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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.

Monday 2 January 2017

Bank Holiday Monday Walk North - Great Missenden, Little Missenden, Amersham

TOCW1 Walk 5 : Great Missenden to Amersham
The Chilterns Little Missenden with BIG fish and an easy walk
A short distance at 16.3km (10.1 miles)  - you can just follow the river after the Red Lion pub if you want to shorten the walk but it is easy - the dotted red line on the map shows the route clearly
Tough ?  not at all at 4 out of 10
Explorers 172 & 181 or Landranger 165 
or find the map here http://www.walkingclub.org.uk/book_1/walk_05/map.shtml 
or GPS here www.walkingclub.org.uk/book_1/walk_05/download-GPX-KML.shtml


Take the 9.57am from Marylebone Station to Great Missenden arriving at 10.38
HEADS UP CHEAP TRAVEL  Great Missenden is one stop outside London Transport zone nine and Network card holders can get a discounted London Transport zone 1-9 travelcard at weekends and on bank holidays from any Underground ticket office up to a week in advance. You then only need to buy a one stop extension from Chiltern Railways from Great Missenden to Amersham.
This approach has the advantage that on the return journey from Amersham you can use the four Underground trains an hour (45 minutes to Baker Street) as well as the two hourly Chiltern Railway trains to Marylebone 39 minutes.
By contrast, a normal day return to Great Missenden is only valid on Chiltern Railways.

This is a cracking walk with with gentle rolling hills, old churches (what a surprise) and excellent lunch options. Even if you do not eat at The Red Lion which is fairly early on in the walk then pop into the pub garden and have a look at the River Miss Bourne ( I kid you not) where very large trout challenge the ducks and geese for the scraps of bread that you throw in. They are all game (!)

It maybe advisable to phone and reserve a table when setting off from the station ( or a few days before if you know that you are going ) as the pubs may well be busy
Lunch  The original lunch stop for this walk is the Squirrel pub (tel 01494 711 291) in Penn Street, some 9½km into the walk, which serves pub classics but from their web site I am not sure if they are doing food today 
140 metres down the road from the Squirrel, the Hit or Miss Inn (tel 01494 713 109) –  cricket – has plenty of seating and food served this Monday 12noon to 8pm
Slightly further on (say just over 1 km and as far as I can see on the route ) is the Plough http://theploughamersham.co.uk/ with food served this Monday 12.00 to 18.00
For slower walkers or late starters, Little Missenden, some 5½km into the walk, has two characterful old pubs, though their food offering is more limited. The Red Lion (tel 01494 862 876) www.redlionuk.com/ serves food, while the Crown (tel 01494 862 571) offers pies, baked potatoes, sandwiches and soup.

Tea The recommended tea stop is Seasons Café Deli in Old Amersham, which is open until 6pm daily. This has limited seating, however, so groups might like to explore other options nearby. One immediately across the road from Seasons is Gilbey’s Restaurant (01494 727142) which advertises cream teas. Otherwise, there are a number of ancient pubs in the vicinity, including the Crown Inn Hotel 50 metres to the west of Seasons, which offers afternoon tea and the Kings Arms 100 metres beyond that. Just before Seasons on the route there is also the Nags Head.
These are some 20 minutes walk from the station
If you are desperate by AMersham station then there is a Tesco Express just up the road selling snacks and a Subway beyond that which sells tea.

All the info here  http://www.walkingclub.org.uk/book_1/walk_05/index.shtml

 

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

this is already posted for jan 4, just 2 days later...? am i missing a trick?

Bridie said...

Thanks for flagging up the similarity Anon
The trick that you missed is the walk is in a different direction so substantially different views and different lunch and tea venues - same leaving time from Marylebone and churches are the main similarities
There is likely to be a larger number of walkers available on the Monday who wouldn’t normally make the Wednesday walk ( a different demographic )
I trust that this explains the difference

Anonymous said...

can I bring my Champaigne, I could not get out today, Sarah

Anonymous said...

Only if you bring fizz on BOTH Great Missenden walks this week!

Bill S said...

n=15 on this walk, including a late starter who caught us up at lunch time, plus a couple who appeared to be doing the walk independently. We had a beautiful w=clear-blue-sky for most of the walk, with a few clouds appearing towards the end of the afternoon. It was pretty slippery underfoot for most of the route, with frost and black ice on the tarmac sections and a thin layer of treacherous mud over the footpaths and bridleways.

We had a brief stop in Little Missenden to look at the church and to belatedly toast the new year with champagne (courtesy of Sarah, for which many thanks) before carrying on to Penn Street and lunch. Remarkably, the long climb on the bridleway out of Little Missenden, the upper section of which is usually impassable due to long stretches of ankle deep mud, was relatively clear of the stuff and for once presented no real obstacle.

The Squirrel at Penn Street was, it turned out, serving food so half a dozen of us ate there, with a couple more stopping off for a drink. There were no free tables inside, but the bar staff directed us to a cosy roofed and semi-enclosed decked area at the rear of the pub equipped with patio heaters and a wood burning stove and furnished with settees, arm chairs and blankets where we sat quite contentedly.

Three of us stopped at Season's Deli in Amersham Old Town (now a full blown tea shop, the deli counter having been dispensed with sometime ago) for tea and cake before climbing up the other side of the valley to Amersham Station and the 4.15 Chiltern turbo back to Marylebone.

A fine day out.