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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.

Sunday 4 February 2018

Sunday Walk – A Country Park and a Norman church (Cheshunt Circular)

New Walk – Cheshunt Circular
Length: Up to 15¼ km (9.5 miles). Toughness: 1/10

11:12 Cheshunt train from Liverpool Street (Hackney Downs 11:18, Tottenham Hale 11:25, etc), arriving Cheshunt at 11:40. You can use Oyster PAYG or contactless but Cheshunt is in TfL Zone 8, outside the main fare zones, so a simple day return to Cheshunt might be cheaper.

Freedom Pass holders hoping for a free ride will be disappointed since engineering works have scuppered the alternative London Overground service today. You'll need an extension from Zone 6 to Cheshunt on the West Anglia service.

Trains back to Liverpool Street are at xx:20, xx29, xx:51 & xx:59.

It seems to be obligatory these days to claim that a walk will be mud-free so I'll follow the trend and say that much of this new walk is on surfaced paths through River Lee Country Park. Even so, I expect you'll have to negotiate a few gloopy spots. You won't see all the wildlife advertised at this time of year (an abundance of dragonflies? masses of orchids?) but there should be enough features to sustain your interest.

Lunch is in the town of Waltham Abbey, which boasts a particularly fine Norman church: much smaller than in its heyday as an Augustinian Abbey, but well worth a look. There are plenty of possible watering-holes and two of the pubs are suggested – one in the western hemisphere, the other in the eastern. As always, any feedback on the ones you try would be appreciated.

A glance at the document's Walk Map will reveal that this is really a 10 km walk padded out with various loops and whorls, which does at least give you the opportunity to take some short cuts if the weather's poor. In due course it will probably acquire some longer options (northwards to Broxbourne or southwards to Enfield Lock), but as it stands it should make a decent enough walk for this time of year.

You'll need to print the directions from this temporary New Walk page.
T=swc.311

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Grateful to understand late start.

Sean said...

Re: start time. The chosen train does match the "train nearest to 11:00", a formula designed to get to the lunch pub around 1pm. There's usually a 10:57 train but with this Sunday's reduced schedule it was a toss-up between one 15 minutes earlier or later. Anyone who knows me won't be surprised to learn that I plumped for the latter. It does at least give us the opportunity to see how many of the "more walks with a late start" brigade show up (not heard so frequently nowadays, admittedly).

Anonymous said...

13 walkers.
Sunshine during the morning and a light shower just after lunch.
Great walk.

Anonymous said...

Brilliant walk, so many interesting features.
Many thanks to Sean.

Anonymous said...

n=13 w=sunny-morning-with-a-shower-in-the-afternoon