Ascent/Descent:
120 m; Net Walking Time: ca. 4 ½ hours
Toughness:
3 out of 10
Take
the 10.00 Paignton train from Paddington (Reading 10.28), arriving
Didcot Parkway at 10.42.
From
Ealing your best route is via Paddington...
(Fast)
return trains:
15.29, 16.03, 16.16, 16.29, 16.48, 17.17,
17.29, 18.00…hours (from 42 minutes).
For
the day of the year with the earliest
sunset, an easy walk with a short journey…
This
walk takes in an attractive part of the Thames Valley south of Oxford, with a
lunchtime stop in Dorchester-on-Thames. This handsome village is now bypassed
by the traffic but used to be an important staging post between London and
Oxford. It has retained a large number of coaching inns and other pubs, so
there's plenty of choice for refreshment.
You should be sure to visit Dorchester Abbey , one of the few large monastery buildings to survive the
Dissolution; it now functions as an impressive parish church. In the afternoon the
walk comes to the Wittenham Clumps, the name given to
a pair of Iron Age hill forts set in a nature reserve managed by the Earth
Trust.
The
lunch pub will be any one of a handful in Dorchester-on-Thames (11
km/7 mi), for details see the walk directions. For tea in Didcot, the Prince of Wales, right by the station, is the obvious watering
hole to spend the time waiting for a train.
For
walk directions, map, height profile, photos and gpx/kml files click here.
t=swc.44
1 comment:
5 non-fairweather walkers off the train at Didcot, later joined by another one in Dorchester (having missed the train, she drove from Ealing, keen on walking up to the Clumps), so n=6 in w=drizzle-then-rain-to-lunch-then-clear-skies.
The group survived the rather uneventful start out of Didcot with animated conversation, and then was hit by the worst of the weather just as we reached the best stretch of the route, along one of the most scenic parts of the Thames and past the Iron Age earth dykes to lovely Dorchester. The Fleur de Lys provided for tasty fare at reasonable prices and after only 45 minutes we left the pub to visit the Abbey, which is always a highlight.
Two sandwichers (who had seen the Abbey on earlier outings) moved on and we never caught them. The car driver went up to the first Clump with us but then returned to Dorchester and her car and the rest reached the Prince of Wales in Didcot at 16.25, giving enough time for a drink and then the delayed 16.48 train.
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