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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 20 November 2016

Sunday Walk 2 Epping Forest : stepping to Epping

Loughton to Epping SWC walk 197
13.4km (8.4miles)
Difficulty 3/10
Through the ancient woodland of Epping Forest, to lunch at one of two pubs in Upshire. After lunch you are in open countryside with good views around Copped Hall Park.
The forest is renowned for its ancient pollarded trees which support a wealth of rare insects and fungi. Deer are commonly seen in the more open areas and, in the afternoon, you may see English Longhorn cattle.
Transport
The walk starts from Loughton Underground Station at 10.30am. Meet outside the main entrance.
Loughton and Epping are both in Travel Zone 6 on the Central Line. The frequent service takes about 40 minutes from Oxford Circus to Loughton. Use TfL's journey planner to calculate the time from your station.
Lunch 
You could have an early lunch at High Beach Visitor Centre where there is a kiosk, toilets, café and the Kings Oak pub (0208 508 5000).
The recommended lunch pub is the Good Intent in Copthall Green (01992 712066), friendly with a good range of reasonably priced food.
Alternatively, try the Horseshoes pub (01992 712745) friendly service and good food.
80m before the Horseshoes, St Thomas’ Church has a pleasant grassy area with wooden benches, suitable for a picnic.
Tea
The recommended tea stop is the Verde Café, 88 High Street, Epping (01992 571476). Tea in china cups and delicious cakes. It closes at 4pm on a Sunday. If you're too late, there are any number of pubs, cafes and restaurants in Epping High Street (see text)
Walk Directions here
You can shorten the walk to about 5 miles by staying on the Three Forest Way in paragraph 7, rejoining the main walk at the end of paragraph 30. No lunch stop for you, though. (see "Walk Options")
T=swc.197

1 comment:

PeteB said...

n=7 on this with the forest looking splendidly atmospheric and sparkling in the dull early winter light. The weather was w= dull-and-overcast-but-dry. Definitely the best time of year to do this walk.

We stopped at High Beach visitor centre for a quick coffee before setting off for open countryside and the 2 pub options in Upshire where the pub lunchers settled for the Horseshoes and what a good choice it turned out to be! The roasts come in 3 sizes - small, medium and large and the one who had the medium could not finish it. You would have to be a real trencherman/woman to tackle the large! Also a very good veggie soup and baguette.

After lunch we enjoyed the open countryside north of Epping Forest slightly marred unfortunately by the low hum of busy traffic.
Two of us had tea at the excellent Verde cafe
before one went to explore Epping High Street and I caught the tube back to the East End.

(PS. I am coming to the conclusion that I will have to rethink the stretch through the Forest to High Beach as the narrow trails at this time of year are often invisible because of leaf drifts and poor signing and unless you have a map or gps route finding is difficult. I may try to redraft the route so it follows wider and better drained trails although these tend to be busy in fine weather.