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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 24 March 2018

Saturday walk - Cuxton to Sole Street combination walk

Cuxton to Harvel to Sole Street (SWC 35c + Book 2, walk 17)
Length: 16.6km (10.3 miles), with optional 5.6km (3.5 mile extension)
Toughness: 5 out of 10

9.55 Southeastern high speed train from St Pancras to Strood, arriving 10.27, changing for the 10.34 (Maidstone West-bound) train to Cuxton, arriving 10.38.

You can also get the 9.09 from Charing Cross (9.12 Waterloo East, 9.18 London Bridge, 9.27 Lewisham) to Strood, arriving 10.13 to connect with the Cuxton train as above

Buy a day return to Rochester, which will also be valid for return from Sole Street.

This combination of walks has only been done once before and that many moons ago. It involves doing the morning of the Cuxton to Sole Street walk (SWC 35 : directions here and GPX here), switching when prompted to option c, to get to lunch at the Amazon and Tiger pub in Harvel. From there you can do the afternoon of the Snodland to Sole Street walk (book 2, walk 17: directions here - start from point [4] on page 3 - GPX here) to Sole Street.

If, as I suggest, you use the main walk start from Cuxton, this makes a walk of 10.3km (6.4 miles) before lunch and 6.3km (3.9 miles) after lunch.

- There is the option of a shorter start from Cuxton which reduces the morning to 8km (4.9 miles). You could potentially get the 10.22 train from St Pancras if you want to do this.

- At the end the walk there is a possible 5.6km (3.9 mile) extension up to the village of Cobham, with its choice of pubs: see option d) of the Cuxton to Sole Street walk.

Why am I choosing this walk today? The link route between the two walks contains two nice wood anemone woods, which just may be starting to flower (though last week's cold may have set them back). It is otherwise quite a cute little link route. This whole area is also one of chalk downland (a lot of it wooded) which, while certainly not mud-free, may be a little less muddy than other areas (famous last words).

Whether you do the standard Sole Street ending or the extension, there is a nice choice of pubs at the end of the walk.

Trains back from Sole Street are on the hour (00 past) to Victoria, taking 53 minutes. If you have a ticket from St Pancras it is also possible to get the train in the other direction, towards Rochester, at 25 past, changing there for a high speed service to St Pancras. But there is as 20 minute wait for a connection, making a total journey time of 1 hour 11 minutes, so this is not really worth it unless you really really want to end up in St Pancras. T=3.35c

2 comments:

Walker said...

15 on this walk - or rather n=17, since 2 started from Sole Street and met us at lunch. The weather was w=grey, but reasonably mild: I still dream of one day doing a Saturday walk in warm sunshine though. At least there were signs of spring. Lots - LOTS - of primroses in the woods, the cow parsley plants starting to bush up, mud drying (though still a fair bit on my boots when I got home), oodles of bluebell plants on the morning ridge. And yes, wood anemones, “wooden ms”, mostly just putting out their leaves but some in flower, though closed up under today’s leaden skies. Apologies to those who said at lunch that they had not seen them, but they were there. They get more obvious in coming weeks.

Most of us ate in the Amazon and Tiger, who coped well with our influx (they had no other diners). Credit to them for having a homemade vegan stew on the menu.

After lunch the group got fragmented, so I speak only of what I know, which is that three of us did the extension to Cobham and four (?) others walked directly to Cobham for tea at the Leather Bottle: they were leaving as we arrived. We three left the pub at dusk, which was at the ludicrously early hour of 6.30pm - an indignity we will not suffer again until mid October.

Anonymous said...

Three walkers followed the recommended route to Sole Street and went to Cock Inn for refreshment and found close to 10 fast walkers already there. Some caught 4:53pm train back to Victoria whilst others went to Rochester at 5:25pm then high speed to Kng's X.