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This Week's Walks - Archive

Please see the Saturday Walker's Club This Week's Walks page.

This is an archive of walks done by the Saturday Walker's Club. You should only need to use this page if the SWC website is down.

Saturday 23 January 2016

Saturday Third Walk – Epping Forest

Extra Walk 241 – Leytonstone to Loughton
Length: 12.8 km (8 miles). Toughness: 1/10

Take a Central line tube to arrive at Leytonstone (TfL Zones 3/4) by 10:45. Turn left outside the station and meet on the pavement outside Le Parisien café.

Loughton (Zone 6) is also on the Central line. Buy a Zones 1-6 Travelcard or use your Oyster card.

From a cursory glance at the map you might assume that Epping Forest lies between Chingford and Epping, but a remnant of the original forest stretches much further south into London's urban sprawl, marked by the Epping Forest Centenary Walk. This walk picks up this waymarked route just north of Leytonstone tube station and follows its course through these green spaces to a lunch stop in Chingford. The shorter afternoon section goes through the more familiar part of Epping Forest before dropping down to Loughton. Although this is not exactly a country walk (with plenty of main roads to cross) there will doubtless be some muddy stretches, so wear appropriate footwear.

For lunch the walk author recommends Butlers Retreat, an up-market café, with the nearby Royal Forest for those preferring a traditional (Brewers Fayre) pub lunch. There are several pubs and coffee shops for tea in Loughton High Street.

You'll need to print the walk directions from the Extra Walk 241 page.
T=swc.241

6 comments:

Stephanie said...

Hello,
It's my first time and wondering if anyone will be joining this walk?

Hannah said...

Hi Stephanie, I'm planning on joining this walk - weather permitting!

Stephanie said...

Hi Hannah, that's great! See you :)

Ian T said...

W=mild-some-sun-dry Anyone needing to top up their winter mud quota would have been delighted with this walk. There was plenty and I think I saw most of it twice. Wrong turns, missed turns, right turns that felt wrong – you name it, I took it. I don’t know if it was me or the directions. n=15 turned out including a late starter who overtook me. (The others were ahead by then). I bailed out at Chingford.

DGA said...

Actually Tigger, it was more like n=19 as 3 slightly late starters caught a couple of us up before lunch on the golf course just as we were veering off-course (see what I did there). Arrived at the pub to find the walk poster and author already esconsced by the window in his usual 'guest star appearance' in-time-for-lunch mode although I believe he did deign to muddy his boots and walk the last third.
Two of us had tea after we'd turned left on Loughton High Street at the very inexpensive and walker/extras friendly Lounge Cafe (?) run by a lass from North Loughton aka Scotland.

Sean said...

The walk poster (not the walk author, incidentally) would like it to be known that by the time he was spotted in the lunch pub his boots had already picked up impressive quantities of mud from the second half of the morning route, a late start from Highams Park being more suited to his sluggish lifestyle. From this vantage point a good few walkers were clocked heading straight for Chingford station, a shame really as the afternoon section was distinctly easier underfoot. The morning route had its attractions but in future I will take the walk author's advice and avoid it at this time of year; I suspect a Chingford Circular using the partly-surfaced paths through the more familiar parts of Epping Forest would make a better winter walk.