Reservoir Slogs.

Phew! What a scorcher!

It was hot hot hot yesterday when London bv Foot (in the form of Clive, Roxanne,and myself) headed out to the Lee Valley Reservoir Chain for what would be LbF's second walk of the year. At times it was sticky and humid (and I was chafing in places that nobody's had the misfortune to see for quite some time) but at other points there was a gentle, and refreshing, breeze and it even briefly rained.

The forecasters hadn't seen that coming. The last couple of miles were tough going but it was a fun day and it's one I'm very glad I didn't postpone. These walks don't walk themselves. On the summer solstice - with the temperature due to hit 34c (93f) - it was perhaps no surprise that I was up and about early. The night before had been a night for sleeping on the bed rather than in it.

I'd walked down to Honor Oak Park station from where I'd take a bus replacement service to New Cross Gate. Not long after 9am and a young man was dancing to some actually very decent sounding African music on the platform while enjoying what would presumably not be his last can of Stella Artois of the day. I took the Windrush line to Dalston Junction and, with plenty of time to spare, walked up through Dalston and Stoke Newington to Stamford Hill.

Past the intriguing Egg Stores, Abney Park Cemetery, The Rochester Castle pub (a Wetherspoons that even early in the morning had a regulation mobility scooter parked outside), a Besiktas FC club shop, a rather stunning Turkish restaurant (Aziziye) that doubles up as a mosque (or, in Turkish, camii), a rather succinct review of the new Superman film ("SHIT" - Mark Kermode, eat your heart out), and Izmir barbers. A rather pleasant reminded that in about six weeks time I'll be heading off to Turkey (with Michelle and Evie) for my first foreign holiday for over six years. Though we're not going to Izmir as once planned. Instead nearer to Antalya.

There was also a sign advertisoing "NICE DRINKS" and "DUNNO MAYBE BEARS". Can somebody not spell BEERS or are our ursine friends genuine possibilities in the London Borough of Hackney? On reaching Stamford Hill, it's soon very apparent that it's home to the largest concentration of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in the whole of Europe. There were some fantastic hats on display but I couldn't help thinking that the garb they dress up in must be very hot. 

Still, hardly the worst thing that's done in the name of religion. Or indeed crime prevention. Stamford Hill used to (in the 1740s)  have a gibbet which displayed the bodies of criminals who'd been executed at Tyburn. Which was roughly where Marble Arch is now. About seven miles away. Stamford Hill's clearly was the site of some kind of unnecessary, and gory, secondary hanging. 

Those who were born, grew up, or lived in Stamford Hill have included former Suede guiatarist Bernard Butler, tapdancer and Give Us A Clue team captain Lionel Blair (1928-2021), 2006's X Factor winner Leona Lewis, and the financier Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836).

I killed a bit more time exploring the area around Stamford Hill station and, dead on time, Clive and Roxanne arrived and we made our way, via Clapton Pond, to the Riverside Cafe on Spring Hill. Clapton Pond has been there since the 17th century and Kae Tempest once set a piece there. Wikipedia has it that in 2011 a skeleton of a chicken was found at the bottom of the pond. Is that really a newsworthy event?

The homemade beans on toast in the Riverside Cafe though? That is newsworthy. Clive generously treated us to brunch and soft drinks and soon the walk proper had begun. We crossed the Lee on the Coppermill Bridge and soon crossed the Coppermill Stream too - at least three times (it was full of either duckweed or algae - none of us were certain which) and wandering past Warwick Reservoir West and Warwick Reservoir East.

Some of the reservoirs are given over to fishing, you're not allowed to swim in them - no matter how refreshing they might look, and some have paths with views across them to the tall buildings nearby and others are obscured by tall grassy banks. Some are behind rails and others are easy to access. It's not certain why this is but I certainly preferred it when our path was up high. It gave us the advantage of a pleasant breeze and there was also a lot more to see.

The thirteen reservoirs of the Lee Valley Reservoir Chain are, second only to the Thames, one of the most important geographical dividers in London. They separate the boroughs of Haringey and Enfield to their west with the borough of Waltham Forest and the county of Essex to their east. Some of them were hit pretty badly by the German Amy during World War II and all but one of them, the Banbury Reservoir, are Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

Why Banbury was overlooked remains a mystery and it was certainly one of the ones most difficult for weekend walkers to look at. Clearly somebody's hiding something? The William Girling reservoir is the biggest and the deepest. In places it's twelve and a half metres deep and it holds 16,500 megalitres of water. That's just short of two million pints.

The reservoirs are split into two groups. The Chingford Reservoirs (in the London Borough of Enfield - these are the William Girling and King George V) and the Walthamstow Reservoirs (Waltham Forest - Banbury, High Maynard, Low Maynard, the Warwicks, and the rather unambitiously monikered Reservoirs number four and five).

It's a pylontastic stretch) as much of the day was and it wasn't long before we reached the very tempting looking Ferry Boat Inn. With larger groups time tends to be of the essence and my dictatorial tendencies tend to win out and I force people to walk past nice pubs and not go in them. With a smaller, and punctual, group we had time for a much earlier than normal pitstop and very enjoyable it was too.

My phone, now there's a real dictator, tells me we had only walked (as a group ) for forty-three minutes (I'd done over two hours before meeting the others) and that we spent a perfectly reasonable thirty-two minutes in the pub. For the next stretch it would be the best part of two hours and for the final 'slog' just over two hours. That's about five hours of group walking and, for me - by the end of the day - about seven and a half hours of walking in total. 37,649 steps was not a record for the year but it was a decent amount on such a hot day and made a serious dent in my yearly average. I even had the sense to carry some water with me to drink although I didn't, as Pam had suggested when messaging earlier, require any suntan lotion. That can wait for Turkey.

 

The next stretch, it has to be said - and was said - thanks Roxanne, was not quite as scenic - apart, possibly, from the horse. That was near the traveller's camp. There were wrecked cars, flytipped rubbish, a memorial to someone gone too soon, lots of high fences and barbed wire, and a place that offered to train your dog that looked to me, if not the others, a little unwelcoming. 

 

There was, in what one imagines is fairly prime estate, an abandoned - and once clearly impressive - edifice with trees growing out of its windows and near that two rather lovely little houses. After deciding that it was highly unlikely there would be a shortcut through Costco's car park we instead took a bit of a diversion under the A406 which involved crossing a few streams of the Lee in some of their less glamorous aspects and coming out into South Chingford where we'd reach our second pub of the day - The Old Hall Tavern.

It wasn't as nice as The Ferry Boat Inn but it wasn't a bad pub. More a local's place. A pub for watching sport and not a pub for real ale fans. They had none whatsoever. Roxanne and Clive ordered Neck Oils but after the first one came out even that ran out. Clive switched to Amstel and I had a Heineken. We grabbed a table out the front and it started raining.

So we went and sat inside and that pint/pitstop/sit down/toilet break lasted fifty-three minutes. Once done we retraced our steps down to the side of the Lee where we would follow, for some time, a long straight path along the side of the River Lee Navigation. A canal that thinks it's a river? Or a river that think's it's a canal? It certainly feels more like a canal than a river.

There were some pretty flowers, some impressive sky, and some photogenic narrowboats and Dutch barges but there wasn't really much chance to look at reservoirs. We'd probably seen enough reservoirs though for one day. I must say the baby duckling and baby Egyptian goslings were much more impressive and much sweeter.

Eventually we had to come off the towpath and take a diversion on a sort of improvised rubber footpath that went on for quite some distance. We stopped to rest our weary feet underneath one of the pylons and were approached by a friendly security guard who warned us it probably wasn't safe to do that and even offered us alternative seating. 

Instead we carried on to a grassy patch where we had a sit down, even a lie down, in the grass. It was much needed and if it was tough to get back up we had to do it. We didn't have far left. I wasn't going to drag the others around Rammey Marsh to try and see water voles, pipistrelle bats, grass snakes, reed buntings, meadow pipits, skylarks, and linnets on a day like yesterday.

I wasn't even going to do that myself. Instead we left the reservoirs behind on the impressively named Swan and Pike Road. This brought us out by Enfield Lock (first developed around 1812, towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, with the government owned Royal Small Arms Factory) and not far away was our final stop of the day. The Greyhound pub. We followed South Ordnance Road to the pub and because I'd walked up the bank to take a photo I had to walk most of the way high up on the bank like an excited toddler.

The Greyhound pub was another local pub. We sat in a garden that barely deserved the name (more a yard) but at least had a table, chairs, and some shade. A local under-nines football club were hosting an award ceremony in the lounge bar so the pub, and garden/yard (yarden?), were full of both young kids and proud parents.

There were no takers for curry - or other food (though crisps, Taytos too, did appear at the table) - so after one drink (forty-one minutes, thanks for asking) it was about a kilometre back to Enfield Lock station where the three of us jumped on a Greater Anglia train and headed south. Roxanne and Clive jumped off to change at Tottenham Hale and I continued to Stratford where I picked up a Mildmay train to Dalston Kingsland and met with my friend Simon, who had rung earlier, in The Crown & Castle where, over a few pints, we put the world to rights.

We stayed there until just gone midnight and I took the Windrush to Peckham Rye and a bus up the hill home where I attempted to watch some television but fell asleep almost immediately. Hardly surprising after that amount of walking, in that amount of heat, with that amount of beers. It'd been a good day though and, chafing aside - I was walking like John Wayne at one point, I'd thoroughly enjoyed it. LbF go again in August with Riding the Roding II (Wanstead to Loughton) but before that, on the first Saturday of July, TADS are back with a trip, via Pagham Harbour, from Chichester to Bognor Regis. Thanks to Roxanne, Clive, and Simon for being summer solstice walking, and drinking, buddies yesterday.