Walking to Camelot by John A. Cherrington Page A

Fotheringhay, where Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned and tried before being beheaded on February 8, 1587. The famous Talbot Hotel in nearby Oundle has a macabre link with Fotheringhay Castle, as the main staircase of the hotel is the very one Mary descended at the castle on the way to her death; her ghost is still seen retracing those final steps. (The staircase was installed in the Talbot when it was rebuilt in 1626, at the time of the castle’s demolition.) Mary’s executioner lodged in this inn the night before he performed his grisly duty.
    The wind picks up as we march along, and great sweeping views across Rutland Water open up through the trees. Waves are being churned into whitecaps, the sky changing from an oyster-shell hue to angry, inky blotches of nimbus rolling in from the North Sea.
    â€œDirty weather coming, John,” says Karl. “We better hoof it to our lodgings.”
    The Rutland Water reservoir is a vast nature reserve that is the breeding site for numerous species. It is also a fisherman’s mecca. The surrounding landscape is one of gentle, undulating wolds and alternating flat, grassy fields. Once heavily populated, the hundreds of lost and deserted villages in the vicinity attest to the ravages of the Black Death in the fourteenth century.
    Rutland Water was a low-lying region of marsh and lake prior to 1976, when it was flooded and transformed into a reser-voir 4.19 square miles in area, making it England’s second-largest lake after Windermere, in the Lake District. Some twenty thousand wild birds reside here year-round, and countless others stop over while on migration. The prized bird to spot is the osprey, which was introduced in 1996; breeding couples now return annually to raise their young. This magnificent bird boasts a five-foot wingspan at maturity.
    Wetlands to the west of Rutland Water are now a nature reserve which is home to the Anglian Water Birdwatching Centre. The British Birdwatching Fair is held here annually, the largest of its kind in Europe. I am told that two of the highlights of the recent summer exhibition were the killer cat and stuffed canary carpet displays (not at all politically correct). The fair is the birdwatchers’ equivalent to the Glastonbury music festival.
    Heavy gusts of wind and rain are now upon us. Karl disappears from sight ahead of me and I don’t catch up to him for a good half hour, when I find him standing motionless at the outskirts of our destination village in front of an official-looking sign which reads: “Whitwell — twinned with Paris.”
    Our B&B host is Julie, a bubbly, athletic woman in her forties who keeps a trim cottage with her husband and two collies. My first question to her pertains to the opening hours of the Noel Arms village pub. My second question relates to the funny sign.
    â€œIs this some joke, or is it a different Paris?”
    It transpires that Julie is uniquely qualified to answer both questions, because she and her husband at one time managed the Noel Arms. She gives me a newspaper — the
Daily Mail
from August 18, 1992 — that exploded the Whitwell story onto the national stage.
    â€œSome cars skidded into the hedge,” we read, “but mostly they pulled back slowly, and had their pictures taken at the sign. You see these places everywhere, and often nobody’s heard of the city’s twin before. All it ever means is that officials get a trip once in a while to drink wine for several days and visit the local sewage farm.”
    The Whitwell village elders, led by Sam Healey, proprietor of the Noel Arms, voted to twin Whitwell with Paris. They then erected the signage, and patiently waited for the mayor of Paris, Monsieur Jacques Chirac, to visit, as is the custom with the twinning of cities. Finally, the Whitwell elders received a reply from Chirac’s office advising they had never heard of Whitwell. The letter was a little on the frosty side; in fact,