Extra Walk 276 – Epping to Chipping Ongar
Length: 12.5 km (7.8 miles). Toughness: 2/10
Take a Central Line tube to arrive at Epping (TfL Zone 6) by 11:20 (every 5-10 minutes; a 45-minute journey from Oxford Circus). Meet outside the station.
The walk ends outside the Travelcard / Oyster area and you'll need to take a 420 bus back to Epping. These run half-hourly until 19:30, setting off from Ongar High Street at xx:00 & xx:30.
One of our Sunday regulars has been plotting a series of Central Line routes through Epping Forest and this one breaks a little further out into the Essex countryside. Although it's been on the site for a year its author has been disinclined to rely on the Sunday bus service, so this is its inaugural SWC outing. The route broadly follows the Epping-Ongar section of the Central Line which closed in 1994, but as it's coming up to Halloween you might catch the distant tootings of a Ghost Train creeping along the eastern part of the old line.
The lunchtime village sounds like a good place to hear these trains: Toot Hill. It's about 60% of the way through the walk, so you should get to the Green Man just after 1pm. There are pub and café options for tea at the end of the walk in Chipping Ongar High Street, and an interesting-looking 1 km extension which you could take before heading for the bus stop.
You'll need to print the directions from the Epping to Chipping Ongar Walk page. T=swc.276
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
n=10 set off for a very pleasant walk in the Essex countryside. Much more rural than I expected with large recently ploughed fields, hedgerow with beautiful berry bushes dotted in it and lovely vistas of the changing colours of Autumn. Purportedly, the oldest wooden church in the world was a delight to behold although how much of it was original Saxon was a debatable point. One thing that did strike me was how much darker it was inside the church compared to its stone equivalent. Half the group stayed in Ongar for tea and cakes.
I fully agree with BrightSpark's opinion of this very pleasant rural outing, but as a connoisseur of mud'n'motorway walks I have to say this one didn't quite live up to expectations. There was the brief thrill of crossing the M11 but the traffic noise disappeared all too soon and apart from that the walk was exceptionally quiet, just the occasional toots of a steam train (though too far away to be seen). And the only really muddy stretches weren't on narrow fenced paths with no escape routes, but in open woodland where they could no doubt be avoided with a bit of initiative. This might not be such a bad winter walk after all.
Like many pubs these days the Green Man has a large formal restaurant and only a small bar area, but they happily accommodated eight of us in the restaurant for lunch. I don't expect they get many groups of walkers but they were exceptionally welcoming. The walk author also managed to find us a very good small coffee shop for tea, much needed refreshment before a journey home which (in my case) took almost as long as the walk itself.
Post a Comment