Distance: 10.4 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk through rural south west Warwickshire along the Stratford-upon-Avon Greenway to Quinton and Mickleton beneath the highly prominent, deeply enigmatic, Meon Hill the most northwestern part of the Cotswolds escarpment.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
Meon Hill: Prominent, Significant and Enigmatic
In geography prominence is a term used in part to describe a hill or mountain that is significantly taller than its surroundings, really standing out within the landscape. In this regard Meon Hill in Warwickshire standing near the tri-county boundary where Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire meet, is certainly prominent. Significant and enigmatic are two other words which could also describe the peak.
Meon Hill is significant in several ways. It sits at the northwestern most point of the Cotswold escarpment, the first sign of a storied limestone ridge running for more than 60 miles all the way from Meon Hill to Wiltshire and Somerset just south of Bath. Its prominence also makes it significant in the landscape. Meon Hill summit stands 194 metres above sea level, not especially high in the Cotswolds where hills, ridges and plateaus tend to hover between 200 and 300 metres, but very tall indeed, if you are approaching from the Worcestershire Severn Plain to its left, or the very gently hilly landscape of Warwickshire around Stratford-upon-Avon to its north. Meon Hill’s “parent peak” is Ebrington Hill, Warwickshire’s highest hill standing a little to the south east and rising 261 metres above sea level.
Meon Hill’s enigma arises from its unusual shape. It stands proud from other hills, connected only to the rest of the Cotswolds chain in which it is the northernmost link, via a thin narrow pass to the south. Otherwise it is a loner amongst hills, its flanks steadily ascending towards a flattened peak. The peak is believed to have been flattened during the Iron Age in the 1st Century BCE the create a platform for a hillfort. Parts of the ramparts are still visible at the top of the hill, but the main legacy of this mighty regional centre from millenia ago is the hill’s uncanny appearance, its top evidently levelled by a now ungraspable intelligence.
It has long been known that Meon Hill was an ancient hillfort. Antiquarians described it as such as far back as the 17th Century, with a dig in 1824 discovering a trove of 394 iron bars, smelted more than 2,000 years earlier, buried more than a metre below the surface. These bars would have been used as currency during the Iron Age, representing a significant stock of value for whoever buried them.
Later excavations of the site in the early to mid 20th Century, after archaeology had emerged as a coherent and considered academic discipline, discovered that Meon Hill had remained occupied into the Romano-British period, and in the form of the burial of an early medieval warrior, had evidently retained a significance long after that.
Since the middle ages the hill has seemingly been unoccupied. It is ringed by several villages which would have been established in something akin to their modern form that period. The main settlements, excluding the large new housing estate, akin to a big village, at Meon Vale, are Upper and Lower Quinton, the former of which lies on the village’s lower slopes. With Mickleton in Gloucestershire, and Ilmington and Admington in Warwickshire, also encircling the hill.
Meon Hill’s prominence, its isolation, and relative desolation in what is a pastoral and far from unoccupied part of central England, not to mention its uncanny shape the legacy of its Iron Age occupation, naturally lends itself to myth making. Legends of black dogs stalking the misty hillsides abound, but that is quite normal in rural England. Like other prominent hills in the Midlands whether Mow Cop in the far north of Staffordshire, Bardon Hill rising out of the Trent plain in northern Leicestershire, or summits like Wychbury and Turner’s Hill in and around the west of West Midlands county, Meon Hill frequently appears shrouded in mist adding to the spectral and eerie atmosphere.
The myths and legends associated with the hill are augmented by the general association southern Warwickshire and the northern Cotswolds generally have with witchcraft. This dates back to the middle ages, if not earlier, and took on gruesome and tragic form in the 1660s at nearby Broadway Hill, where three people were executed for a supposed magically induced murder. As late as 1875 an old woman living not too far south east of Meon Hill at Long Compton was murdered for being a suspected witch. Meon Hill itself was the site of an exceptionally brutal slaying in 1945, which was never solved, now never will be solved, and which the Metropolitan Police detective Robert Fabian, who spent part of his retirement mythologising the case, contributed a lot to presenting the murder as supernaturally inspired. Needless to say the residents of Upper and Lower Quinton are to this day famously reluctant to discuss the case.
None of this darklore, surprisingly common in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, necessarily detracts from the truth, that Meon Hill is a striking and unusual local landmark. Undoubtedly beautiful in its unusual and isolated situation close to the place where the Midlands ends and South Western England begins.
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 from Stratford-upon-Avon to Mickleton, via the base of the enigmatic and stiking Meon Hill begins from Stratford-upon-Avon Railway Station.
Exit left onto Stratford-upon-Avon Railway Station concourse opposite some recently built flats.
Walk straight ahead and then around to the left along a pedestrianised path heading towards the town centre.
Upon reaching the public road carry on straight ahead down the pavement approaching a crossroads on the edge of the town centre.
Here there is a set of traffic lights. Cross the road to the right, then head left, before turning right onto Grove Road.
Carry on straight ahead along this road for quite some distance.
Presently you reach a roundabout.
Here turn left, heading towards a sturdy concrete bridge.
Beyond the bridge continue along the road until you reach another roundabout.
Walk around the roundabout to the left. Cross over the carriageway coming from the south, and then follow the carriageway around to the right. Soon you reach the entrance to the car park at the top of the Stratford Greenway.
Turn left into the car park and walk all the way along it. Prior to its closure in 1976 the route which is now the Stratford Greenway was the southward extension of the railway from Birmingham which now terminates at Stratford-upon-Avon Station. It joined the Cotswolds Line at Honeybourne. Prior to World War Two fast diesel trains ran from Birmingham Moor Street to Cardiff along the route, and in the years prior to closure tourist trains headed from the West Midlands to the West Country along the line in the summer.
At the bottom of the car park you join the Greenway which takes you south from Stratford.
Passing Stratford Racecourse you presently come to an old rusted metal railway bridge over the River Avon.
On the far side you continue along the Greenway heading away from the town.
After some further distance you see the top of the Cotswold escarpment in the distance to the south. Here you see an old cottage to your left and a short terrace of cottages of a similar vintage to the right. Which you pass and continue walking straight along the Greenway.
Soon you reach Milcote Road which you cross, passing the cafe partially created from an old railway carriage, set-up just beyond the site of the former Milcote Station.
Beyond Milcote you carry on along a generally somewhat quieter section of the Greenway for around two miles approaching Long Marston. As you walk Meon Hill the enigmatic mini-plateau that is the northwestern most crest of the Cotswolds escarpment rises up in the middle distance to the left.
Nearing Long Marston on your left there is a metal gate out onto a track across a field which is waymarked for the Heart of the England Way.
Turn left through this gate and follow the track for some way. Once through the gate on your left, Meon Hill hulks on the near horizon.
Soon the track sharply turns to the right, here leave the track and cross a stile straight ahead of you.
Follow the now somewhat overgrown footpath walking straight ahead for some distance. The route is still fenced in and waymarked for the Heart of England Way and Monarch’s Way, but since a housing estate was recently built (it is still expanding) just north of where you are walking, a developer constructed cycle and walking path has taken much of the foot traffic from the route.
After some distance, right next to the new estate, the path turns sharply to the right, before running through some bushes out into open fields.
Once in the fields turn left and continue straight ahead until you reach a stile leading out beside the Campden Road, the main road from Stratford into the northwest Cotswolds.
Carry on straight across the road and into a field on the far side of the road. You are now more or less level with Meon Hill to the south now, the villages of Lower and Upper Quinton standing between you and its flanks.
You cross two field boundaries until on the right you come to a metal bridge across a stream and then follow a path across meadows to reach a housing estate on the northern edge of Lower Quinton. Lower Quinton stands as the northwesternmost tip of the Cotswolds National Landscape protected area.
Follow a snicket onto the estate and then turn left, walking through the estate’s centre to reach the main road running through Lower Quinton.
Cross the road and now with Meon Hill looming enigmatically straight ahead in your field of vision, you head to the left down the road which runs through the slither of countryside that separates Lower from Upper Quinton.
Upon reaching Upper Quinton which is a far smaller, quainter seeming village than Lower Quinton, the road swings sharply to the right bringing you out on the village green.
In the centre of the green there is a road running off to the left towards Meon Hill which you pick up and follow.
Presently, just before the road turns into a track climbing the hill you turn right, passing the last house in Upper Quinton and picking up a footpath through some trees to reach open fields.
Following the footpath waymarked for the Heart of England Way you walk around the western base of Meon Hill. The path is well trodden, especially in places, and generally easy to follow.
As you walk there are spectacular views to the south and west, along the Cotswolds escarpment running southwards, and to Bredon Hill and the Malverns to the south and west in Worcestershire.
Continue along the path around the base of the hill.
Presently rounding its southern flank you begin descending across fields towards the village of Mickleton. Mickleton is Gloucestershire’s most northerly settlement surrounded on three sides by the Midlands countries of Warwickshire and Worcestershire.
Reaching a brook which you cross via a bridge embedded in the hedgerow, you cross from Warwickshire into Gloucestershire and out of the Midlands into South West England.
On the far side of the brook you pick up a track running to the left uphill past some farm buildings towards a pair of new housing estates on the northern edge of Mickleton. Unlike the Quintons Mickleton stands just outside the Cotswolds National Landscape.
From beside the farm buildings you can look back to get a spectacular view of the commanding, intriguingly shaped, and still enigmatic Meon Hill.
Upon reaching the housing estates a path leads between them to a road on the edge of the older part of Mickleton, which you cross, to enter a pasture on the far side.
Partway across the pasture if you look back Meon Hill rises – somewhat eerily – above the roofs of the modern houses.
On the far side of the pasture you enter a recreation ground behind the high street. Turn left here and pick up a path which runs off the recreation ground down a snicket to the high street.
Upon reaching the high street turn right and follow it for a short distance to reach a triangle at the heart of the village where the mini-supermarket and largest pub are situated. The bus stop is on the triangle beside the village’s former well.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
Mickleton is served by numerous bus services, though the majority of them are run by a local community transport group called Hedgehog Community Bus, who have numerous services that only run once a week. More regular services are provided by Stagecoach whose buses No. 1, 1A, 2 and 2A each run several times a day between Moreton-in-Marsh and Stratford-upon-Avon both of which have mainline railway stations. The former on the Hereford to London line, the latter with services to and across the West Midlands conurbation and to Banbury via Leamington Spa. While on weekdays and Saturdays Mickleton is reasonably well served with buses throughout the day into the evening it makes sense to check times because there are some hours when there is no bus. There is a Sunday service but it is less frequent and finishes earlier than on other days.