Wilderspool Causeway

Bracknell is not the most accessible place to run to, or the easiest place to leave. If you need to go for a run and complete one of your final Christmas purchases, though, but don’t want to drive through traffic, one of your options is to trot over there and back, culminating in being caught on one of the embankments of the Coppid Beach Roundabout, sandwiched between the A329(M) slip road and a muddy access route to nowhere, entangled in barbed wire and thorn bushes while hanging on to a tree so as not to slip onto the carriageway.

I started off, as usual, running along Old Forest Road with the motorway to my left across the fields and the dismal industrial units of Toutley Road straight ahead. This road now merges into a new road (Queens Road – note the lack of apostrophe) which leads to Twyford Road and the entrance to Cantley Park. Another option would normally be Bell Foundry Lane, but this is closed ‘except for access’ as all the land around it has been sold off for the construction of unaffordable homes (UH).

‘Except for access’ wouldn’t normally be a deterrent as you could access the road in order to leave it again at the other end. It looked pretty hazardous though, so I chose a route alongside the intensely waterlogged goalmouths of Cantley Park to a dog walkers’ lane leading to Wiltshire Road. Incidentally, part of Wokingham was once considered to be in Wiltshire rather than Berkshire: Cross Street outside The Ship used to be a boundary between the counties.

Wiltshire Road then merges with Warren House Road which eventually leads to The Warren, a sort of upmarket chain pub with little character. It’s the kind of place which has muted green paint on exposed wood as if to honour some kind of consensus nobody remembers being party to. Instead of turning towards The Warren, though, I continued to Keephatch Road, running on  driveways to avoid the inevitable dog walking couple who somehow become more than the sum of their parts, slowing and stopping at confusing angles while doing little to constrain the animal. Once at the end of Keephatch, I opted to run down Binfield Road, a lovely country road generally untroubled by traffic or building work. However, at the A329(M) bridge, this route was blocked with unmistakable finality by a high fence and a sign which simply said ‘road closed’. Turning back, I followed Binfield Road down to its junction with London Road, between St Crispin’s and The Three Frogs.

Crossing London Road, I decided to run down Priest Avenue. When doing this, don’t make the mistake of turning down Froghall Drive – Wokingham’s Bermuda Triangle: houses seem to bar access to a lake at the far end and once you realise that, you’ve lost time you won’t be able to recover. Priest Avenue, though, leads directly to Waterloo Road and away from Wokingham’s gravitational field. Ordinarily I would turn right towards Ludgrove, but this time turned left and immediately over the railway line onto a country road past Oakwood, a climbing centre with a Christian twist, and onto Peacock Lane.

You reach Bracknell quickly from here, as evident by an awful lot of UH and some contrived areas of ‘Open Space’. Any little patch of greenery is marked by a railing and a sign to tell you it’s there. Pretty soon, you see the Fujitsu building – a pleasing landmark – and it doesn’t take long to reach it, with a dilemma on your hands: do you just keep going into the wilderness of Wildridings, through Bill Hill Bronze Age Barrow, do you look left and hope there’s a way to somewhere meaningful through the gigantic network of Waitrose buildings or do you nip down onto a secluded, fenced-off path alongside the A3095? To find your way through Wildridings would be an absolute nightmare, but the secluded path and the Waitrose depots aren’t really enticing options either. In the end, I went down onto the path and upped the pace a bit for a kilometre or two, emerging from the huge underpass of the Twin Bridges roundabout to see a large Morrison’s sign which indicated the far end of The Peel Centre.

Sports Direct purchase secured, it was now 2 p.m. and I needed to be back in Emmbrook by 3:30 to facilitate a trip to Sainsbury’s in Winnersh to pick up some things for Iris before 4. However, I now had a bag and my muscles had ‘seized up a bit’ or at least felt too jaded now to be fired up to run and swing the bag around. I therefore didn’t run or jog back but opted for a fast walk. I had to slightly improvise the route though, as I didn’t want to end up entangled in a hazardous thicket on a verge of the Coppid Beach Roundabout. I knew that something like this would happen if I ended up near Amen Corner, John Nike or The Coppid Beach Hotel. I therefore decided to go back via the Binfield area, vaguely near to Warren House/Twyford Road and the beginning of the journey.

Walking as quickly as I could, I soon reached Newbold College with its symbol of an open bible with a flame rising from the pages. Whereas Wokingham’s faith expressions seem predominantly CofE, Bracknell’s seem adapted to sometimes wild effect. Perhaps you have to adapt in unusual ways to gain mystical traction here. Turning down Foxley Lane, I intended to go cross country back to the Keephatch type area. Taking another left down ‘Murrell Hill Lane’, I asked an American where the path led. He said ‘all the way to the main road – the 329’. With him being American and saying ‘main road’, I assumed he meant the A329(M) on the other side of the Coppid Beach area and that there’d be an overpass or way to safely cross it. Why I assumed this, I don’t know as it clearly wasn’t what he’d said, and the only place to safely cross the A329(M) would’ve been via Binfield Road – the one I’d been barred access to earlier. The more I walked down this ‘Murrell Hill Lane’ thing, the more I wondered if I was going back in the direction I’d come from.

This proved to be the case when I got on the London Road – the ‘329’ – near The Coppid Beach Hotel: exactly the scenario I wanted to avoid. With the time constraint, there was nothing for it but to press on and cross the roundabout. I’d done it before, but couldn’t remember how. As you approach it, you have the option to go up an elevated residential road. Right at the end of this, overlooking the roundabout, is Coppid Beach House and a sign saying ‘public footpath’. You couldn’t see where the path would end, but it should have been obvious, what with the dual carriageway and large roundabout beneath it. What’s more, the turf wasn’t exactly conducive to walking – it was the light brown, squelchy stuff bordered by green and darker brown which looks flat and innocuous until it gives way beneath you as you step on it. In the back of my mind, I remembered I’d asked my mum for some new running trainers so was hoping this could be my current pair’s last outing. If I retraced my steps, I may have found a safer way to cross the roundabout, but would definitely have missed the 3:30 deadline.

Slip sliding in the mud, I therefore edged towards the littered verge of the dual carriageway and stepped over some barbed wire to edge my way down the thorny bank, keeping an eye to the right for cars flying around the corner. I then grabbed a non thorny tree so as not to slip, and tried to keep my centre of gravity low in case that happened. After a little while I got down onto the side of the road and over it to the vast and peaceful concrete centre of the roundabout. If you’ve ever tried to access St Anne’s Manor from here though, you’ll know there’s a little more to do. You then have to walk along a very narrow grass bank which drops off into undergrowth; when a bus or lorry passes, stand still and brace yourself for the afterwaft. Once at St Anne’s Manor though,  a path appears again and you just have to press on past a lot of UH around Loch Fyne and stomp back to Wokingham.

As with its faith expressions, Bracknell’s interpretation of what people are looking for in new housing seems unusual, bordering on the bizarre at times. As a ‘new town’,  perhaps there’s a sense that they can just let go. One of the new developments looks like a multi-storey car-park on a major roundabout and another – called ‘Blu living’ or something – looks like a student halls of residence with a ‘fresh-air social nucleus’ in a development that ‘encourages growth and prosperity.’ Eh? They admit their attempts at social engineering, welcoming ‘ambitious executives’ while ‘deterring the less welcome.’ Once in Wokingham town centre, it was a case of taking every shortcut I knew (Cross Street, Rose Street, Rose Walk) to get onto Glebelands, Milton and then Matthewsgreen Road for some urgent strides home.