 Hello, thanks for joining me. I'm out on the Shelton Hills today just outside Great Missingdon in Buckinghamshire. On today's walk what we're going to do we're going to find the source of the river Misborne and over today and in the next couple of days I'm going to follow it all the way to its confluence with the river Colm down near Denham. So we're just going through this gate. Here we have the Great Central Main Line which once ran all the way from Marilynburn up to Sheffield and beyond now it's just served by Chilton Railways on their service as far as Ellesbury Vale Parkway but there are plans to reopen some of it further to the north but we'll do a separate video on that when that happens. So we're going to go under the track bed of the old Great Central Main Line so once upon a time you've seen steam expressways running up towards Nottingham and Manchester Sheffield etc. You'd have also seen the Metropolitan Line trains from Verley Junction because this was also once part London Underground, this bit of railway line now London Underground, Metropolitan Line, there goes Father Lamisham. But this video isn't really going to be a railway video as I said we're going to follow the river Misborne but as it starts so close to the Great Central Main Line I just thought I have to show it. So we're going to follow it all the way as I said I've always been fascinated by rivers in a similar way to how railways are. They make their way through towns and countryside, they connect things up and I've just always had a fascination for them. Now the river Misborne, it runs about 15 miles or so, it starts here, it's just starting to rain. This is Mobwell Pond. Now the river Misborne is a chalk stream. We have already done a video on its tributaries in Chatham St Peter so have a look out for that one, there's a link in the screen now. We looked at the tributaries, this is the main river now you look at this pond it's quite a nice large pond. Now I've never ever seen this much water in being a chalk stream a natural thing with chalk streams is they do dry up they flow intermittently so say if it was dried up now and it rained a lot tomorrow you might get sort of run off off the road but it would take a long time for that rain to filter through and make the river flow. Now from what I know at the moment it's flowing most of the way through so further up as we will discover I've discovered parts of the river is dried up but here it's flowing which I'm really pleased about it's quite often it flows in parts of Great Missingdon in Amisham but it is quite rare to see it at water at the source especially this much so this is Mobwell Pond so it's really quite a big pond. Great Missingdon, the edges of Great Missingdon are just there so we're about half a mile away from the town centre I'm going to carry on there's a footpath just up over there and we shall find some more of the River Missbourne on the way to the town centre. So I'm now walking down the footpath in the rain from just by Mobwell Pond and we're heading towards Great Missingdon town centre and what happens here oh here's the river I almost couldn't see it there there you go there's the so this is really how the River Missbourne looks for much of its course just through through the fields of Buckinghamshire down the Missbourne Valley I think this is just going to be a passing rain shower so I'm not going to let it bother me I'm just going to carry on really so yeah I just wanted to show you the first section of rural River Missbourne before it gets to Great Missingdon town centre so we just come upstream about a quarter of a mile from where we'd asked for we're just coming now like I said back there we'll be coming to the edges of Great Missingdon now I get to this rather pleasant place here it's called Bogs Meadow I hope I'm pronouncing that right there we go there's a very interesting interpretation board tells you a lot about the wildlife and the plants you can see here so the Missbourne is just here flowing under this concrete bridge and then along here so like I said I don't think I've ever seen water in this section of the for so for me I'm really pleased that you know I can see this with water it's it is a shame it doesn't flow so often there have been problems with companies taking water out the river which hasn't helped although that does make me think it I'm not sure where they took the water out but if they were taking it out further up why would it affect it here but it is also part of the natural way a short stream is formed is that they they just do dry up intermittently um because they depend on you know water in the water table so if there's no water then they don't flow and so if you have like a long period of no rain it might not happen now but later on they'll end up being no water then you'll get like when you get that couple of weeks in sort of March where it rains constantly that might not do anything till September so what happens here the river goes into a culvert just up there and it takes it underneath a park so what I'll do I'll go over there and um I'll show you we won't see the river but we'll be standing on top of the river so I've now come into the park now this line you can sort of see where the grass is a bit dead that is where the river is in a culvert below my feet um so really it's culverted all the way from just the other side of those trees right the way down to um well then it becomes private gardens so I'm not exactly sure where the culvert emerges personally I don't know why it needs to be culverted because I think if they dug all this up it could the river could be the centerpiece of this park I appreciate over there where there's a car park on the road yes culverted it there but could they not open this up and you know to me I just think it would look really nice really nice center piece of the park if you know why they can't do that or why they chose to culvert it here you know please comment let me know I'm now going to carry on walking in that direction and try and find the river where we can actually see it so here I am now in a rather attractive part of great missingdon town center now that's for the river being in a culvert well what happened I noticed when I got to the end of the culvert I was talking about I could just sort of catch a glimpse through the hedge of the river um out of the culvert but it wasn't really anywhere you know I couldn't really film it through the hedge so I've carried on here let me show you this building here this is the abbey farmhouse and over there was great missingdon abbey or missingdon abbey rather the abbey was founded in um 11 33 I believe by I think his name was William the missingdon so there was an abbey on the site it's eventually you know got dissolved as monasteries do it became a stately home and um oh hello there's the river look don't think you can see it but the river emerges here and flows along there so those people there who live in that house they have a river underneath them we're going to carry on into the abbey into the abbey's parkland um we're just just you can see what we're doing we are also going to be for a bit of time following the south buck's way so we'll leave the end of great missingdon town center behind us the main street the shops on is just up there there's also a railway station in great missingdon on the great central main line opened in 1892 these lovely cottages so where we're going to now we're going into the great missingdon or the missingdon abbey estate so it became a stately home it burnt down in about 1985 it's been restored it's now a conference center an agile education college so it's really quite a nice estate we'll see the building and you can walk through and there's the big lake which we shall see more of in a moment so i'm going to carry on up here to where we can access um the missingdon abbey estate so on my way into the missingdon abbey estate i thought i just come up here quickly and show you the parish church of st peter and st paul and how it's a little way from the town center you know not far a lot not even really a quarter of a mile away but it's kind of outside the town center now all of the land around here the one's been part of missingdon abbey now you may be able to hear the traffic here is a bypass the great missingdon bypass so in order to get to the church they come up this little lane as they probably always would have done except they have to cross the bypass now there's an interesting rumour that when they were building the bypass they discover the tunnel from the church down to the abbey now i'm not sure how true that is but supposedly somewhere down there there is a tunnel was apparently as they were digging you know they broke through this tunnel which um you know it'd be it'd be really cool if they hadn't been broken through and you could still go up and down it i'm not sure how true that is but to me you know it would be believable that a place like that could exist i'm now going to go down these steps here and um we're going to go and find the river missbourne again in the missingdon abbey estate so here we are in the missingdon abbey parkland and just down in front of us is warren water the big ornamental lake that was dug out and over there that's missingdon abbey so that's it in its um sort of later guys as a stately home i think there are some fragmentary remains of the abbey inside the house from what i've been told so um maybe one day it'd be nice to go around those gardens and make a video there something that's something we might do in the future if um i'm not sure if they ever do open the gardens for public to go and have a look around but you know if they do if anyone from the abbey is watching if your gardens are open to the public i'd be quite happy to come and have a look around make a video so let's just follow warren water it's a lovely big lake now i believe it kind of there would have been ponds here you know for the monks for fish because quite often abbeys monasteries do have their own fish ponds and as we already know there was a farm because we saw the beautiful old abbey farmhouse it's really nice to see this much water in it i think i have seen sort of a trickle flowing through the middle but i've also seen this completely dried up when you see this much water in it it to me it's hard for me to sort of think i've seen this dried up i've i've walked i've stood where those ducks are except obviously a bit lower and um so yeah it's great to see that it's completely full again and just up there there's a bridge where the weir ends and then what i should do i'll carry on through the abbey parkland because the river you know makes its way meanders through the parkland and um before it gets to the railway there's one more lake so at the end of the abbey parkland it eventually crosses the great central main line only crosses two railways in its course we'll come on to the other one so you can gather it's the children main line but we'll talk about that in a later video so got to the end here it's a very beautiful place this feels a bit like i'm in a national trust property and this is the wider part there's a bit of a shame the road's been put through the parkland because you could have once walked all the way on up there but unfortunately you can't do that so let's go through here and um carry on to where the bridge over the river is and we have a fallen tree in the river but this is the end of warren water now there's a slight problem with the bridge it appears with two of lost it's um it's flat so it looks like what i'm going to have to do i'm going to have to get over the fence and go through the stepping zone so just a moment i should stop filming across the fence so i just went back ran around to where the gate was and now i'm on this side of the fence so there's a beautiful bridge with no slats so now how am i going to get across so there's these down here is the stepping stone so it makes a bit of an adventure or it is Henry's adventure i suppose so here we are here's the the stepping stones the river me and is off down there now as i said i want to go to the end of the parkland excuse me and i'll just swap camera from one hand to another one and negotiate stepping stones there we go i want to go to the end of the parkland and um we shall end the video down there but yeah this is the end of Warren water really really pleasant place it's um yeah you can come on the train from London up to great Missingdon and come and do this walk yourself so i'm going to follow the river onto the other lake at the other end of the Missingdon Abbey parkland so i've now been walking for about half a mile through the very pleasant Missingdon Abbey parkland here's the river just here now as i said it turns into another lake which is just here so i'm not too sure about this one whether this one was to me the one by the abbey was more obviously an ornamental lake but i wonder if it's kind of been derived from the fishing pools for the abbey now this one to me looks more like it could have been fishing pools for the abbey i'm not sure so anyone watching knows wants to comment tell me please do interestingly i'm just seeing that tree there there's some some masonry in there i'm going to i was going to cross that log but trying to do that with the camera might be easier said than done i'm going to follow the lake around this way you can see where where it goes to so be up here i know the next bit beyond here is where the river is going to become a bit more difficult to access because you've got the old metropolitan and great central mainline first and there is a lake or a pond each side of the trap bed because i've seen it from when you go on the train but the one this side of the trap bed i think without going on the train it would be very difficult for me to show that so you even from on the train you'd probably only get a glimpse maybe in the winter when you know there's not so many leaves on the trees so yes this one looks to me more like it could have been have a monastic origin rather than the other one back there but i might be wrong so you know do comment and tell me but then once you get across the railway you've got the deep mill pond which is where a mill once stood again i think that's going to be rather hard to show you so what i'll probably do is this video will end when we get to here and in the next video we'll go to Little Missingdon a village not too far from here about a mile away and we'll be able to see a lot more of the river there and from there we can pretty much follow the river all the way through amisham through the chow fonts and on to denham so yeah i'm just going to carry on walking till i find the end of this lake so i've just come along here and here we are at the end of this lake just there it goes down a little waterfall and then it goes under the road and it goes through the grounds of the chilton hospital and eventually it goes under the railway and the next point where we'll be able to see it will be its suffix bridge in Little Missingdon so that's where we'll start part two there's a little weir down there so the river flows off down there so um hope you enjoyed this video thank you very much for watching please do feel free to like subscribe share comment tell your friends tell anyone you know you think might be interested and in part two we shall continue our adventure along river miss gorm thanks for watching goodbye