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At 8.45am, I stroll down the steps of The Queen at Chester hotel and into the midweek flow. The roads are full of delivery vans, the station is lined with taxis and the pavements are busy with commuters. I move among them lightly, a roamer bound for distant lands. Well, distant-ish: I’m a coffee to the good, it’s a warm day, and I’m about 20 strides into a 13-mile hiking trail. A pigeon coo-coos from a pub roof. And so the Baker Way begins.
In the UK, you’re rarely far from a good walk. According to The Ramblers, there are more than 140,000 miles of footpaths, byways and bridleways in England and Wales alone. Some of these are well-used routes through classic beauty spots, but most go nowhere near a mountain ridge, a clifftop or even a national park. This makes them no less valuable.
You can tell a lot about the Baker Way purely from its name. In contrast to the still-under-construction King Charles III England Coast Path, a high-profile trek with a monarchic title, the Baker Way opened in the mid-1980s as a quietly meandering walk in memory of Jack Baker, a former footpaths officer at Cheshire county council.
The path that takes his name is appealing in numerous ways. Beginning at Chester station, it threads from the confines of the city into the Cheshire countryside. It’s also unburdened by crowds, easy to complete in a day and finishes at another station – the wood-shrouded Delamere (with trains to Manchester Piccadilly and Chester) – allowing you to trundle back to the start by direct rail.
Leaving Chester, it doesn’t take long for the trail to start doing its thing. Within a couple of minutes of setting off, I’ve joined the towpath of the Shropshire Union canal. The route passes a steam mill, a Waitrose and a Victorian water tower, then starts to shrug off the city. Willows droop into the water and moorhens fuss around at locks. Narrowboats appear with names that sum up the ambling spirit of the walk: Happy Soul, Foggy’s Notion, Sanity at Last.
“Morning!” comes a greeting, brisk and bell-like. I’m about 20 minutes into the hike and have now reached the Point of Exchanging Hellos. This, as any walker knows, is the moment at which a trail becomes sufficiently rural to warrant a friendly greeting to anyone passing the other way. It’s a two-way endorsement of a mutual activity: we share a path, you and me. We’re walking for the fun of it, and today is ours.
By 10am I’m surrounded by head-high willowherb and swallows are wheeling overhead. Fields of ripening maize unroll to the east. The path signage is typical of a minor UK hiking trail (that is, well intentioned but sporadic) and the countryside is full of thick, green scents. The sky can’t decide whether to be bright or overcast, but my mind’s made up already: this is going to be a good day.
In 1961, Jack Baker was also a founding member of the Mid-Cheshire Footpath Society (MCFS), one of many UK charitable organisations that dedicate their time to championing and maintaining public rights of way. Some of these, such as The Ramblers and Slow Ways, are wide-reaching and well known. Others, such as the MCFS, are more regionally focused. All play their part in ensuring trails such as the Baker Way remain etched into the outdoors for future generations.
“We’ve got more than 1,200 miles of footpaths in Mid-Cheshire,” the current MCFS chairman, David Kendall, tells me later. “We organise two weekly walks and try to cover about a third of the whole network every year, recording and resolving any issues on the paths and reporting to the borough councils where needed. We’ve got about 100 individual members, including about 40 active walkers who volunteer their time to monitor the footpaths.”
It’s a praiseworthy setup. As I reach the midway point of the trail, passing between jungles of ferns, I’m profiting from the miles already in my boots. The usual daily grind – emails and to-do lists – feels more distant by the hour. The path bobs over packhorse bridges, saunters across crop fields and ducks down frothing greenways, dotting my calves with nettle-stings. There’s no one but the chiffchaffs and cabbage whites. I’m a farmland flaneur with a meal deal in my backpack and an ill-folded OS map. It’s a kind of bliss.
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When I arrive in the well-to-do village of Tarvin – leafy streets and timbered houses – it provides an enjoyable pit stop. I re-caffeinate at stylish Cornichon, a high street cafe directly on the route. When I ask the server if many Baker Way walkers call in, he seems puzzled. “Where does that go again?” he says in reply. This is not a trail overwhelmed by hikers.
The route continues to serve up simple joys as it spools out to Delamere, now tight between hawthorn hedgerows and squirrelling through copses. With no fixed timescale to keep to, I walk slowly, enjoying the near-solitude. In a grassy meadow I pass a farm vehicle containing two snoring fence-builders (the Chester siesta?), then get a private showing of two Twiglet-legged foals wobbling across a pasture. When the sun comes out, the light on the path is leaf-dappled.
The Baker Way has no real scenic climax, no cathedrals of rock to gawp at, but that’s not the point. It has stretches of open fields, stretches of middle-of-nowhere lanes and stretches of hushed forest. It’s an escape, pure and simple – a journey away from the nine-to-five via kissing gates and ivy-wrapped fingerposts.
There are, of course, the obligatory drab parts – a couple of busy carriageways to cross, a field where a farmer has planted maize slap-bang across the route, and a pretty risky section of road-walking on the approach to Delamere Forest – but there’s precious little to grumble about. And while the whole walk has less than 215 metres ascent, I still feel pleasantly shattered on arriving at trail’s end. Delamere’s 150-year-old station is all chunky stonework and vintage ad placards, its main building reinvented as a cafe with shaded gardens. I order a cold Cheshire Cat ale and sit there waiting for the hourly train back to the city.
There are hundreds of footpaths like the Baker Way. They get far less fanfare and footfall than the UK’s more famous long-distance paths, but their value is not defined by prestige. When I speak to David Kendall at the MCFS, it’s clear he’s passionate not just about the society’s work, but about the gentle power of the footpaths themselves. “For me, walking a path like the Baker Way is a chance to become more aware of the rhythms of life and the patterns of the seasons. It brings you closer to nature,” he tells me. “That’s why so many of us love walking. It lifts the soul.”
Accommodation was provided by The Queen at Chester hotel, which has doubles from £76 room-only. Mid-Cheshire Footpaths Society has a downloadable booklet for the Baker Way, with route instructions. For more information on walking in the county, visit visitcheshire.com