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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, 24 June 2023

Saturday Walk - Vale of Wardour and Old Wardour Castle: Tisbury Circular via Donhead St. Andrew's

DAC is away...
 
Length: 23.3 km (14.5 mi) [much shorter option available, see below]
Ascent/Descent: 561m
Net Walking Time: ca. 6 hours
Toughness: 7 out of 10
 
09.20 Exeter St. David’s train from Waterloo (Clapham J. 09.27, Woking 09.46), arrives Tisbury 11.06 
[In Tisbury you have to be in the front three cars of the train due to a short platform]. 
Returns are at xx.01 (basically), last train 22.03
 
This walk explores the Upper Nadder Valley (also known as the Vale of Wardour) in the south westerly parts of the West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which is spectacular walking country with some breathtaking views. It heads west from Tisbury along the valley and through Wardour Park with its large mansion. After lunch at a gastro pub in Donhead St. Andrew, some serious ascents take you all the way to the Nadder Head in another large country estate. Looping back the route passes a Neolithic hill fort site on a ridge right on the boundary with Dorset, with occasional views through trees to surrounding steep downs.

An exhilarating descent and an equally exhilarating route through the wooded Barkers Hill lead back down to the Nadder. The return route then leads right past the romantically ruined 14th century Old Wardour Castle and through High Wood back into Tisbury, a remarkably unspoilt village.

A shorter version of the walk, rated 4/10, and allowing enough time to visit Old Wardour Castle (English Heritage), exists in a separate file.

Lunch: The Forester Inn in Donhead St. Andrews (7.0 km/4.3 mi, food all day, table booked for 13.00). 
Tea: Plenty of options in Tisbury, see the pdf or the webpage for details.
 
For summary, map, height profile, walk directions, photos and gpx/kml files click here.T=swc.252

1 comment:

Thomas G said...

The undersigned missed the train by mere seconds (as he does at times), but then took some opportune shortcuts to meet the other 2 lunchers at the pub just as they ordered their food. Meadows and fields were almost entirely wildflower-filled, with intensive agriculture seemingly out of fashion in these parts. This meant hords of butterflies and damselflies everywhere, plus plenty of birdsong and loads of buzzards and kestrels circling. This is always a quiet walk insofar as being remote from any significant traffic, with no hotspots for dog walkers and/or locals to bump into or walking groups to appear from nowhere, but today, in the still summer air with only an occasional slight breeze, it was very quiet indeed. More by luck than by judgement (I had posted this more than 3 weeks ago) I had picked the most shady of the Tisbury walks, which came in very handy today.
Lunch was fine, but the pub is under new management as of last year and they have clearly gone off the previous Michelin Bib Gourmand ambitions. Still a fine pub, no doubt, but not a gastro destination.
The picnickers had moved on before I arrived and we only saw 2 of them again in Tisbury, at the Benett Arms. Their fastest walker was assumed to have gotten the 6 o'clock train, which we had missed by a handful of minutes, but in fact he had gotten waylaid near Old Wardour Castle and had inadvertently picked up the outbound route (which is longer), so we met him on the platform at 7. He blamed the walk instructions! Unbelievable...

An all-male group of n=6 therefore, in w=sunny-and-warm-with-an-occasional-breeze weather