Ride along the river

We went for a very nice bike ride in sunny Hertfordshire last Sunday, bowling along quiet roads with surprisingly open views - for some reason there weren't so many hedges, and so the golden fields of ripening wheat border straight onto the roads, and you can see for miles across them and the rolling countryside.

On the way back we took a short cut along what looked like a quiet track between fields, with a ford crossing the river about halfway along. I vaguely wondered why the map showed the word 'Ford' written lengthways down the road, and why the river was marked running along the same line as the road. That can't be right, I thought.

But the Ordnance Survey had - as they most often do - got it spot on. The River Ash does indeed run along exactly the same course as pretty, high-banked, tree-lined Violets Lane. Luckily it isn't a very big river, and is actually dry along some stretches, but in places it was quite definitely waterlogged, knee-deep and bedded in sticky soft sand. We splashed our way through by a combination of pedalling and falling in. It was brilliant. And then at the other end, feeling just like explorers making it alive out of a jungle, we found a wonderfully helpful notice to point out where the road finally went its separate way from the river, just in case by that point we'd forgotten what a proper road did.