of early efforts to ameliorate harsh factory working conditions. The younger Robert Peel who was Tamworth MP before and after the first reform act, which regularised the British electoral system and enabled slightly more men to vote, became a Tory Prime Minister. He was also the Home Secretary which saw the creation of the first police forces in Britain, lending them their nickname, The Peelers. A statue of the second Robert Peel stands in front of Tamworth’s grand market hall.

Since 1974 Tamworth has been fully situated in Staffordshire, where it sits at the county’s south easternmost tip. The town remains marked by its location at the confluence of the River Tame and Anker. It is also where the long straight Birmingham and Fazeley Canal and the twisty Coventry Canal meet, giving it an inland waterways boaty feel. 

The Walk

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

This walk was created using Ordnance Survey Explorer. To subscribe and also get Ordnance Survey Maps on your phone, click the banner above.

This walk to Tamworth, primarily along the towpath of the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, begins from Water Orton Railway Station.

Upon leaving Water Orton Railway Station turn right. Walk straight downhill along a road which runs towards the edge of Water Orton.

On the edge of Water Orton you come to a very old, very narrow bridge across the River Tame. Walk across it, taking care of the heavy traffic which makes use of its thin ancient span.

Once you are on the far side of the river you have crossed from Warwickshire where Water Orton is situated to Minworth in Birmingham.

Here turn left and follow the road around as it runs towards one of the forest of warehouses and factory units which populate the eastern edge of Birmingham.

Continue walking straight until you reach a roundabout with warehouse units to both the left and right and a cluster of houses straight ahead.

There is a straight road which looks like it was designed for HGVs lined with trees off to the right. Turn right and walk along it.

At the end of the road you come to the busy A4097, an offshoot of the A38 which runs off towards where the M42 and the M6 Toll converge.

Here, turn left and walk a short distance towards some traffic lights opposite a pub on the right.

On reaching the traffic lights turn right and cross the road to the side beside the pub.

Walk straight a short distance passing the pub. Here on the right there is a steep narrow road running uphill. Turn right and head up this steep narrow road.

At the top of the slope there is a bridge across the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal. Here to the right there is a ramp running down to the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal. Turn right and walk down to the towpath.

Once on the towpath turn right and walk along the long straight line of the canal.

Keep on walking straight ahead approaching the edge of Birmingham district. The surroundings are already pretty rural.

Continue walking until you reach the cutting leading up to the Curdworth Tunnel, just north of the village of Curdworth, the first settlement inside Warwickshire, once you leave Birmingham again.

Walk through the short Curdworth Tunnel and continue along the towpath on the far side.

Soon you approach the bridges which carry the M6 Toll and the A446 over the canal.

Carry on walking approaching a cluster of locks on the Curdworth flight.

Keep on walking down the lock flight.

Presently you pass an old lock keeper’s cottage and continue along the towpath having passed it.

Off on the right there is Kingsbury Waterpark. It is created from old gravel pits.

Continue walking straight along the towpath passing another former lock keeper’s cottage.

Having passed the cottage you continue along a long straight stretch of towpath.

Keep on a fair distance further. 

Presently you approach the edge of the Tamworth built up area. You approach and walk beneath a distinctive footbridge which looks like a castle gateway.

Carry on walking passing a cluster of moored barges and underneath a road bridge.

Continue walking, crossing a bridge over the canal which leads to a marina.

On the far side of the bridge continue walking, approaching the centre of Fazeley where the Fazeley and Birmingham Canal converges with the Coventry Canal.

You walk underneath a bridge and arrive at the point where the two canals meet.

Cross the bridge here and walk down the other side.

Once on the far side of the bridge keep walking straight ahead, heading deeper into Tamworth.

Continue walking along the Coventry Canal for quite some distance walking beneath a bridge which carries the A5 over the canal.

On the far side of the bridge look out on your right for a set of gates which lead onto a footpath running away from the canal towards a main road.

Upon reaching the side of the road turn right and begin walking into Tamworth.

Follow the road walking straight ahead through an area defined by the metal sheds of car showrooms.

Presently, having passed the car showrooms you reach a point where the road forks.

Here cross the road to the left, and head onto the narrow residential road on the other side.

Once on this residential road turn right and walk along the road to the top.

Here at the top of the road on the left there is a cut through which leads out onto a roundabout on the A51.

Straight ahead of you there is a set of traffic lights. Use them to cross the road.

On the far side of the A51 turn right and walk along a road, heading around the edge of Tamworth’s water meadows.

Presently you reach a junction.

Here turn left and walk along a road approaching an old bridge, now pedestrianised, across the River Anker.

Cross the bridge and walk up the road on the far side passing the motte where Tamworth Castle, now a museum stands, next to some gardens beside the River Anker.

Continue on up the road, walking uphill on the far side of the river.

At the top of the hill past the castle there is a road which runs off to the right, towards Tamworth market hall where the statue of Robert Peel stands.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

Tamworth is well served by trains. The station is served by trains south towards Birmingham, Nuneaton and London as well as north towards Burton-upon-Trent, Derby, Nottingham and Yorkshire. There are also occasional services towards Crewe, while some southbound trains carry on towards the South West and South Wales. Tamworth is also a bus hub for its part of the central Midlands. There are local services to suburbs of Tamworth and outlying villages, as well as further afield destinations like Lichfield, Nuneaton and Birmingham.