Station Road, Edingley

 

It’s a tight right-angle corner, turning left off the main road into Station Road, Edingley. It’s also a blind spot, as my view is blocked by the corner house from traffic arriving at the T-junction from the side road, so I approach with caution. The third property in the short row of terraced houses is called Railway Cottage. This is somewhat optimistic, as is the street name, itself. From here it is probably a good twenty-minutes-walk, or so, to Edingley station house where the railway used to be.  

In fact, Kirklington and Edingley station was neither in Kirklington or Edingley, but roughly half-way between the two, as was the case for many other country stations in Britain. Railways tended to link towns as directly as possible, rather than cater directly for the needs of smaller settlements in between. That often meant a bit of a stretch before local inhabitants could catch the train.

Station Road runs east-north-east, parallel to Edingley Beck and its riverside footpath. It is separated from it by a string of houses and gardens. It’s an attractive part of anyone’s bike ride, passing former farmworker’ cottages, an elegant row of properties that look Edwardian in style but maybe younger, a handful of council houses and bungalows and some splendidly individual and no doubt sought-after more modern residences complete with their traditional pan-tiled rooves, before one or two old farms and then open countryside.

The lane immediately narrows, which can sometimes cause a problem. My progress is halted by two cars stopped facing each other with no obvious space left on either side for me to pass. Their drivers are both seated with windows down and engaged in earnest conversation as I pull up. Surely not road rage here. I’m looking to see if I can squeeze round on either side to make my get-away from the scene before I became embroiled as a witness to a possible assault. I always look on the bright side of things at times like this. There is no obvious way past. The young man with his girlfriend in the smaller car seems to be behaving reasonably and he has clearly not raised his voice. The older man, who is on his own, with his Volvo Estate sprawling across most of the road and who has obviously, from his current position, made no real effort to slow down in advance or move over sufficiently in the first place to enable the two of them to pass each other comfortably, is blatantly trying to put him on the spot. “I drive it every day,” the young man replies, somewhat exasperated, at the same time being as defensive and indignant as he can without being unnecessarily provocative. After we have all been seated for a further couple of minutes, including me on my saddle, the girlfriend notices me waiting and the young man suddenly reverses a few yards rather jerkily allowing me to escape. I leave them to it. There is no sign of them when I return that way some twenty minutes later. I look down for any noticeable patches of blood on the road but there is no evidence as to how it had been resolved or who had eventually given way.

Then its on past the largest building on Station Road. The care home was a building site for months as it completely morphed into a much larger version of its former self. A sizable notice outside the gates during the Covid years told passers-by that they might like to enquire about the availability of short-term stays. I suppose that black humour in the darkest of times takes some bottle, really.

I’m in the countryside proper now, passing Conker Lane, as the track to the farm and camp site is known, for obvious reasons. When conkers were currency and at a premium in the built-up area that I lived in as a child, one could only have dreamt of the treasures lying over-looked and abandoned in Conker Lane at that special time every year. 

On the right is the only real eyesore in Station Road. This is obviously a current trend - piles of aggregate. Farmers used to just grow crops and keep animals. This is the second such relatively recent blight to spoil [literally] one of my frequent circuits. It started at the top of the field with a heavily padlocked gate on the back lane, beyond which piles of multi-coloured stones suddenly sprouted - broken bricks and rubble, dark topsoil, grey building material, sands and gravel. Pretty much anything, really, though once the grass verge there had become so churned up by visiting lorries that it had become a quagmire in wet weather, and the edges of the road surface had started to disintegrate from the weight of HGVs turning out in a confined space, the heaps of stone began to shrink, only to appear again at the bottom of the hill right next to Station Road. Now, in addition to the dumps themselves, there is a mobile home, odd lorries, a freight container, some JVCs and a skip, plus a brand new open-sided steel barn plonked right on the skyline. It’s a complete mess. It beggars’ belief to me that it is allowed to happen in an otherwise unspoiled rural landscape with no previous industrial activity. Can somebody explain to me how that is allowed to happen, please?

At the cross-roads there are road signs warning users about icy surfaces, as the junction is in a dip and hidden from the sun for much of the day by a row of tall trees. They’ve even added slightly raised, corrugated tarmac ridges to the road surface to aid adhesion and channel some water away.

Though it doesn’t say so, Station Road presumably takes a left here as that’s the way to the station. The fields here are periodically occupied by alpacas, sheep, horses and donkeys, with crops, including wheat and bright yellow rape, in the fields that meet at the corner. This is also a good spot for owls, both barn and little. The smaller version took up residence in some wooden sheds alongside a field boundary for a few years and then spent a lot of time surveying the surrounding ground from the tops of the telegraph poles that line the road.

The admirably re-surfaced and winding road to the station now passes a single old farmhouse in the approach to the bridge over the railway’s track bed. When I first started cycling past here it was occupied by an elderly couple who kept a small-holding. The front door was always wide open and the ducks, geese and hens that wandered the road outside had open access to the house as well. You could see them through the windows, prancing around on the dining room table and the rest of the furniture. The somewhat dishevelled two-some were the perfect match for their dilapidated farmhouse and their menagerie. By then, I think they had become an engrained part of the local folklore. Sadly, it was eventually reported that they had died within a short time of each other and that a younger couple had taken over the place. I fancy that they must have got very fed up with being stared at by every passing driver, cyclist and rambler, as everyone had habitually done until they had realised that there were new occupants.

I’ve reached the station at last, except that I’m very nearly 100 years too late to catch the last passenger train. Coal trains continued to roll down the slope towards the Trent through the decades that followed, and no doubt the odd pick-up goods would have still called by to interrupt the peace and quiet, collecting farm produce and dropping off timber and other supplies.

The shallow and under-stated valley of the Edingley Beck remains a picturesque and tranquil location, though, sadly, although lapwings and skylarks do their best to announce the arrival of spring, turtle doves and cuckoos no longer seem to be in the mix.