Walking the Wychert Way
A beautiful fieldpath walk in rural Buckinghamshire, taking in Haddenham and five other wychert villages
The Wychert Way is a circular walk located in a delightful part of the Vale of Aylesbury. It passes very close to Haddenham in Buckinghamshire, and embraces various other local villages, including Chearsley, Cuddington, Dinton, Ford, Aston Sandford and Kingsey. The complete circular walk is approximately 12 miles in length, but it can be accessed at various points near the villages listed, as well as from some local roads with suitable parking facilities, and so can be enjoyed in sections by those looking to cover shorter distances.
The walk offers an attractive experience of the Buckinghamshire countryside, with splendid views of the Chiltern hills, and offers relatively easy and level walking. Generous grants made by Bucks County Council, the Haddenham Beer Festival Trustees, Aylesbury & District Ramblers and various individuals have enabled local enthusiasts to way-mark the Wychert Way and replace many styles with new 'kissing gates', thus making the route even easier for those who find climbing styles to be rather challenging.
What is 'Wychert'?
In Haddenham and a belt of villages west of Aylesbury are a number of villages whose cottages have rendered walls. These are mostly built in 'witchert', Buckinghamshire's version of the cob or earth-wall construction more usually associated with Devon and Dorset. Still used in this part of Bucks until the 1920s, witchert is a corruption of 'white earth' which roughly describes the lime rich sub soil that lies above the Portland Limestone belt that passes through the Vale of Aylesbury.