Length: About 10 km (6.2 miles) to Twickenham, 15 km (9.3 miles) to Richmond. Toughness: 1/10
Take a Piccadilly line tube to arrive at Hatton Cross (TfL Zone 5/6) by 11:00. It's a 45 minute journey from Leicester Square; if necessary, use the TfL Journey Planner from your local station. Meet upstairs in the ticket hall.
If you finish at Twickenham (Zone 5) there are five mainline trains an hour to Waterloo, at xx:01, xx:03, xx:23, xx:32 & xx:53. These all call at Richmond (Zone 4) around five minutes later. There are no District line trains from Richmond this weekend but the Mildmay (Overground) line is operating.
On the SWC site this River Crane Walk is shown as an out-and-back walk from Twickenham, but its northernmost point isn't far from a tube station so it can also be done as a linear walk – unless it's scuppered by problems on the Piccadilly line, which is what happened when I tried posting this variation 2½ years ago.
It wasn't really designed as a club walk so there aren't any designated lunch and tea places as such. There are cafés at the Shot Tower and in Kneller Park which function as pit stops; if you want something more substantial there are plenty of eateries in Twickenham as well as some appealing riverside pubs at the start of the optional extension to Richmond.
As usual there's no walk leader so please download the GPS file and/or the route map from the L=swc.376 page since navigation isn't entirely straightforward in the few places where the river is out of sight. For the extension, simply make your way to the River Thames and turn left.
NB. The SWC page lists the main features en route but you might also like to check out the notes and directions in this pdf document produced by Inner London Ramblers, since part of the River Crane Walk overlaps with Section 9 of the LOOP.
2 comments:
On TfL's advice I took an offbeat route to Hatton Cross (train to Feltham and a short bus ride), arriving just before 11am to find that the curse of the Piccadilly line had struck again: signal failure at Green Park. One tube did show up with an SWC regular, but as there was a 15 minute gap to the next one we decided to set off. Apologies to anyone who was delayed and started late.
The first part of this walk is directly under the Heathrow flight path and the spectacle of planes roaring overhead proved so exhilarating that I wondered if I'd been too hasty in shelving plans for a Gatwick Circular around the perimeter fence. Watch this space! A more peaceful stretch along the riverside path led to the Shot Tower where we stopped for a caffeine boost. My companion told me she had a weekly gym target of 1,000 steps and we knocked off a good portion of those by climbing to the top of the tower. After some more dawdling around the island we set off for the next leg, soon bumping into another regular who'd started late from an intermediate station. So for a while we were n=3 on a w=mostly-sunny autumn day.
One chose to finish at Twickenham but the unexpectedly fine weather persuaded two of us to carry on along the Thames Path, this time after an alcohol boost at the Barmy Arms. At Richmond we stopped to peruse what must surely be an April Fool's joke gone too far, a statue of someone called Bernardo O'Higgins who it claimed liberated Chile from Spanish rule. After that I would have been happy to call it a day but in the interests of research I was persuaded to try out one of the pubs around the Green. On the journey back South Western Railway could only muster a ridiculously crowded four-coach train which had to make lengthy stops at all the following stations, but after an undignified dash across the footbridge at Clapham Junction I just managed to make my connection.
Not an April Fool!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_O'Higgins
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