Delights and Surprises in Tring Park

A stimulating walk from Tring up into the wooded Chilterns and back through Tring Park.

Distance 5.5 miles (8.8km)

Minimum time 2hrs 30min

Ascent/gradient 335ft (102m)

Level of difficulty Medium

Paths Pavements, footpaths, 3 stiles

Landscape Arable farmland, historic parkland, woods

Suggested map aqua3 OS Explorer 181 Chiltern Hills North

Start/finish SP 925114

Dog friendliness Largely arable country, but horses in fields around Wigginton and cattle graze in Tring Park

Parking Car park at east end of Tring High Street (except market day, Friday)

Public toilets At car park

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Directions
Background
Information

1 Walk along the High Street from the car park, passing the church, to turn left at the crossroads down to Akeman Street and the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum. At Park Street turn right, then go left, up Hastoe Lane, to climb out of Tring and under the A41 bypass.

2 Just beyond the bridge turn right at a footpath sign, 'Hastoe'. Beyond the A41 cutting, at a gate and stile, you bear left to climb the ridge, with a hedge on your left. On reaching Stubbing's Wood, follow its edge initially, then enter it. At a path fork bear right - the route is marked by arrows on trees. Pass a footpath sign, 'Shire Lane Pavis Wood', then descend to a sunken way and turn left along it. Climb towards a gateway and out of the woodland. Continue along a metalled lane. At the junction turn left, briefly on to the Ridgeway National Trail along Gadmore Lane. Leaving the Trail at a crossroads, turn right on to Browns Lane, a metalled bridleway.

3 Turn left at a footpath crossroads on to the Chiltern Way. Follow Grim's Ditch, with its bank and ditch, sometimes impressive and sometimes barely discernible. After about 1¼ miles (2km) go through a kissing gate on to Chesham Road.

4 Turn right at the road, then left through a kissing gate, still on the Chiltern Way. When you reach a lane turn left. At an electricity sub-station turn right. The Chiltern Way veers right but here you leave it, instead following the left-hand hedge, to a hedge gap and a waymarker post. Cross a dry valley - the church belfry is visible opposite. At the hedge line head diagonally left into cattle pasture. Through a kissing gate turn right on to Chesham Road and proceed to Wigginton Church.

5 From the church head north along the Twist, winding downhill as far as the Ridgeway National Trail signs. Turn left to follow this Trail to just beyond a pair of Rothschild estate cottages (Ladderstile and Westwood cottages). Here the Trail turns left but you go straight on, into the woods of Tring Park.

6 At a cross path turn right to the Temple or Summer Pavilion. Head west to the Obelisk. Still in woodland, continue downhill to a kissing gate. Bear right here, into superb cattle-grazed, 18th-century parkland, to head for a footbridge over the A41. Across the bridge follow the footpath back into Tring - the route is clear, near the town being mainly between high walls - emerging in the High Street.

The quite remarkable historic parkland of Tring Park is the centrepiece of this walk. Even though construction of the A41 Tring bypass in 1974 cut it in two, many of the features shown on a 1729 map of the park have survived. The house on the north side of the bypass dates from the late 1670s. Sir Christopher Wren designed it for Henry Guy (Groom of the Bedchamber to Charles II). There is now little about it to suggest Wren's contibution because, in the 1870s, Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild bought the estate and added the French-style pavilion roofs and other 'enrichments'.

With regard to the parkland, in 1705 the great Charles Bridgeman, the foremost garden and landscape designer of the day, was called in by the son of the then owner, Sir William Gore. Bridgeman planted formal, double avenues that led slightly east of south from the house towards the escarpment ridge. Although these have gone, having been replaced by less formal, later 18th- and 19th-century tree plantings, the delineation of an avenue running south west from the house survives. The trees themselves are known to have been replanted as a lime avenue in 1836, which is now interrupted by the footbridge over the bypass.

Your route enters the park from Wigginton, in woodland that is today managed by the Woodland Trust. Here you are in the south eastern corner of the park, Bridgeman's so-called 'Wilderness'. The avenues of yews and limes were laid out as long ago as the 1720s. The avenues focus on two remarkable structures, both part of the original scheme. The first you see is the Summer Pavilion or Temple. Its architect was probably James Gibbs, whose work included St Martin's in the Fields in Trafalgar Square and several garden buildings at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The Summer Pavilion, or Temple, is just a portico with a pediment - it has no rooms behind the back wall. From here you look down an avenue to the Obelisk, also probably by Gibbs. This is supposed to be a monument to Charles II's celebrated mistress, Nell Gwynn - or possibly her dog. Beyond the Wilderness the route descends to fine parkland before the footbridge over the bypass. Leaving Tring at the start of this walk you pass the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, now a part of the Natural History Museum. Part of the route also follows the earthwork, Grim's Ditch.

What to look for

St Peter and St Paul Church, Tring, is a large mainly 15th-century town church. This does not prepare you for the astonishingly massive and sumptuous monument to Sir William Gore of Tring Park that faces you across the nave after you enter. Gore died in 1707 and the monument, oozing smug complacency and arrogance, depicts him in his robes as Lord Mayor of London, his wife reclining beside him.

While you're there

In 1889, when Nathan Mayer Rothschild, First Baron Rothschild, gave his son Walter a lavish 21st birthday present he could hardly have envisaged what it would be today: the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum. Housed in fine, 1890s buildings, it is one of the best such collections in the world, retaining many of the original glass cases. There are thousands of specimens - mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and insects - to see. When Walter Rothschild died in 1937 he gave it to the nation.and it is now open to the public.

Where to eat and drink

Tring has, of course, a wide choice for eating and drinking. Two pubs in the High Street are a total contrast. The Rose and Crown was rebuilt by the Rothschilds in 1905 in an over-scaled and grandiose timber-frame style. The Bell, a brick refronted, 17th-century, timber-framed coaching inn is much more homely and welcoming.