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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 16 April 2016

Saturday Third Walk – A strenuous North Downs walk

Extra Walk 244 – Woldingham Circular via Titsey Place
Length: 17¾ km (11.0 miles), with optional extension (see below). Toughness: 7/10

09:53 East Grinstead train from Victoria (Clapham Jct 09:59, East Croydon 10:10), arriving Woldingham at 10:26.

Trains back from Woldingham are half-hourly, at 29 & 59 minutes past.

This fairly strenuous walk starts along the same valley as the Woldingham-Oxted walk, but turns off in the opposite direction when it reaches the North Downs escarpment. The thick blue line stretching across the Walk Map reveals that you'll have to put up with the [redacted] in this part of the walk, but it's less obtrusive once you move from the open downland into the wooded Titsey Plantation. You'll feel that you've earned a refreshment stop as you have to climb all the way back up the escarpment to get to the lunchtime pub at the top, the Botley Hill Farmhouse.

The full afternoon route goes down through the plantation, past Titsey Place and back over the North Downs to the hilltop village of Woldingham before descending to the station. There are more up-and-down stretches to enjoy but you could reduce them by cutting out the section past the manor house and its gardens, since they're not open this month. This shortcut would also increase your chances of getting to the Dene Coffee Shop (the only refreshment place at the end of the walk) before it starts putting up the shutters at around 4.30pm.

Optional Extension: This walk's 500m of ascent should be more than enough for ordinary mortals, but any Übermenschen craving an extra 7-11 km could tack on Extra Walk 2a (the Short Walk version of Woldingham-Oxted). This would take you on a slightly different route up the valley and then steeply downhill into the village of Old Oxted, where four pubs will be competing for your custom at the end of these efforts. [Buy a return to Oxted if you plan to do this.]

You'll need to print the directions from the Extra Walk 244 page.
T=swc.244

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks in part to Walker for this report - I was too lazy to write my own so I just adjusted his to fit
n=18 on this walk

This walk had an ill-starred beginning, first with all Southern trains out of Victoria and London Bridge being held up by a problem at East Croydon (though in the end we were only 20 minutes late) and then with someone ringing the only lunch pub,Botley Hill Farmhouse, and being told they would not accommodate us as they were fully booked but luckily the cafe next door, also belonging to the pub were able to serve us soup and panninis which staved off the hunger pangs for a while.

We all got very spread out after lunch, so the rest of this account describes my experience. Weather much better than the grim wintry conditions forecast - w=cloudy-and-unseasonably-cold-but-with-some-very-occasional-sunny-intervals-in-the-afternoon. Whilst we all got throughly splattered in mud, the low-lying fields on much of this walk were also nothing like as waterlogged as I expected after yesterday's deluge but it was a slip fest with one walker slipping over three times even though they had poles.

The other bit of good news was there were very few bluebells on this walk - how refreshing.

Some of us stopped for tea and cake in the Dene tearoom - joy of joy the tea, cakes, ambiance, seating and staff were all very very very exceeedingly excellent.

Next time we have to book the lunch pub the Botley Hill Farmhouse 4 or more days ahead