Rutland Round

Jo and I came to Rutland by accident. It’s a place we had both visited often during our childhood growing up in the neighbouring county of Lincolnshire, and the unitary authority of Peterborough. It only became our home in 2019, when we bought a property in Oakham on something of a whim. We moved in the week before the Covid pandemic lockdown in March 2020, when the work from home directive meant I no longer had any tangible work, and Jo had to be at home. We had a small cottage in Kent with no garden, and the direction of travel with the Johnson Conservative government was only going one way, towards total lockdown. We ran away from Kent with as much of our lives as we could stuff into two cars for an almost empty house in Brooke Road. We had the intention to return south. We didn’t.

One of the things that people valued most during the pandemic was their period of daily exercise. It was jealously guarded and surprisingly well adopted. The silence except for the birdsong, the occasional lawn mower, crossing the road to avoid other humans all encouraged greater participation in exercise and connection with nature. Sadly, for most people those habits have been lost as quickly as they were started.

For us, this meant walking the paths around the southern fringes of Oakham. Weekdays would be shorter excursions due to Jo’s work from home commitments, but at weekends we ventured further afield. We were struck by how many paths there were across the landscape, and how well signed they were. Our walks usually started from home and radiated across Rutland, occasionally crossing the border into Leicestershire. Inevitably Brooke Road featured heavily as we lived along the road. Inspired by David Hockney’s Arrival of Spring series, I documented the arrival of spring along Brooke Road in the third period of Covid restrictions from January to June 2021. The resulting imagery and diary entries became a self-published book. Those influences are how I arrived at the Rutland Round.

On our excursions out, we came across way markers for many paths which raised our interest in where the routes started and finished. Further research brought us to the Rutland Round devised by John Williams. We are very much indebted to him for his dedication to bring the walk into existence over a quarter of a century ago and for the detailed guide we have carried with us on our journeys around the county. The route has changed little in that time.

Trees have grown much larger and some have succumbed to the ravages of climate and disease. Young hedges have matured and been laid. The Osprey Project has taken flight, and has had over 300 youngsters born at nest sites around the county. Time ticks by quickly but we are reminded by the discovery of a 180 million year old sea dragon skeleton at the Rutland Water Nature Reserve that life in Rutland goes back way beyond our fleeting dalliance here.