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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 12 January 2019

Saturday Walk - A Cotswolds Classic: Hanborough to Charlbury

DAC is away...

Length:  22.1 km (13.7 mi) or 18.5 km (11.5 mi).
Ascent/Descent:  297/287m; Net Walking Time: ca. 5 – 5 ½ hours
Toughness:  5 out of 10 

Worried about the daylight?  Sunset out there is at 16.20, giving sufficient light to about 17.00 hours, and the last 20 minutes are on tarmac estate lanes and public road, you do the math…
  
Take the 09.22 Worcester Foregate Street train from Paddington (Slough 09.38, Reading 09.53, Oxford 10.23), arrives Hanborough 10.32. The train is likely to be busy with tourists to Slough, maybe even to Oxford, so be quick to board. From Ealing B’way take the 09.05 to Didcot Parkway and change at Slough (09.27/09.38).
Return trains: 16.07, 17.04, 18.04, 19.07…. (from 79 minutes journey time). Buy a Charlbury return.

The River Evenlode; soft, easy hills and fertile countryside; Blenheim Palace and its Great Park; Akeman Street (the Old Roman Road from Alchester to Cirencester); some open farmland; delightful stone villages & Lord Rotherwick’s deer park, Cornbury Park.

For a shorter walk: stay on the Oxfordshire Way as described at point 49 in the directions (Grid Reference SP 375 179), first along field boundaries, then lanes, into and through Charlbury to the station: 18.5 km/11.5 mi, or take a more direct route into Stonesfield (obvious from the map).

Lunch: The White Horse in Stonesfield (12.8 km/8.0 mi, food to 15.00) or the The Plough Inn in Finstock  (17.5 km/10.9 mi, open all day, food to 14.00).

For walk directions, map, height profile, photos and gpx/kml files click here. t=1.38

1 comment:

Thomas G said...

n=6 off a not very busy train (January must indeed be downtime for tourists) in drizzle initially. After 20 minutes or so the waterproofs could be stowed away though, and the rest of the day stayed w=dry-but-overcast, even getting a little brighter towards the end of the walk.
The morning is relatively featureless apart from Blenheim Park and the various meetings of the Evenlode River, with the remainder being mainly field boundaries and country lanes, but - with virtually no mud - even those were pleasant enough. The soil out there is of a brownish/reddish/orange tone, so the ploughed fieldscapes looked quite attractive in fact. 4 had food at The White Horse, with the quality being good, but again the front-of-house gave the distinct impression of not quite knowing how to run a pub. Charming, all in, though.
The afternoon has a more continuously pretty landscape, and we breezed along, despite a stiff breeze in our face. We saw a pigeon falling out of the sky right next to us, dead, apparently having been attacked by a wake of kites (8 of them riding on the one updrift), a large herd of deer in Lord Rotherwick's Cornbury Park, the Lord himself being helicoptered in as we passed (or maybe it was just the kids being dropped off from boarding school?) and some magnificently woolly brown sheep.
In Charlbury we were greeted by more than a handful of EU flags on houses and some EU buntings as well, with no Union Jacks in sight. A Remainer's enclave in deep Oxfordshire?
At the church we could turn left for the 16.07, or right for the pubs. We turned left.
At Oxford then, an apparition: a SWC regular got on, returning to The Smoke after a day of organ tuition at a College.
We then got delayed due to a trespasser (or maybe a signalling problem, as a later announcement suggested), but were still back at P'ton at 1/4 to 6.