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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 20 February 2016

Saturday Third Walk – The Year of the Monkey in London W4

New Walk – Norbiton to Hammersmith
Length: 16½ km (10.25 miles), with longer and shorter options. Toughness: 2/10

10:12 Shepperton train from Waterloo (Vauxhall 10:16, Clapham Jct 10:21, etc), arriving Norbiton at 10:37.

Norbiton is in TfL Zone 5 and all the possible return stations in Zones 2 or 3, so use your Oyster card.

This walk starts with a trek through a huge deer park and ends with a stretch along an attractive part of the River Thames. In between you can have lunch at a pub overlooking a village green and then explore the grounds of a historic neo-Palladian villa, currently celebrating the Chinese New Year. All in south-west London.

The park is of course Richmond Park and the lunchtime stop is at the Sun Inn in Barnes, “the village on the river”. The grounds are those of Chiswick House, where Lord Burlington's attempt to recreate the gardens of ancient Rome is somewhat overshadowed this month by the vivid displays of a Magical Lantern Festival. The suggested destination is Hammersmith but you can easily cut the walk short or extend it to Putney; see the walk document for details. However, if you do the extension note that football fans will be spilling out of Craven Cottage at 5pm as Fulham have a home game with Charlton.

You'll need to print the walk directions (with maps) from this New Walk page. As a fair proportion of the walk is on firm surfaces and the park shouldn't be too muddy, choose comfortable footwear.

PS. Before anyone asks, there's no GPS route on the website; the better to show up any inadequacies in the written directions. In any case you hardly need one for urban walks and Richmond Park is a nice place to get lost in. Leave your gizmo at home!
T=swc.261.y

4 comments:

PeteB said...

But I'm lost without my gizmo and even my GPS!

Anonymous said...

Lovely walk in the morning but now it has turned a bit wet so have had to adjourn to the library to do some work.jfk

Anonymous said...

n=11 w=dry-morning-drizzle-in-the-afternoon

Nice walk, good pub, "interesting" Chinese New Year decorations in Chiswick Park.

Anonymous said...

and no mud !