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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.

Sunday 5 June 2016

Sunday Walk 2 Alton Circular

Alton Circular Book 2 Walk 10 
20.4 km (12.7 miles)
Toughness 4/10
A long but gentle Hampshire walk through the woods, hangers, hidden pastures and downland that surround Selborne (about which Gilbert White wrote his famous Natural History). After lunch in Selborne you ascend a zig-zag path, constructed by the man himself, and head across Selborne Common for Chawton, once the home of Jane Austen. Her house is likely to have closed by the time you reach it but you can still see the outside and have a quick nose round the garden.
Trains: From Waterloo, get the 09:07 (Clapham Jct 9:15 Wimbledon 9:22) to Alton arriving 10:31.
Return xx:15 direct, xx:45 changing at Woking.
Lunch: An early option, perhaps too early, is the Three Horseshoes in East Worldham (01420 83211), after 2.5 miles. It serves food from 12.00pm to 2.30pm.
The recommended stops are in Selborne after 6 miles. The Queens Hotel (tel 01420 511454) serves food all day. The Selborne Arms (tel 01420 511247) serves food from 12pm to 3pm. There is also a tea shop in the Gilbert White Museum, serving lunches to 2 and accessible without paying admission.
The museum itself costs £9.50 and is open till 5. It also commemorates Lawrence Oates, the ill-fated Antarctic explorer.
Tea: Cassandra's Cup in Chawton closes at 4.30pm. If too late, the The Greyfriar pub (01420 83841) next door will be open.
Other options exist in Alton. Caffe Nero and Costa Coffee in the High Street are both open till 5pm on Sunday, and the nearby Swan Hotel (tel 01420 8377) serves cream teas until 6pm. and drinks till 9pm.
Directions: Book 2 or here. The online version is fully revised and slightly shorter than the book version.
T=2.10

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hartley Mauditt Church is 1 1/2 miles from the Three Horseshoes in East Worldham. The Church is truly stunning, pretty much in the middle of nowhere with a pond just across the road. Not to be missed

Anonymous said...

Is mr tiger coming on this walk?

PeteB said...

Surprisingly just n=3 on this walk although we did pick up an SWC stalwart (jfk) mysteriously emerging from a wood near the end of the walk. The weather w=warm-and-sunny-25c which made the woodland stretches particularly welcome. We ambled contentedly through the verdant, dreamy Hampshire landscape, surprising a roe deer in some woods which burst from the trees after we spotted it. Some stretches of the paths were overgrown and still a bit muddy in places which strengthens the points in the comments for this walk about not doing it after a period of rain; some sections would be virtually impassable.
We arrived in Selborne at around 12.40pm and we all had sandwiches. The Queens Hotel is still closed and up for sale and does not look like re-opening anytime soon.
In the afternoon we enjoyed lemonade and ice-cream at the pub in Upper Farringdon which still left plenty of time for the others to visit the church in Chawton whilst I enjoyed tea at Cassandra's with a massive slab of carrot cake that I think added about 2 points to my BMI. Finally we ambled back through Alton to catch the 5.15 direct train to Waterloo.
I quite understand the choice of the 9.07 train for this walk but if you are happy to settle for a later lunch, say 1.45- 2.00pm then the 10.07 would perhaps be best. Was this a factor in the low turnout?