Catch the 10.05 train from Waterloo (10.12 Clapham Junction) to Winchester, arriving 11.04.
One motive for posting this walk is that Winchester looks very cheerful in the run-up to Christmas, and has a Christmas market in its cathedral grounds. The website for this says that the stalls are being spaced out a bit this year to allow for more social distancing.
I was also wondering if anyone would be interested, if the weather is not hostile, in having festive drinks and snacks on the top of St Catherine's Hill - ie sharing a bottle of wine or two, bringing some food that can be shared in a Covid-safe kind of way (or just consuming your own food - no pressure to share....). My idea is that this might replace the pub lunch, and we then get back earlier to Winchester for tea or the Christmas market. There is no particular need to decide about this in advance, since the walk starts by walking through the centre of Winchester, and food/wine could be bought there, but if you are keen on the idea and want to encourage others, you could post a comment below.
Otherwise, this is a fine downland walk, taking in the ancient hill fort of St Catherine's Hill, with panoramic views, and giving good views of Winchester Cathedral on the approach back to Winchester. You also pass all the historic attractions in this ancient town, including a couple of city gates and Winchester College (the public school).
For more information on the various historic attractions, see pages 2-5 of the walk directions. Pages 13-15 also have a walking tour of Winchester Cathedral (though you will need to pay an entrance fee to get in to it). You can also find all this information at the bottom of the walk's home page.
If you do want a pub lunch, the Bridge in Shawford, serves food all afternoon and is capacious, but it is also popular: it is probably worth booking a table. Expect to get there at about 1.45pm if doing the full walk, or 1pm if doing the riverside short cut (see below).
After St Catherine's Hill, there are two ways to shorten the walk:
1) A riverside short cut to Shawford (lots of motorway noise initially, but a very pretty route through watermeadows, as featured in the Chris Packham programme on BBC TV The Walk that Made Me. This reduces the walk to 15.6km (9.7 miles).
2) A Tourist Loop that takes you across the watermeadows from St Catherine's Hill and back into the town. This gives a walk of just 8.9km (5.5 miles) and is ideal if you want to explore Winchester or the Christmas market a bit more.
Tea options and characterful pubs in Winchester are too numerous to list, though the home page for this walk has various ideas.
Trains back are at 18 and 48 past (there is also a slightly slower 56 past, only worth getting if you just miss the 48 past). The 18 past stops at Clapham Junction: otherwise changing at Woking gives you a speedy connection.
2 comments:
I’m game for a swift snifter on top of the hill ! Although I’ll also want to have a proper sit down lunch
As an old friend of mine famously once said when contemplating a view in the Yorkshire Dales: “You know, this was not as bad as I thought it would be”. I had expected grey cloud and to be the only person on this walk, soaring omicron cases and a tube strike perhaps making the attraction of a long journey to a Christmas market less than compelling. On the plus side, I thought the trains might be emptier than of late.
Wrong on all points. The train down was BUSY. People seem to have interpreted Chris Whitty’s advice as “See your friends and family NOW, while you still can.” There were also six of us at the station. And after a bit of early cloud it was w=SUNNY. Lovely glorious sun, even feeling a bit warm despite the approaching solstice. What a nice surprise!
We lost two of the group in the town, but they had said they might walk on ahead. On the climb up St Catherine’s Hill we acquired another, however, who had just missed the specified train but got the stopper a few minutes later. So n=7 in all. Our late starter had brought a (little) bottle of wine to drink on St Catherine’s Hill, but otherwise this idea was as unpopular as a Conservative candidate in North Shropshire. The rest of the group were straining on the leash (mixed metaphors - Ed), so on we went.
Sun, sun, sun. Oh how nice the sun was. The watermeadows near Shawford were bathed in golden light and we sat on a duckboard there to have our sarnies. Our late starter, alas, had not brought lunch, so went on alone to the pub (sorry!). We looked in later to find her but were told categorically (and incorrectly) that there were no single diners. But one of our number later met her on the train and got the true story.
We had a pleasing and uneventful afternoon and then approached the maelstrom of germ-breathing humanity that was the Christmas market. (Prediction: Winchester will be the next omicron hotspot…) One of our number brought us all gluwein (proper German stuff, made with real glue!) and then headed for an early train. The rest of us thought we had not had enough virus exposure yet, and so had bratwurst with curry sauce (x2) and cheesy chips (x1) and set off to find - ha ha! - a quiet pub in Winchester on a Saturday night. We found one place with a spare table, but it rapidly became as crowded as a tube train during a tube strike, and so we left and got a bottle for the train. So back to London after a memorable, if not entirely socially-distanced day.
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