DISCOVER Hertfordshire
The first time anyone had seen a view of England like this was 15 September 1784. Retrace the course of the spell-bound pioneer who beheld it (and his airsick cat) on an 18 mile walk and wonder in greenest Hertfordshire.
‘NEAR THIS SPOT at 3:30 in the afternoon of September 15th, 1784, Vincenzo Lunardi, the Italian balloonist, made his first landing whilst on his pioneer flight in the English atmosphere. Having handed out a cat and dog, the partners of his flight from London, he re-ascended and continued north-eastwards.’
This strange tale of flying cats and dogs is etched into a stone in the Hertfordshire village of Welham Green, on a small patch of grass at the junction of three roads. Britain is peppered with monuments to curious moments like this. There’s a statue in Paisley to awoman who found a snail rotting in her ginger beer; a plaque in Maldon to a fat man whose waistcoat could fit round seven hundred men; a half-buried cannon at Hampton Hill to mark one end of a line from which the Ordnance Survey triangulated Britain. And away to the north-east of here at Standon Green End is another stone, at the spot where Lunardi’s balloon finally ‘revisited the earth’ in 1784. And that’s where I’m headed.
It’s 12 miles by crow, or balloon, but 18 miles by footpath, so I’m breaking my walk into two days with an overnight in Hertford. Roads and tracks interleave with fields as I set out east to Bell Bar, and beyond that things turn deeply rural. Lunardi, after taking off from London, wrote a letter as he drifted high over Hertfordshire: ‘The face of the country shows a mild and pleasing verdure... the rivers meandering… the immense district beneath me spotted with cities, towns and villages.’
It was a magnificent day in aviation history, as the ‘Daredevil Aeronaut’ from Tuscany became the first person to leave England’s ground and fly in its sky. He wasn’t the first to visit Great Britain’s atmosphere though. Scotsman James Tytler pipped him with two successful ‘leaps’ (as he called them) above Edinburgh on 25th August and 1st September. Tytler’s effort to get airborne was a cat
