Toughness: 4 out of 10
9.42 train from Waterloo (9.54 Clapham Junction, 10.00 Wimbledon) to Fleet, arriving 10.51
I am creating a hostage to fortune here, but when this walk last had an outing - at this exact time of year in 2020 (back in the time of innocence...) - it made an excellent winter outing: dry underfoot, with good birdsong, snowdrops and crocuses, and spring in the air.
The walk starts by skirting the attractive Fleet Pond, a nature reserve, and I then remember a pleasant mid section with heaths and fields and stuff, before a finish along the Basingstoke Canal: though the latter passes through suburban Fleet, it is actually much nicer than it looks on the map: fairly rural in feel.
For lunch, it seems that the only choice is currently The Windmill in Ewshott after 5.5 miles, since the Fox & Hounds by the canal another 3.2 miles further on is temporarily closed. I have booked a table at the Windmill for eight for 12.45pm.
At the end, tea or something stronger can be had at the Station Inn, a chain pub by Fleet station. The walk notes suggest an alternative with a lakeside setting which involves ten minutes walking along the main road, but I am betting SWC-ers will be too focused on getting the next train to do that.
Trains back are at 10 and 40 past, and involve a change at Woking (presumably due to engineering works, though why this does not affect the outward train too, I do not know)
3 comments:
Buried away at the bottom of the Fox & Hound's web site is a message saying that the pub's closed from Mon 31 Jan to Sat 12 Feb. No reason given; perhaps they've been pinged by T&T. So unless you make a very early stop the Windmill is the only realistic choice for a pub lunch.
Thanks for the update, Sean.I have messaged the Windmill on Facebook and booked a table for eight for 12.45pm.
N=19 on this walk. The weather was w=sun-through-high-cloud for the most part, which was rather nice.
An immediate problem presented itself in that the path along the top of Fleet Pond was closed for resurfacing or some such, which prevented us from using the route around it for BOTH the start and end of the walk. What made this extra annoying was that no obvious work was taking place and leaving 20 metres of the path open would have allowed us to use at least the outward route. A helpful notice suggested we “find another route”, without indicating any.
So we stumbled around an office park and onto suburban roads before eventually finding our way to the woods surrounding the ponds. A tree full of chattering siskins (a migratory bird) was a slightly consolation (to me anyway) for the disappointment of missing the nice walk around the pond.
We then had an easy and uneventful walk on almost totally dry paths to the Windmill pub, which is now serving food. I had booked a table for eight via Facebook and added four more via Messenger (social media has its uses!!), which was a good thing as otherwise this small and charming pub would have been overwhelmed by our mass arrival. The twelve of us filled almost the whole of their “restaurant”. The menu was simple pub grub, but nicely served. We could order at the bar (a blessed relief!). They apologised that some meals took a while to come. Maybe it was because I got mine first, but I think they did very well and were very friendly. Unusually for the SWC these days most people lunched and we all (more or less) waited for everyone to finish before setting off.
In the afternoon I heard the odd grumble that “this walk is OK but not that spectacular”. I confess I found the long canal section a bit dull, perhaps because unlike when I last did the walk it was not broken up by lunch in the late pub. I only saw snowdrops once, but there were some celandines at one point. There was some birdsong but not loads.
Back at Fleet Pond we went to a viewpoint to look at the ducks and then reversed our morning route, with minor variations. We had tea and puds in the Station Inn, and bought too much wine for the train. No change at Woking was needed, the National Rail app having remembered at the last minute that there was a direct train, albeit a stopper. It filled up dreadfully at Surbiton and I write this at a heaving Waterloo. What is this I read about trains being at only 55% of per-Covid passenger loadings?
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