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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 13 May 2017

Godstone-Oxted Walk – Compare two ancient yew trees in Surrey churchyards

Extra Walk 277 – Godstone to Oxted
Length: 17½ km (10.9 miles). Toughness: 4/10

10:39 Tonbridge train from Victoria (Clapham Jct 10:45, East Croydon 10:56), arriving Godstone at 11:19. Buy a return to Edenbridge Stations: not an obvious choice, but this is valid on both the outward and return journeys.

On the way back there's a fast hourly service from Oxted to London Bridge at 19 minutes past, plus slightly slower services to Victoria at 24 & 54 minutes past the hour. They all stop at East Croydon if you want to switch destinations.

Notionally this is a new walk, but to forestall complaints I should acknowledge that it's been cobbled together from bits and pieces of an earlier version of the Oxted to Lingfield Walk (#135). Its raison d'être is to let you compare two of the oldest yew trees in the country, just 4 km apart as the crow flies in the Surrey hamlets of Crowhurst and Tandridge. The walk itself is mostly over low-lying farmland in the Eden valley with a short climb onto the Greensand Hills at the end, but the presence of a few woodland stretches means that it won't be entirely bluebell-free.

The lunch pub is the same as on Walk 135, the Royal Oak on the edge of Staffhurst Wood. It's got plenty of outdoor seating but you'll get there around the peak time of 1pm so call ahead if you want to be sure of a table inside. At the end of the walk there are several tea places in Oxted, with Café Papillon and the Oxted Inn both right next to the station.

You'll need to print the directions from the Godstone to Oxted Walk page. You can save a sheet or two of paper by first clicking the ‘Main Walk’ option (or the word ‘Main’ in the Options heading if you might want to do one of the afternoon short cuts).
T=swc.277

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

W=cloudy-clearing-to-sun-and-cloud-late
N=26 or so
Great walk, lovely yew trees , both stunning and seeing as they are both featured in the UK's top 50 trees it means that we saw 4% of the top trees in the country
Royal Oak / Grumpy Mole handled us with aplomb - they put us in the garden but the weather was mild enough and food was good.
Cafe Papillon closed early and the cafe Robertsons seemed to struggle under the duress of having 6 of us turn up but in the end we all got our teas and ice creams ( one chap's cake got forgotten twice but so it goes)
BUT the buggers cancelled our train at 17.19 so we had to wait another 7 minutes for the one after
Slim Jim