9.42 train from Waterloo (Surbiton 10.00, Woking 10.19) to Hook, arriving 10.48
From Clapham Junction, get the 9.52 Portsmouth train to Woking and change there (arriving 10.12, departing 10.19)
Buy a day return to Hook.
For walk directions and the home page for this walk click here, for GPX click here, for a map of the route click here.
This walk often gets done in winter, when its firm canalside paths are a welcome mud-free option, but I reckon it has lots to offer as a summer walk. Early on you cross Bartley Heath, a change from the earlier route across some fondly-remembered boggy bits on Hook Common. You then pass the remains of Odiham Castle and come to Greywell with its marshland nature reserve, which an informant of mine says is full of the most wonderfully rare flowers and plants at this time of year (though you lot doubtless will not bother to stop and look at them, and you can cut it out - boo, hiss, shame on you! - using a short cut). In general there is lots of waterside walking on this walk, so there should be a chance to see dragonflies and damselflies and the like.
Your lunch stop is the pretty old town of Odiham which has pubs and cafes and shops - see the walk home page for details. After lunch there is a substantial section on the lovely Basingstoke Canal. You then have the option of longer* or shorter routes towards the end of the walk, where there are also a couple of pubs to act as tea stops, the Winchfield Inn being the nearest to its eponymous station (as far as I can see, it is open all afternoon).
Trains back from Winchfield are at 05 and 35 past.
* This longer option has apparently been re-jigged since this walk last had an outing: "I don't think anyone has done it yet" the walk author tells me.
11 comments:
A nice touch to post a walk with a medieval Pest House en route. I wonder if Public Health England have reopened it for modern travellers needing to be quarantined? Be careful not to show any symptoms as you enter Odiham!
I can’t find this week’ s walk details
I am not sure what you mean, Anoymous: be more specific. The walk post contains the walk details and links to the walk directions. What can't you find?
Just wanted to know the train time for this walk.
The train time is in the walk post!! Click on the title for this walk, and the details will be revealed to you.
That’s the problem, when you click on the walk post, nothing happens! It’s been like this for the past few weeks, after the website was down for a couple of days, ‘to make improvements’. It used to work perfectly well before. Now when you go on the website, you cannot find this week’s walk and when you click on another link, you can see the walk post but when you click on it, no further details appear. I just wanted to know the train time, which to catch. Thank you for your help anyway.
The walk details are displaying correctly for me when I access the website on my laptop and also on my mobile phone.
You could try using a different device or a different web browser or rebooting/clearing the cache on your browser.
Yes, that is all I can think of too.
The train is the 9.24 from Waterloo to Hook. From Clapham Junction get the 9.52 Portsmouth train to Woking and change there, arriving 10.12, departing 10.19.
Good luck getting the technical issue sorted!
I mean 9.42 train
I have the same problem, Anonymous. I think there have been updates to some software that make the imported text unreadable. I can’t read wall details on my pc anymore - only on my phone.If you can update your browser it might help.. But ask an expert. I know nothink.
What you don’t expect in July is mud. Quite a lot of it, gloopy and slithery. Sometimes underfoot it felt like January. Whoever heard the like?
N=18 on this walk. I am adding the walk author to the tally since he said he did about half the route, though we only met him in the pub near the end.
As forecast we had w=light-rain-in-the-morning. Annoying rather than soaking. I found the new start across Bartley Heath perhaps slightly less enchanting than the old one across Hook Common, but we are told it is drier underfoot, and since it was certainly a bit soggy today, it was probably just as well we weren’t going the old way.
Odiham Castle was still there, perhaps looking a bit less spruce than it did in King John’s day, but hey, that medieval hardcore was built to last. I loved the nature reserve bit by the river beyond Greywell. Lots of water forget-me-not and meadowsweet, and three magnificent scarlet tiger moths, docile enough in the poor weather to allow their photos to be taken. No dragonflies or damselflies, though.
In Odiham some used the churchyard gravestones as backrests as they ate their sarnies, while others went to the Bell and the Dragon pub, whose very name tells you it won’t be cheap. But service was efficient and the portions decent. Nice nosh, when all is said and done.
After lunch the walk route had mysteriously changed from the last time I did it, taking us away from the canal and past a field of immense Suffolk horses (retired from pulling brewery drays apparently) and into an intensely muddy wood, where only the foliage on the trees reminded of the season. Later we walked along a broad and substantial path along a canal that has somehow escaped the notice of the OS map app. There was a bit of sun, but only a bit. When it came out it felt about ten degrees hotter. (I remember this feeling: it is called “summer”…)
Noted long walker types decided not after all to do the long walk. Instead nine of us (plus walk author) stopped in the garden of the Barley Mow pub. There a byzantine ordering system involving WhatsApp and an extremely grumpy member of staff (who said she was holding the fort alone) nearly put us off. But in the end we were allowed to give our orders in analogue form and enjoyed (variously) gin, tea and mini-cheddars.
Six of us also guzzled two bottles of wine, four beers and about eight bags of crisps and nuts in the garden of the Winchfield Inn, and we then got the (whatever time it was) train back to Covid Central (aka Waterloo, which incidentally was as busy at 9am this morning as I have ever seen it on a Saturday. Where all these people were going on a rainy day bears me. But I suppose others could say the same of us.)
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