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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 9 September 2018

Sunday Walk: Another plucky looky at spooky Pluckley

Pluckley Circular: Book 2 walk 21
Difficulty: 1 out of 10 (maybe 2 or 3 for the longer versions)
Length: 7.2, 9.2 or 11.2 miles (11.5, 14.7, or 18 km)
Pluckley, in Kent’s Low Weald, claims to be the UK’s most haunted village. One family owned this area for over 900 years and many of the buildings still have their distinctive Dering windows. See how many black horses (their emblem) you can spot on the way round. Our basic walk is 7.2 miles but can be lengthened using the online extensions or see below for details of an additional Ghost Walk.
Trains
Get the 09:40 Dover Priory train from Charing Cross (London Bridge 09:49, Orpington 10:06) arriving Pluckley 10:54.
Return trains at xx:37 to Charing Cross. Get a return to Pluckley.
You can also get a return from St Pancras (9:37 Deal train, changing at Ashford International for the 10:31 to Charing X, arriving Pluckley 10:36 ) It costs a lot more and it’s not much quicker, but it would give you an additional return train (xx:54 back to Ashford and change).
Lunch: The Swan Inn in Little Chart is recommended 01233 840 702. A bit later, in Pluckley, there's the Black Horse  01233 841 948.
Tea: Your best bet for the short walk and ghost walk is the fore-mentioned Black Horse, which is fine, unless you’ve just had lunch there. Allow about an hour back to the station if following the short walk.
Both SWC extensions take you past the Rose and Crown at Mundy Bois 01233 840 048. From there, allow 45-50 minutes to the station.
The longest extension also takes you past the The Barrow House  in Egerton 01233 756 599 (formerly the George).
The Dering Arms, 01233 840 371, opposite the station, closes early on a Sunday. Be pleasantly surprised if they are open past 4.
The Blacksmiths Arms / Forge Tea Room, mentioned in the ghost walk, is just a private house now.
Directions All three SWC options are available online. Book 2 itself only gives the shortest one.
Ghost Walk: Devised by historian and author Richard Jones, the ghost walk is not an SWC walk and it’s not in our format. Start off with the SWC walk and switch to it at St Nicholas' Church in Pluckley. It ends 4 miles later, back at the Black Horse. From there, you can resume our original basic walk back to the station, a total 11.2 miles. When this variation was suggested last year, SWC walkers were “too scared” to follow it. So, as Dirty Harry might say, "your question for today is... "Do I feel plucky?" Well....do ya, punk?"
T=2.21

1 comment:

Sandy said...

I think there were n=19 on this beautiful walk in w=sunny-and-surprsingly-warm-weather, but as we soon and I gather that a large portion of the group got lost in an orchard before we got to Pluckley, I can only report on behalf of 9 or 10 of us. The Swan at Little Chart didn't find favour so we didn't stop till the Black Horse, which we shared with about 40 French motorcyclists. Some had a slightly delayed but apparently ample to excessive lunch, others picknicked in the churchyard, and all but one of us decided it was too soon to head back to the station and carried on with the fully extended walk. This had great views and scenery in the first half but imho the second half was less delightful and there might be something to be said for the "shorter extension." One of our number forged ahead and had a drink at Egerton, while the rest of us had to pause to return a lost puppy to its home, or at least a helpful neighbour - we were a bit concerned it would try to follow us home otherwise - and no sooner had we done that than another pooch tried to adopt us. Must be something to do with pheromones.
Anyway by now we were down to a group of 6 who thought we had time for more refreshment and a debate about pronunciation in another nice pub at Mundy Bois. But we caught up one some of the others in time for the 1637 train, and the front runner even managed to extract a glass of wine from the Dering Arms before, as predicted, it attempted to close.
A crakcing day out but no ghosts knowingly encountered . . . although who knows what happened to the remainder of the walkers . . .