I ticked off Arbury Hill, the high point of Historic Northamptonshire, back in 2013. This was my early days of peak-bagging and I was doing a few drive-bys and quick walks on the way to a work trip in Melton Mowbray. At the time I didn’t stray from public rights-of-way into private land so I got as close to Arbury Hill’s summit as possible on the footpath and considered it ticked.
Several years later my friends and I started our annual County Top long weekends to bag the furthest peaks from home. My “non-completion” of Arbury Hill became a constant source of debate during those weekends. For a while I insisted that I had definitely bagged Arbury due to my non-trespassing policy. I got as close as possible on public routes so I was done. Right?
They weren’t having it and 2 of them had made successful summits of Arbury without difficulties. One had got the land-owner’s permission and the other just went there. By our 2022 Scotland Trip I had decided that I needed to return to Arbury to resolve the dispute. My plan was to turn up, ask the land-owner for permission if I could find them and if not just do it, but be discreet and not disturb anything.
So, in the summer of 2023, as a part of a road trip of Midlands high points I returned to tackle Arbury Hill again. I parked at the same spot on the grass verge on Badby Road and up the closest footpath to the southern edge of Arbury Hill summit. No land-owner in sight and, being early evening on a Saturday, no-one at all.
At ~ 1 km from the start of the footpath on Badby Road there’s a gate across the path then a locked wooden gate on the right hand side that leads up the hill on the eastern edge of a crop field. 300m later, just before the woods, there’s another gate into a field and it’s a short walk from there to the summit. As it turned out it was a simple ascent with 2 easy to hop-over gates from the public footpath. I returned using the same route with a smug sense of being able to resolve a now 10-year debate with my friends.
