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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 August 2017

Sunday Walk – Titsey Place on the North Downs

Extra Walk 244a – Woldingham to Oxted via Titsey Place
Length: Up to 13¾ km (8.5 miles). Toughness: 4 or 5/10

10:53 East Grinstead train from Victoria (Clapham Jct 10:59, East Croydon 11:11), arriving Woldingham at 11:26. Buy a return to Oxted.

Trains back from Oxted are half-hourly, at 28 & 58 minutes past.

This walk goes through a mix of open valleys, woodland and parkland, with a fair bit of climbing packed into its short length. If you're familiar with this part of the North Downs you'll be able to work out that it will be slightly more rewarding if you're a bit deaf in the right ear, as there's an annoying stretch near the pesky M25.

The up-market lunch pub on this walk (the Botley Hill Farmhouse) is very popular at weekends so you might prefer to have a picnic lunch on one of the benches you'll find on the woodland path through the Titsey Plantation; this would also shorten the walk by 1½ km and cut out one of those hill climbs. Or you could treat this as an Afternoon Tea walk, as the Titsey Place Tea Room a little further on offers plenty of calories in the form of a tempting selection of cakes. The manor house itself is closed on Sundays but you could spend 45 minutes or so wandering around its attractive gardens (entry £4.50). And if by this time you've regretted skipping lunch the The Bull in Limpsfield is open to 4pm on Sundays, so you might be able to get a very late pub lunch after all.

You'll need to print the directions from the Woldingham Circular via Titsey Place Walk page. Unless you might want to do the longer ending back to Woldingham, click on Option a to hide the directions for the other options.
T=swc.244.a

2 comments:

David said...

About n=10 walkers set off from Woldingham on a w=bright warm and very pleasant day. I chose to do the circular walk, rather than end at Oxted, and also missed out on the lunchtime pub, opting instead for a bench close to Pitchfont Lane, from where there was an excellent view towards Titsey Place. The return leg passed Woldingham Viewpoint and then follows a rarely used, overgrown footpath through attractive countryside back towards the station. The tranquility of the afternoon was shattered by several flies past (is that the plural of fly past?) of Red Arrows from the nearby Biggin Hill airshow. I'll be reporting the overgrown footpath, and a dodgy stile, to Surrey County Council.

Sean said...

As David noted there aren't many incidents which can drown out the constant grumbling of the nearby M25, but a squadron of Red Arrows skimming low over the tree-tops is certainly one of them. We were also treated to a (replica) Spitfire and a group of British and German WWI triplanes, a nice display of the different ages of aviation in the 20thC.

I also skipped the lunch pub but others reported that the "Sheep Shed" cabin in its grounds (though called a Tea Shop on its website) caters for drop-in visitors with light lunches and even mini-roasts on a Sunday, a welcome change from the "book a week in advance for lunch" trend. The Titsey Place tearoom was also serving a few savoury dishes in addition to its advertised cakes and cream teas, though they struggled to cope with the number of visitors to the garden event taking place. After a nice slow day a fair number caught the 16:28 train back from Oxted.

I counted n=14 at Woldingham station and another two on the train said they were going to start from Oxted and do the short circular walk from there.

PS. Thanks to David for reporting the footpath/stile problems.