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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 9 July 2016

Saturday Third Walk – the New Forest and coastal marshes

Extra Walk 226 – Brockenhurst to Lymington
Length: 17¾ km (11 miles). Toughness: 3/10

10:05 Weymouth train from Waterloo (Clapham Jct 10:12), arriving Brockenhurst at 11:37. Buy a day return to Lymington Pier – £16 with South West Train's offer if you get it before midnight on Friday, but make a careful note of the collection procedure if you book online.

Or take the train an hour earlier: see below.

Trains go from Lymington Pier at 27 & 57 minutes past the hour (two minutes later from the Town station) to Brockenhurst, where you change for Waterloo. The last trains with connections back to London are at 20:27 and 21:27.

Here's another far-flung walk to take advantage of SWT's ticket offer. There should be plenty of interesting fauna and flora to see as you make your way across a varied landscape from the edge of the New Forest to the coastal marshes on the Solent. Lymington is a nice town to explore at the end, and if you've got the energy there's a short optional extension across the river to the Pier station.

One drawback with this walk is that you have to choose between an early or a late pub lunch. A three-hour walk before lunch seems too much after a longish train journey, so I've chosen a train which will get you to the early pub (the Hobler Inn) at around 12.40pm. Even with a stop for tea at the later pub you should still reach Lymington before 5.30pm, a good time for a few pink gins in the yacht club (or fish'n'chips on the quayside) before the journey back.

Early Start option: If you prefer a long walk in the morning (perhaps with a coffee break at the Hobler), take the 09:05 train and carry on to the Chequers for lunch. You should get there at around 1.40pm and you'll end up with more time to explore Lymington at the end of the walk.

You'll need to print the walk directions from the Extra Walk 226 page. If you want to finish earlier, use the document's Walk Map to devise a short cut into Lymington.
T=swc.226

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

no issues with train and cheap fare on offer, what more can I ask for? intend going

PeteB said...

n=12 on this walk with the weather w=mainly-cloudy-but-warm-and-humid-with-a-breeze.
A varied and interesting walk, starting of with mainly woodland trails - there was even a bit of mud laid on by the walks inspector - before lunch at the Hobler Inn. After lunch it got a bit more interesting with one lengthy perimeter circuit of a vast field on a very narrow enclosed and overgrown path leaving a few of us with "walk wounds" of the bramble variety but we all survived. The summer so far has meant vegetation has grown more thickly and quicker than I can remember. We stopped off at the Chequers pub for a "refresher" before the lovely ending on the estuary path with godwits and little egrets spotted.
In Lymington some made their way to the station and others to the pub whilst I gorged on fish and chips on a bench looking over the harbour. Three of us then did the short extension to Lymington pier before trains back to London. An excellent day out and overall an ideal summer walk.