Distance: 5.1 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Countryside walk from Dorridge partly along the Grand Union Canal towpath to Packwood House, the quintessential, and utterly conflected, Tudor looking country house. Rightly famed for its yew trees.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
“Baron” Ash’s Conflected Country House
“A house to dream of, a garden to dream in” that was how a visitor to Packwood House in the 1920s summed up their experience of visiting.
Right in the heart of England Packwood House is arguably the quintessential English country house. And this is arguably by design.
The house, just inside Warwickshire on the edge of the village of Lapworth, first came to prominence in the second half of the 16th Century. It was then that the little manor house was rebuilt by William Fetherston, whose family had owned the site since the late middle ages, and rebuilt in the half timbered fashion that survives to this day.
Compared to its near neighbour the moated Baddesley Clinton with its innumerable priest’s holes, Packwood House’s passage through the Early Modern era was relatively peaceful. The Fetherston’s were successful yeoman farmers, with some scions working as lawyers, but they were perhaps small time enough to largely coast along, rather than being caught up in the tumult of the era’s politics.
Where Packwood’s story becomes more interesting is in the early 20th Century. During the 18th and 19th Centuries the property passed through the Leigh and Dilkes families who married into the Fetherston’s. Downwardly mobile, perhaps due to the late 19th Century agricultural depression, the last of the Dilkes died in relative poverty, meaning that Packwood was bought by George Oakes Arton, a Birmingham solicitor. This was common at the time, when Birmingham was growing rapidly, and the cities outer commuter belt was starting to spring up along the railway lines south east of the city.
After Oakes Arton died in 1901 Packwood House and its 134 acre estate was sold to Alfred Ash an industrialist. When questioned as to why, he purportedly stated that he’s bought it because his son, then aged sixteen, liked it.
Alfred Ash’s son was called Graham Baron Ash. Though perhaps unsurprisingly given his evident aristocratic pretensions he typically did not use his first name, going by Baron Ash.
Independently wealthy thanks to the workers in the factories whose output his father controlled, Baron Ash did not have to work. After surviving a stint as a pilot and later hot air balloon observation post commander during World War I have embarked on a round the world tour. Merrily buying all sorts of artefacts along the way.
Upon returning to the English Midlands and to Packwood in 1924, Baron Ash set about “restoring” it to an idealised Tudor state. All traces of the house’s 19th and 18th Century additions and embellishments were stripped out. Then Baron Ash set about commissioning a new great hall and long gallery for the property, making the pleasant, modestly grand, successful yeoman’s farmhouse far larger and more sophisticated than it ever had been in the 16th and 17th Centuries. To fit out and furnish the house Baron Ash purchased items and artefacts which were being ripped out or thrown away from other properties. This included obtaining items from neighbouring Baddesley Clinton.
In 1941 Baron Ash, in the spirit of the times, gifted Packwood House, its grounds and thirty thousand pounds to the National Trust “ in memory of his parents”. It also served to preserve his tasteful, but also quite bizarre and eccentric, 20th Century imagining of a great Tudor country house, indefinitely.
Packwood House as reworked and recreated is interesting and definitely worth a visit. Though perhaps the most part of the property is the garden. Here there stands a wild cluster of topiaried yew trees, an unusual and special site. There are more than one hundred of them, the tallest amongst them around fifteen metres, and they were laid out in the mid-17th Century by John Fetherston, the then owner. Purportedly some of them are arrayed in such a fashion as to represent the Sermon on the Mount, with clusters of apostles and evangelists arrayed around Packwood House’s yew garden.
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 Packwood House begins at Dorridge Railway Station.
Dorridge is a small, almost entirely residential town, which is extremely affluent on the rural fringe of the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull. The town is handily served by both West Midlands Railway and Chiltern trains.
On leaving the Station you are standing on the edge of the parade of shops and restaurants that comprises Dorridge town centre.
Walk a short way, turning left out of the main exit of the station towards the shops.
Immediately on your right on the other side of the road there is a road leading off past a hotel.
Cross over the road and turn right down this road.
Continue on this long, straight road – aptly called Avenue Way – for quite a distance walking past some seriously large houses, constructed during pretty much every era from the early 20th Century onwards.
Presently you come to a small roundabout.
Head across the road and take the second road on your right.
It leads through an estate of modern houses.
After a short while walking along this road the road leaves the town and the houses begin to thin-out.
Just as you are entering open countryside look out on your right for a footpath sign leading down a snicket.
Once sighted, cross over the road and head right down the snicket.
The snicket passes between the gardens of two houses.
Soon you come to a gate at the end of the snicket leading out onto a grassy open field.
Go through the gate and walk more or less straight across the field following the line of the hedgerow to your left.
Pass through the metal gate you come to into the next field.
Inside the next field follow the track curving slight to the right across the field in the direction of a gate leading out onto a lane.
Having passed through the gate, turn left and walk along the lane.
Head along the side of the lane for some distance.
Presently the lane curves quite sharply to the left.
Shortly after this point lookout on your right for a footpath sign just after a small cluster of houses amongst a stand of conifer trees.
Cross over the style by the footpath sign.
Then head down the track beyond.
After a short distance you come to a metal gate.
Head through the metal gate and cross the field beyond, keeping to the left.
The path leads through a small thicket.
On the other side of this thicket to your left there is a metal gate.
This leads into a field, apparently usually used for cattle though it was empty on the day I walked through, that was incredibly muddy.
Once through the gate and into the field, keep fairly close to the hedge on your right and walk across to the other side.
Here you will find a gate beside a tall old tree.
Having walked through the gate you find yourself at the top of an avenue of recently planted trees looking towards an old farmhouse.
Walk towards the old house.
Just before you reach the building there is a metal gate leading onto a footpath.
Once on the footpath turn left and walk along the line of a wooden fence and a hedgerow.
Very soon you emerge onto a driveway.
Turn left and walk along the driveway.
Presently the driveway merges with a road.
Turn right at this point you follow the road for a short distance. It is a fairly busy road so take care.
On the horizon a whitewashed building is visible on your right. This is the King’s Arms Inn, and beyond it stands the King’s Arms Bridge, which crosses the Grand Union Canal.
Once on the other side of the bridge, look out on your right for a set of relatively steep steps down onto the towpath.
At the bottom of the steps turn left and begin walking down the towpath.
Unusually for a British inland canal the Grand Union was extensively modernised in the 1930s so as to better enable canal freight to compete with rail and road transport. All in all, the modernisation scheme was not a great success. Despite significant investment into widening the canal for larger boats, straightening it to enable faster journey times and enhancing infrastructure such as locks, freight traffic continued to fall vertiginously and had essentially ceased by the start of the 1970s. The end of this era is depicted in the (fairly dreadful but fascinating) 1964 film The Bargee, which centres around a commercial barge on the Grand Union Canal.
The afterlife of this attempt to bring the canal into the 20th Century, does manifest itself however, in the fact that the Grand Union is far more like a water based motorway than the sleepier, more meandering narrow canals that make up the bulk of the navigable inland waterways in the UK.
A side effect of this is that it can be a tad monotonous, but it makes up for this in terms of speed.
All in all, you walk along the Grand Union Canal for more than a mile.
The first section is almost urban in terms of its feel, heading past the large Black Buoy Marina which is a hub for barge owners on this section, which is one foot in the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, one foot in Warwickshire.
Presently it opens out, though still with a large number of barges tethered, some painted with traditional waterways art.
The feel of the canal gets steadily more rural as you move away from Dorridge and its conjoined partner in crime, the similar in spirit, large village of Knowle.
After walking for quite some way passing under several more imposing bridges, you come to the low red brick Turnover Bridge.
The Turnover Bridge carries the towpath over the canal.
After crossing the bridge, turn left keeping on down the towpath. After quite some distance you approach the edge of the village of Kingswood.
Approaching the edge of Kingswood you come to a modern concrete road bridge.
Walk beneath the bridge. To your left there is a plaque underneath the bridge which states that you are passing from the River Trent to the River Severn catchment area.
Just after the bridge on your right there is a path leading off the towpath to the side of a main road.
Once on the road turn left and begin walking uphill past a series of houses on the edge of Kingswood. Presently you cross a bridge over the Chiltern Main Line.
On the far side of the bridge there is a driveway waymarked with a footpath sign running off to the right.
Turn right and walk down the driveway, soon turning to the left and heading towards a large recently built house behind a tall wall.
Approaching the gate into the house’s grounds there is a footpath running off to the right.
Follow the path around the house through woodland for some distance.
Presently you come out on the edge of a field.
Here turn right then turn left through a metal gate into a field.
Once in the field walk straight ahead following the line of the fence around the edge of the field.
Upon reaching the far side of the field you come to a gate which you pass through. On the far side of the gate there is a main road.
Here, turn right and walk along the road for a little distance.
Presently on the left there is a gate marked with National Trust logos. This is where you enter the Packwood estate. Turn left and walk through this gate.
On the far side of the gate walk straight ahead along a wide, fenced in walkway lined with trees.
After some distance you reach a gate inside a stand of trees which leads into the Packwood estate’s parkland. You can see the house and its surrounding buildings, as well as the spectacular and famous yew trees in front of you.
Once you are through the gate walk straight ahead following the path across the parkland approaching the house.
On the far side of the parkland there is a metal gate down onto some brick steps.
At the bottom of the brick steps walk straight ahead across a road to the entrance to packwood House.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
Packwood House is situated near to Lapworth Railway Station in Kingswood which is served throughout the day (albiet sporadically) by trains north towards Solihull and Birmingham via Dorridge and south down the Chiltern Main Line towards Warwick, Leamington Spa and eventually London. it is also not all that far to walk back to Dorridge Railway Station. Bus services are very limited.