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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 19 August 2018

Sunday Walk – The Biggin Hill Air Show (Whyteleafe to Hayes)

Extra Walk 38 – Whyteleafe (Upper Warlingham) to Hayes
Length: 16.6 km (10.3 miles). Toughness: 4/10

10:21 East Grinstead train from Victoria (Clapham Jct 10:28, East Croydon 10:39), arriving Upper Warlingham at 10:51. If it's more convenient the Caterham section of the stopping 09:54 service from London Bridge crawls into Whyteleafe at 10:44. Starting from this station is covered in the directions, but it would be more sociable to meet the others at Upper Warlingham (a four-minute walk, signposted). Buy a Zones 1-6 Travelcard or use your Oyster card.

This year is the centenary of the RAF and this is being celebrated at events like the Biggin Hill Air Show with flypasts by Spitfires and other historic aircraft, as well as the usual displays by the Red Arrows, etc. There would be better views of all this from the Hayes-Knockholt walk but Network Rail have thoughtfully scheduled engineering works on both these lines, so that's a non-starter. It still means that you won't have a simple return journey by train but there are many other possibilities from Hayes, including:
  • A rail replacement bus to Lewisham at xx:05 & xx:35
  • A 10-minute bus ride to Bromley South (138, 2/hr & 246, 1/hr)
  • A 25-minute bus ride to East Croydon (119, 4/hr)
  • Divert to New Addington for a shorter walk and Tram to Croydon
I hope this doesn't put anyone off: it's no worse than the standard one or two trains per hour on most of our Sunday walks. This is a much more rural walk than you might expect for something well inside the M25. It hardly gets any summer postings but I seem to remember a fair amount of shady woodland sections. Lunch is at a very attractive 16thC country pub, the popular White Bear in Fickleshole; it has a large garden but it might still be advisable to call ahead. For tea, there's a large Harvester pub and several small cafés near Hayes station. There's more information about the walk (and a link to download the directions) on the Whyteleafe to Hayes walk page. T=swc.38
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

n=10 I think. w=dry-and-mild. Pleasant walk, mostly along bridleways, and it was nice to do this one on dry ground. A tip for anyone wanting more open stretches who doesn't mind adding about 700m to the walk, is to detour on the afternoon at the sign for Leaves Green, up through open countryside then back down the valley to re-join the footpath further on.

This walk proved a very good choice for the Biggin Hill Centenary. We had fantastic views of the aircraft in the afternoon, with some of them swooping so close that we could read the markings. The Red Arrows came over, as did Spitfires a Lancaster and a bomber escorted by two smaller planes.

Monday 20 August 2018 at 23:06:00 BST

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