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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 4 March 2018

Sunday Walk – Royal Parks (Hampton Court Circular)

Extra Walk 240 – Hampton Court Figure-of-8
Length: 13 km (8.1 miles). Toughness: 1/10

10:59 Hampton Court train from Waterloo (Vauxhall 11:03, Clapham Jct 11:10, etc), arriving at 11:37. Hampton Court is in TfL Zone 6.

Trains back from Hampton Court are half-hourly at xx:05 (direct) & xx:35 (change at Surbiton).

This Sunday's short walk is a meander around the royal parks at Hampton Court, hopefully with some early spring flowers and blossom. Because the direct trains are only hourly this Sunday I've started the walk half an hour later than usual, which gives you the option of an early pub lunch in Hampton Wick. Alternatively, I've always been satisfied with the food at the Pheasantry café in Bushy Park's Woodland Gardens, which you'll reach at around 1pm. You could even stop there again for tea on the way back but there are plenty of other places towards the end of the walk, eg. the Tiltyard café in the ‘informal gardens’ (free entry) of Hampton Court Palace.

You'll need to print the maps and directions from the Hampton Court Circular Walk page.
T=swc.240

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds good and light on mud post-melt. See you all there.

PeteB said...

Eight off the train at Hampton Court and we picked up 1 other SWC stalwart in Hampton Court Park who was doing part of the walk and then going to see relatives in SW London so n=9 in all. I know Hampton Court park fairly well as I was a student at Kingston Poly in the early 70s and spent many happy, and lets be frank, fairly drunken summer hours with friend there, and we quickly made our way to the pub at the Kingston entrance to the park which has now sadly closed so we decided to continue on to the Pheasantry cafe but with a couple of head-scratching moments over the directions en route.

After a decent lunch things got a bit weird! There is no gpx file for the walk so those with the written directions (not me) took over following the route and they became a bit confused with where we were and needed to get to regarding our position in relation to various cottages, plantations and other parkland features so after one bout of faffing around I and one other just decided to use gps to take a direct southerly route back to Hampton Court station -by-passing the Pheasantry cafe as a possible tea stop - where we bought tea and cake from the station cafe for the 3.30pm train back to London.

Perhaps those following the walk directions were having an off day but they certainly became somewhat confused by them. Perhaps inattention was to blame and the park has a myriad of tracks and paths you can take and writing directions for these can be difficult. I'm sure the others found a good route back to the Pheasantry for drinks and then back to the station. A gentle and pleasant day out but a gpx/kml download would make things a lot easier! Oh the weather: w=some-rain-at-first-then-dull-and-dry.

(Some comments from the other walkers about the directions would be helpful.)