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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 7 October 2018

Sunday Walk: Autumn, Epping Forest (Loughton to Epping)

SWC walk 197
13.4km (8.4miles) Difficulty 3/10
There should be some autumn colour on this walk, through the ancient woodland of Epping Forest to lunch at a pub in Upshire. After lunch there's open countryside with good views around Copped Hall Park.
The forest is renowned for its ancient pollarded trees, primarily oak, beech and hornbeam, which support a wealth of rare insects and fungi. It is common to see deer in the more open areas. In the afternoon, you may see English Longhorn cattle.
Transport 
Start from Loughton Underground Station at 10.30am. Meet outside near the ticket gates.
Loughton and Epping are both in Travel Zone 6 on the Central Line. Loughton is about 37 minutes from Oxford Circus. Use the TfL journey planner to calculate your journey time from other stations.
There is parking at both Loughton and Epping stations.
Lunch
You could have an early lunch at High Beach Visitor Centre where there is a refreshments kiosk, toilets, café and the nouveau-posh Kings Oak pub (0208 508 5000).
The Horseshoes pub (01992  712745) in Copthall Green is better placed, with  friendly service and good food. Nearby, St Thomas’ Church has a pleasant grassy area with benches suitable for a picnic. (The other pub we used to visit, the Good Intent, is no longer a pub).
Tea
The Verde Café, 88 High Street, Epping (01992 571476) is recommended. Tea in china cups and delicious cakes. It closes at 4pm on a Sunday. If you're too late, there are any number of pubs, cafes and restaurants in Epping High Street (see text).
Walk Directions here
The path through the forest from paragraph 7 to 11 can be tricky to follow. A map and compass or gps device would be helpful.
You can shorten the walk to about 5 miles by staying on the Three Forest Way at paragraph 7. This rejoins the main walk near the end (see text).
T=swc.197

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant walk in lovely warm sunshine.
Many thanks to Peter for leading us along the most scenic paths,
so many great vistas.

PeteB said...

Thanks Anon- at least n=20 gathered in the entrance hall of Loughton tube station and we met at least 1 late starter near the end of the walk. The Horsehoes pub was fully booked and this does pose a bit of a problem as this is now as very popular lunch-time stop and so people either had a quick lunch at High Beach or continued on for a picnic lunch in the attractive grounds of St Thomas's Church which has bench seats and some fine views and thankfully little traffic noise.

Plenty of leaf colour along the forest tracks but 95% of it was green so the "full autumn" will probably not appear for another 3 weeks. Six of us lunched at the Church and another group went to check out the Horseshoes.

After lunch six of us headed straight for the station after enjoying w= fine-and-sunny weather throughout. This walk can be enjoyed as a brisk outing to get back to London early or a "lazy Sunday" amble and I hope all others including a number of "Saturday refugees" enjoyed their day out.

I went for the brisk option hoping to see a top football match between Liverpool and Man City but it turned out a 0-0 bore fest. C'est la vie!