Net Walking Time: ca. 4 hours, Toughness: 4 out of
10
Take the 10.00 Portsmouth Harbour train from
Waterloo (Woking 10.25, G’ford 10.34), arrives Petersfield 11.00.
From Clapham take the 09.52 stopping service to Portsmouth &
Southsea and change at Woking (10.12/10.25).
Return trains: xx.46 (from
87 mins). Buy a Rowlands Castle return.
An undulating ramble through the little-known
western reaches of the South Downs. Though there are a couple of steep climbs,
the overall gradients are not too arduous, and your reward is some fine hilltop
views in the second half of the walk.
Lunch: The Five
Bells in Buriton (4.2 km/2.6 mi, food to 14.00) or The Red Lion
in Chalton (10.5 km/6.5 mi, food all day; sign up online for a 20% off food voucher!).
Tea: For details of the tea shop and the three pubs in Rowlands
Castle check the walk directions pdf.
For walk directions, map, height
profile and gpx/kml files click here. T=swc.18
2 comments:
Quite. A. Brilliant. Winter. Day. Especially for Country Walking...
Bright blue skies all day, frosted ground in the shaded areas, hardly any mud, clear air, far views, hardly a breeze, but - sadly - only tiny tiny specks of snow away to the side, in very few places, and never on the paths. It felt warm, it felt like spring, and we were walking into the sun all day, and into the views for the latter 2/3 of the route, after having climbed up the first of several downs, with a real top-of-the-world feeling with 360deg views on the last long down (Chalton). 'tis a very quiet route as well, away from roads (once out of Petersfield, where there is still a diversion in place around a new housing development, but that only caused a few minutes of delay).
We got to the Red Lion 1/4 past 1 and the first arrivals fell into the 'table service'-trap, consequently getting their meals after all the later arrivals who ordered at the bar. To top it off, that lot also had coffees and left the pub long after the others. Not that it mattered, as we all ended up on the same train (16.46).
11 on the platform, 2 met just north of Buriton in that beautiful valley without a name where we spotted 4 deer (they had driven to Buriton, from there walked with us to lunch and then back to their car), 1 overtaken in the woods south of Buriton (having missed the posted train, he was half an hour behind in Petersfield and took a taxi to Buriton). n=14 w=sunny
There was about 1cm of snow on the North Downs above Wye: only on the tops and then not everywhere. See the SWC Facebook page. There was also a bit of cloud in the afternoon so you had better weather, and the ground in Kent was not frozen.
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