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From Coombe Hill, the path descends to skirt around Chequers, passing through the grounds. Of course there are CCTV cameras everywhere and signs warning that you mustn’t stray from the right of way, but in fact it was all a great deal less hysterical than you’d expect. These days, when you have to go through everything but a strip search just to get into a local BBC studio or the offices of a minor insurance company, it was a reassuring and quite charming surprise to find that the prime minister’s country residence was behind a fence that consisted of wooden posts and a bit of wire strung between them. Once you cross the drive of beech trees planted by Churchill, the fence becomes even more cheerily rustic, in that it is made of old railway tracks chopped and upended into the soil.

When the PM’s in residence, however, security is far tighter and has been so since the early days. The handover of the house finally happened in 1921, just as the partition of Ireland was taking place. When Lloyd George was occupying the house, IRA graffiti was found just down the road and a group of Irish students walking nearby were arrested and held in police cells. When the Ulster Troubles re-ignited in the late 1960s, a footpath across the estate was deemed to be too close for comfort and an application made for its closure. According to Norma Major, who wrote a book about Chequers while husband John was its prime occupant, this resulted in an ‘inevitable public enquiry’ and ‘four years of wrangling before the footpath was moved’. All the more amazing, perhaps, that the Ridgeway still passes through the grounds, clipping across the main drive just inside the gates. Mrs Major’s purse-lipped opinions on the world are unintentionally hilarious, and none more so than when she tells of her husband’s surprise elevation to the top job: ‘To become Prime Minister just a few weeks before Christmas, as John did in 1990, was not ideal timing. For one thing, it threw the Christmas cards into chaos . . .’

On the desk in the prime minister’s study at Chequers sits a silver inkwell designed and inscribed by Lord Lee, the benefactor of the house. Its Latin motto (‘Stare Super Antiquas Vias; Videre Quænam sit Via Recta et Bona, et Ambulare in Eá’) is helpfully translated and inscribed into English, presumably for those very same PMs from the middle classes who not only failed to have a country estate to call their own but who may even have lacked a classical education. It’s a lovely motto, one that seemed to sum up even my small effort in ambling the Ridgeway, and it echoed through my head as I skirted the estate: ‘To stand on the ancient ways, to see which is the right and the good way, and in that to walk.’

There were three weeks to go to a general election and, as it was to turn out, a new resident at Chequers. Despite the profound effect the house seemed to have on its Labour inhabitants, you couldn’t help but feel that a Tory, especially a patrician posh one like David Cameron, would be far more suited to the area. I walked past dozens of vast ‘Vote Conservative’ hoardings in lush paddocks, and even more of their smaller brethren on little posts in people’s front gardens. The only other party that seemed to be gaining local support was UKIP, whose posters could often be seen peering out from behind fake mullioned windows, just beneath the three burglar alarms. One sign was entirely new to me: warnings of the use of ‘Concealed CCTV’, which seemed to crop up particularly in pub gardens. One of the great joys of doing a trail is the way in which normal life and its tedious rules just evaporate away, and that includes the feeling that if you pass a pub, you are duty bound to stop for a pint, regardless of the time of day. Most were horrible. If there’s a part of the world that screams cosy rustic pub, it’s the Chilterns, but gastro-greed had overwhelmed them and they were nearly all pretentious restaurants or cheerless food barns. On the second day of the walk, one