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9.45 train from Waterloo (9.52 Clapham Junction) to Milford (Surrey), arriving 10.38 T=1.27
Buy a day return to Haslemere
It is heather time, and this is the best heather walk I know, with acres and acres of the stuff, which hopefully should be at its purple best.
The walk needs little introduction otherwise (though if you don't know about it, click here). For lunch one is reliant on the Three Horseshoes pub in Thursley - a popular place, but one we usually manage to squeeze into somehow. It serves food till 2.30pm.
After lunch the alternative routes along the valley rim rather than the original route that descends into it, are highly recommended, and likewise the alternative route down to Haslemere at the end.
For tea there is the National Trust cafe at the head of the Devil's Punchbowl - unless it is out of water, tea bags, staff, toilet paper or one of the many other excuses for having to close early that it has come up with over the years. Otherwise you need to get to Haslemere by 5pm to get tea at Hemingways (the great man wrote many of his famous novels here....) but the town also has several pubs.
Trains back from Haslemere are at 01, 10 and 30 past, the 10 past being slightly slower than the other two
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“When did we last have a sunny Saturday?” I said to someone today. “Last week?” they suggested. But it certainly seemed like the first nice Saturday in ages. Not wall to wall sunshine - w=sun-and-cloud - but a very nice day.
N=22 assembled at Milford station, elbowing another walking group out of the way (they were all oldies, unlike us…). We did the alternative start to avoid the busy road.
One forgets how woody this walk is, but the heather broke through in places. Thursley Common was ablaze with it. Perhaps not at its 100% best, but pretty good. The target species for the day here was the elusive (and brilliantly camouflaged) grayling butterfly, of which I saw two. Others said they saw more.
Time was when one was nervous about whether one might get a table at the Three Horseshoes. Not in these straightened times, however. We found three nice tables in the garden. At least 11 ate, others had drinks.
In the afternoon we did the rim route rather than the bowl ( with apologies for the toilet imagery..). More heather here. Exceptionally the National Trust tea room was doing tea, having not suffered any kind of outage. Nice vegan cookies.
After tea most opted to do the more direct route. I inveigled three others into doing the Gibbet Hill option, but got them a bit lost by following the old A road route. But we got there in the end and successfully navigated down to Haslemere, picking up a straggler from the direct route on the way.
The others had talked of having a drink in Haslemere, but we could not find them. We found two sandwichers in the White Horse, but they were just leaving. We had a quick drink and headed variously for the 18.01 and 18.10 trains.
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