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The first TADS of the year is normally a good one - and it's normally a well attended one - and so it proved to be on Saturday (1st February - the earliest in the year a TADS walk has ever taken place) when we kicked off our eleventh (ELEVENTH) season with Great Bottom Flash, a roughly twelve mile trek from Ash Vale to Farnham and from Surrey to Hampshire and back in to Surrey.
I'd woken up ridiculously early (excited) and, wearing my brand new Scapa walking boots, taken the train from Honor Oak Park to Clapham Junction where I not only met with Pam but availed myself of a new train wallet. As so often, we were travelling from platform 9 and, as is equally common, the train was late. We took a train to Woking and then changed on to the train we would have been on anyway and as we disembarked we met with Shep, James, Roxanne, and Clive.
Adam and Teresa were getting out of a train on the opposite platform and, at Carriages Cafe, we met with Darren, Cheryl, Jason, and Chris. Nobody was quite brave enough to try 'the guv'nor' (and most of us being veggies we wouldn't have been able to anyway) but there was a good mix of breakfasts, brunches, and brunchingtons.
Porridge, egg sandwiches, and a lot of veggie breakfasts. Carriages had two veggie brekkies on offer but we all (everyone who had one) took the same one and we all opted for beans instead of tomatoes. Beans 7 Tomatoes 0. After checking with the staff it was time for me to unveil the TADS 10th birthday cake that I had had made specially. Nobody was hungry so it was probably just as well Cheryl wasn't coming on the walk so she could take the cake home and bring it out later, saving me lugging a cake around for the best part of five hours
The breakfasts had been good (the mushrooms and the toast I felt deserved special commendation) so full of grub, and full of anticipation, I led the troops back past the station and down to the Basingstoke Canal and a piece of water they call, for some reason, Great Bottom Flash. It amused me enough to name the walk after it and once Chris had amused Darren with some requested impressions of Tadley legend Belfast Bob it was time for me to launch into my first spiel of 2025.
So why not start with a poem:- "O, Farnham, green Farnham, what hop-grounds are there that with Farnham’s fair hop-grounds can ever compare" comes from The Green Hills of Surrey by Greenwich born William Cox Bennett (1820-1895) and it's a poem that goes on to mention a few other destinations TADS have visited over the last decade. Box Hill, Leith Hill, Guildford, Dorking, and Reigate. I told the gang I'd read the whole poem in the pub later if they wanted.
Apparently they didn't! Ash Vale, where we still were, has about six thousand residents and among its notables are the cricketers Darren and Martin Bicknell who both played for Surrey (Darren also played for Nottinghamshire and Martin made it into the England team) and Samuel Franklin Cody who was born in Iowa in 1867 and became a Wild West showman though not as famous as his unrelated namesake Buffalo Bill Cody. Samuel Cody was, however, the first man ever to achieve heavier than air flight in Britain and died in a plane crash on nearby Cove Common in 1913 aged 46.
Someone who has lived to a far riper age in Ash Vale is one Ethel Caterham who I had read died last year at the age of 115 but checking it now it seems she is still alive and she is still 115 years old but now with an extra 166 days. She survived covid at the age of 111 and is now the second oldest person in the world (Inah Canabarro Lucas of Brazil is about three months older) and the second oldest British person ever. She is the last remaining subject of Edward VII. Good on her. I wish I could have given her a slice of that cake.
The Basingstoke Canal, which we would follow as it winds round the army town of Aldershot, was completed in 1794 and was built to connect Basingstoke with the Thames at Weybridge. It's 31 miles (or 50k) long so perfect for a future two, or three, day walk and it has twenty-nine locks on it. But it was never a commercial success and from 1950 to 1977 it was pretty much derelict.
After that, restoration began and it reopened as a leisure canal (though I don't think we saw a single boat in motion all day) in 1991. The engineer behind the original canal was John Smeaton (1724-1792) who also did piers, bridges, lighthouses, and harbours but perhaps is best known now for featuring in the lyrics to I Predict A Riot by The Kaiser Chiefs.
Smeaton was the name of the 'house' at Kaiser Chiefs' vocalist Ricky Wilson's school because he was from Leeds - or, according to the lyrics of that song, an 'old Leodensian'. Smeaton was assisted in his work on the canal by Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820) who later designed a cathedral in Baltimore, the central tower of St Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, and, most impressively of all, Washington DC's Capitol Building.
The third man on the job was William Jessop (1745-1814) who specialised in canals and worked on many in Britain and Ireland as well as designing Bristol's Floating Harbour. Along the canal you can (though we didn't) find vipers, lizards, nightjars, woodlarks, and Dartford warblers. We passed various lakes, ponds, and pools with names like Bungalow Lake, Willow Park Fishery, Rushmoor Flash, and Claycart Flash (none as good as Great Bottom Flash) and even observed an aqueduct dammed up in order to be repaired. But we didn't stop for our group photo until we reached a rather phallic looking statue which was soon given the name ' the Aldershot acorn'.
Look how proud it stands! Parked, as it is, not far from Aldershot Camp - the army garrison, I couldn't help wondering if frustrated soldier's wives visited this obvious fertility symbol in the dead of night hoping for some magical intervention - even if it's not exactly a Cerne Abbas giant!
If Alex had been on the walk, as we'd been hoping, she'd no doubt have been able to give us some more Aldershot information (having lived there, her father was a military man) but all I had was that Aldershot Camp was mentioned in Rudyard Kipling's 1890 poem Gunga Din and that in 1972 the camp was bombed by the IRA with seven fatalities.
Nearby Farnborough Airport - an 'executive' airport whatever that means, which we could just about make out through a thick mass of tall trees, is where Samuel Franklin Cody took his famous 1908 flight and also features in Christopher Nolan's 2010 film Inception. Less happily, it was bombed by the Nazis in World War II and, in 1952, a de Havilland DH. 110 Sea Vixen crashed (during the annual airshow) killing thirty-one people. Another accident at the airshow, in 1984, caused injury but not death to anyone.
Not far from the Aldershot Acorn, rested a boat with the unfortunate name (for us city dwellers venturing out into the countryside) of Deliverance but the swans and ducks on the canal were pleasant and so was this long stretch. A bit too long it turns out as we all (and me, specifically) missed the bit where we were supposed to come off the canal.
It wasn't a major problem. It's a laid back group of walkers again these days. We easily corrected ourselves by scrambling up a steep, but short, bank and crossing the A323 and the Norris Bridge back across the canal and into a wide green, and slightly muddy, downhill section (as well as a tiny piece of road walking) that would take us, after about twenty minutes, into The Foresters pub. On the edge of Church Crookham, near Fleet.
A decent pub stop (with friendly staff and a screen showing rugby that we sensibly ignored for the most part) it was too. Pints, alcoholic and not, were taken including a local (Tilford) stout called Black Knight, a Blonde Bombshell, a Level Head, and, for me - unadventurously - a San Miguel. We were certainly getting comfy but managed to restrict ourselves (with one exception) to a single drink before it was back out for another two hours plus of yomping.
Not far from the pub we crossed in to The Long Valley and Caesar's Camp (there are a lot of Caesar's Camps but we decided this camp is probably where he hid his porn mags) and passed an old people's home, lots of dog walkers, a few reservoirs (though sadly not the 'horse swimming pool') and even had a fairly steep, and warming on a cold day, climb through the heathland and ferns. A good workout that most of our legs would feel the next day. Thank to Chris for helping out on this stretch. There were so many small paths crissing and crossing each other at this point that it got confusing and his AllTrails app proved to a great help (must download it). We'd have got there but he got us there quicker.
The sun was going down and, thankfully, so were we. We passed through Farnham Park as it was getting even darker but we could, those of us interested, make out the 12c Farnham Castle on the edge of the park. It's the former residence, one of them, of the Bishops of Winchester, who were there for eight centuries. Built in 1138 by Henri de Blois (Bishop of Winchester, c1096-1171, and the grandson of William the Conqueror) and demolished by Henry II during the 'Anarchy' of 1155.
Sharon met us outside the Darjeeling and once we'd ordered some Cobras and cleared up some poppadum confusion (is eighteen poppadums really the minimum order?) it all went rather well. I gave a slice of the TADS birthday cake to a group celebrating an actual human birthday on the next table, we sang happy birthday to ourselves, and I had tarka dall, pulao rice, and shared a cheese naan with Shep.
