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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 13 October 2018

Saturday walk - Henley to Marlow - Tranquil Thames and Chiltern woodlands

Length: 14.1km (8.8 miles) or 15.9km (9.9 miles) T=2.7b
Toughness: 3 out of 10: three hills, basically, and the rest fairly flat

9.42 train from Paddington (9.50 Ealing Broadway), changing at Twyford (arr 10.30, depart 10.38: connection usually held, but be quick), arriving Henley-on-Thames at 10.50

Buy a day return to Henley-on-Thames (not Henley in Arden). This should be accepted for return from Marlow: if you get any blowback on this, point out that there used to be a "Thames Branches Day Rover" for the same price as a Henley return that covered journeys from Marlow too: if this does not work you would only need to buy a single from Marlow to Maidenhead).

For walk directions click here. For GPX click here. You are doing option b)

This is a lovely walk, with a beautiful wild stretch of the River Thames to start with, then a short climb over a wooded hill (which you can make even shorter by using a short cut - the 8.8 mile version of the walk) and then a descent to the picture-perfect village of Hambleden (often used for filming). The Stag and Huntstman here is a lovely lunch pub and usually fits us in, though ringing at the start of the walk to book a table wouldn't be a terrible idea. The nearby Hambleden Village Stores does hot drinks and deli items and has a couple of outside tables.

After lunch you could simply finish the "main walk", the Henley via Hambleden Circular (which also has a later lunch stop in the shape of the quirky Flower Pot Inn in Aston). But for my money the perfect autumn outing is to do option b) of this walk and carry on through lovely wooded scenery to Marlow, a town so dripping with tea options it would take an encyclopaedia to list them. Burgers, the traditional favourite, remains my recommendation, if you can get to it before it closes at 5pm. If not there are later opening places, with Starbucks and Costa (at the George & Dragon) the ultimate backstop.

Trains back from Marlow are at 06 past, or from Henley at 23 and 53 past.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Appaerently n=9 on this walk

Poppy said...

About eight people attended this walk on a pleasant day. A quite good craft market in Hambleden is on the second Saturday of each month. Enjoyed watching the rowing teams coursing up the Thames as we walked past. Beautiful, but it's not the first time I've been on a West-of-London walk in the Chilterns that attracts surprisingly few people. By lunchtime, the group had dispersed. Everyone appeared happy with the food at the Stag and Huntsman.