Thame is a good stop off when heading South for a breakfast butty and a bimble round the bookshops. You know you have hit the home counties when you price up the charity offerings. £3 a book but they have some good titles in good nick and I picked up some nature writing which tend toward the confessional and morose but often enlighten. I also found my favourite 501 jeans here which are now being patched so they can live again. This time I ended up with more books about cycling in the Chilterns as a means of procrastinating about actually cycling in the hilly Chilterns and packed my panniers full of Scotch Eggs. I snacked amongst the pollarded oaks looking for the ghosts of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in the stunning churchyard and rolled around the timbered houses on the side streets, a lazy warm up as the sun broke through and took the edge off the wind, and I don't mean the eggs.
Further procrastination in a small museum brought some insight into the history of the town with its usual civil war struggle between factions leading to misery and ruin for feuding nobs. I found these local crafty artworks which have inspired me to copy them wholesale at a later date and pass them off as my own ingenuity.
I could wait no longer and having risen at the crack of dawn to beat the traffic I realised I was wasting the day. Atrophying muscles sparked to life as I hit the trail out of quaint Thame. I love a straight track riding through history. This was part of the Wycombe railway and an extension built in 1862 took the line to Thame and eventually through to Oxford, enabling a languid route from Paddington to Oxford purpose made for bimblers looking for the slow train. It later became a key part of the route to Birmingham but lost out to roads and a faster route via Princes Risborough after World War Two. It managed to survive until a few months before Beeching when they knew the game was up with annual losses of £35,000. In 1991 Sustrans re-surfaced the track and commissioned furniture students to make 30 sculptures to mark the route.
Not sure about Eeyore though. He smelled a bit after playing with Pooh!
He gets a nice view of the Chiltern Hills. He does have a pole stuck up his arras though.
There is still steam to be seen on the route as the Chinnor and Princes Risborough railway runs across the trail as you leave Princes Risborough behind. Heritage trains run during summer months along one of the quaintest lines in England from the meticulously restored Chinnor station. A testament to the industry of retired middle England in the lee of the Chiltern ridge. Everything manicured and kempt. Wot ho, Toot toot!
www.chinnorrailway.co.uk
The sculptures livened up the trail in the bleakness of Winter as I passed barren fields with an occasional Kite for company.
It is a popular route and well used by runners and families with the odd windswept stockbroker puffing away looking for a personal Strava best. I don't think I was winning any awards but it got the wind back in my sails.
The scarp of the Chilterns was a constant companion looming ominously beyond my flat bed. I resolved to conquer the ridge another time and bent my wend back to Thame. It turned out to be just enough as the headwinds kicked in and a pint in the Spread Eagle beckoned, former roost of Evelyn Waugh and, like most places round here, site of a Midsomer Murder. I unsaddled with grace to cogitate upon writing my misery lit memoirs and planning some bad pebble based art.
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