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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 3 March 2018

Snowy Saturday – St. Margarets Circular

SWC Walk 165:  St. Margarets Circular (Short or Long) T=SWC.165

Distance:  12.2 Miles or 19.5 km for the shorter option and 16.0 miles or 25.7 km for the longer option

Difficulty:  3 out of 10 (up to 5 out of 10 for the main walk)
Train:  Take the 9:43 AM Greater Anglia Cambridge train from London Liverpool Street, changing at Broxbourne (arriving 10:15 and departing 10:19) for a Hertfordshire East train, arriving at St. Margarets at 10:25. Return trains from St. Margarets are at 19 and 49 minutes past the hour (again changing at Broxbourne). Buy a day return to St. Margarets. 
This is a very charming walk in the gentle rolling hills of Hertfordshire with hopefully reasonable deposits of Siberian snow over the next few days.  It passes through several picturesque river valleys.  Towards the end of the walk, you also pass through a nature reserve before finishing along the Lea Navigation. As the outbound route of this walk passes by the inbound route in several places, it would also be possible to shorten the walk further if the snowy conditions make the going difficult (so bring a print out of the map with you for added optionality). You can find more information about the walk and download the walk instructions here.
The recommended lunch stop is the White Horse or the Chequers Inn in Wareside  on the short route (8 miles into the short walk) or the Feathers Inn  or The Anchor  in Wadesmill  (6.8 miles into the main walk). Tea and other late afternoon refreshments can be had at the Jolly Fisherman near the station back in St. Margarets.   
Dress warmly, wear your best boots (and socks) and enjoy the walk!

4 comments:

Sean said...

There might be some confusion on the platform as a Ramblers group (Capital Walkers) are starting an 11-mile walk from this station at the same time. Their walk is also in and around the Ash valley, but I don't know how much the two walks will overlap.

PeteG said...

Odds are that it is the same walk with the two short cuts. However it is advertised as a packed lunch, though with a pub stop.

Stargazer said...

n=9 SWC Walkers managed to quickly disentangle themselves from a similar number of Capital Walkers who disembarked from the train at St. Margarets (based on a casual observation, our average age seemed well below theirs). Not sure where they went as we only really saw some of them again at the Jolly Fisherman at the end of the walk...

We set off under w=grey-and-slightly-foggy-conditions. In the morning there was a reasonable amount of snow on the ground -- though not the heaping blankets hoped and dreamed of....Nonetheless, enough to illustrate the stride of quite a vast number of critters walking the area....We authoritatively identified a pheasant footprint after one ran down a snowy lane just ahead of us...Reaching the balmy heights of 2 degrees above in the afternoon saw much of snow melt with a return of some muddy patches....

Although efforts were made to bring the whole group on the long walk.....in the end, 5 did the long walk and 4 the short. We all reconvened at the Jolly Fisherman for a bevie before catching the 17:19 back to London.

Anonymous said...

Well done Stargazer for doing the 12m walk before doing a half-marathon today. Best of luck. I am sure yesterday was execellent training.